The address

I am building a website. Not a page; a house. The story in chapters, the six books, this journal, all ten years of it, the support line with the numbers, the Biafra pages, the photographs, the thirteen clips from July in the sun. In English, and in Igbo, because my mother reads Igbo faster and because a boy in Obinze should be able to read this in the language he thinks in.

People will ask why a man of twenty-nine builds what is, let us say it, a memorial, while he is well. Here is why. Every gay Nigerian I have known who died, died twice: once in the body, and once in the story told afterwards, in which he had a short illness or went abroad and lost touch. Amazon can delist a book. A phone can be taken at an airport. A family can decide what is remembered. A website is an address. It does not move. It says: he was here, this is what he said, in his own words, dated.

There will be a letter on it for afterwards. I have written it. It was the hardest thing I have written and I have written the police station. It ends with the prayer.

And there will be this journal, with the entry from the floor at E.'s uncle's, and the ceiling stain, and the first pill, and the boy from Aba, so that whoever needs it can read from the beginning and see that a person got from there to here. That is the whole method. You write it down. They cannot take what you have already said.