Christmas Eve, photographed
A bad night. I took a picture of my own face crying, on purpose, and I am keeping it. This is why.
I was not at D10 tonight. Papa's cousin is visiting and the parlour is not mine when there are relatives, and I understood, and I said I would come tomorrow, and Mama said tomorrow, and I came back to the room by the stadium and sat on the bed under the stain and it came down on me the way it does, all at once, every year on this night.
And I did something I have never done. I took a photograph of my face. Crying, in the white vest, three hearts on it from the app because my hand wanted to put something there. I looked at it for a long time. Then I decided to keep it.
Here is why. Everything on the phone is a smile. Every photograph anyone has of me is the one by the mango tree, or the one on the path in sunglasses, a man going somewhere. If I ever put my life somewhere people can see it, and I think I will, I do not want it to be only the man in sunglasses. I want one picture where the door is still open and the cold is coming in. Not for pity. For the boy in the church at one in the morning, so that he knows the man on the other end of the line has a face like his.
Pill at nine. Took it. The stain is still shaped like Imo State. Tomorrow the parlour. Tonight this, which is also mine, and which I am keeping.