I am writing this because speaking has never saved me.
My name is Ifechi Japhet Nwaorisa. I was born in Owerri, Imo State, in 1992. If you are reading this now, I am thirty-three years old, and I am tired in a way that sleep cannot fix. This is not a confession, and I refuse to call it testimony. It is simply proof that I existed—an imprint in the dirt before the wind erases me.
My mother’s name is Blessing.
She is the reason I survived my childhood.
She is also the reason I learned what survival costs.
I wish these two truths did not live in the same sentence. But life does not care for my wishes.
The first memory I own—really own—is of my mother’s hands.
Not her face, not her voice, not some sweet childhood miracle people like to romanticize. No. My mother’s hands came first: broad palms, darkened by sun and soil, nails packed with earth, fingers that trembled only when she thought I wasn’t looking.
Those hands fed me, lifted me, shielded me.
Those hands lied for me long before I learned how to lie for myself.
When I was small, I would fall asleep holding her thumb like it was a lifeline. I traced the lines across her palm and asked what they meant. She spun stories effortlessly:
—This line says you will travel.
—This one says you will find joy.
—This one promises a life longer than mine.
She was lying, of course. The future is not written on palms or stars or holy books. The future is written by men in offices with pens sharp enough to cut a life in half. She lied because mothers lie—they build soft stories around hard worlds.
I am thirty-three years old.
I have not held her hands since I was seventeen.
I cannot look at them now without choking on the truth of what my existence demanded from her.
Let me speak of Owerri.
Not the postcard version. Not the one politicians recite on radio jingles.
My Owerri had red dust that painted our legs by noon. It had markets where women shouted prices like confessions, where the smell of dried fish could climb into your clothes and stay for days. It had churches—too many churches—where everyone prayed for something different but cried in the same voice.
We lived near Nekede, in a compound with a zinc roof that turned the rain into drums. Two rooms, cracked walls, a stubborn palm tree, and neighbors who knew too much.
Electricity was a visitor.
Water was a blessing.
Privacy was a myth.
My father? A rumor.
A name no one said.
A face I would not recognize if I passed him on a street in Lagos or London or the underworld.
Children in our compound had missing fathers like other children had missing socks—common, unremarkable, barely worth a question.
But no one taught me how to grow into a man without a blueprint.
I knew I was different before English gave me the vocabulary for it.
The boys my age chased footballs molded from nylon bags. They climbed trees to steal mangoes. They fought for no reason except to feel their bodies bruise into shape. They whistled at girls with reckless confidence.
I watched them all from the shade like a foreigner studying a strange tribe.
I preferred silence.
I preferred the sound of pages turning.
I preferred the company of people who did not expect me to perform boyhood like an exam.
“He is too gentle,” a neighbor once muttered.
“Too gentle for this world.”
She was right.
Too gentle—for Owerri, for Nigeria, for everything that came after.
And yet, even then, even as a boy who never fit, I loved my mother with a devotion that felt holy—and dangerous.
She worked the farms in Nekede.
Her mornings began before the sun, before the roosters, before I could even pretend to wake.
She cooked. She walked. She bent over cassava ridges until her back begged for mercy. She came home with soil in her hair, exhaustion in her bones, and still had the strength to sit beside me as I stumbled through homework by candlelight.
I saw her body aging like an overworked machine.
I counted the gray in her hair.
I memorized the way she stretched her legs before standing, quietly, thinking I didn’t notice.
I promised myself I would save her.
That one day I would lift the burden from her shoulders and place it on mine.
That she would rest, finally rest.
But promises are cheap; destinies are not.
Instead of saving her, I marked her life with a shame she never deserved.
I was sixteen the night they filmed me.
I was seventeen when the video destroyed everything.
I have been running for sixteen years since.
There was a boy—there is always a boy at the beginning of a tragedy. His name was Emeka. Older, braver, reckless in ways I admired and feared. He made me feel seen in a body that had always felt wrong, unwanted, unclaimed.
We met in corners of the world where eyes did not reach.
Behind warehouses. Under mango trees.
In moments stolen from a country that condemned us before we were even born.
I thought it was love.
Maybe it was.
Maybe love at sixteen is always a kind of doomed miracle.
But someone recorded us.
Someone always watches boys like us.
When the men came, they came smiling.
Officious. Clean.
Predators wearing perfume.
They showed my mother the video—her sixteen-year-old son, unguarded, alive in a way the law forbade.
“Fourteen years in prison,” one of them said.
“The Act is new, and the police are eager.”
The Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act.
2014.
A law written to make examples out of boys like me.
“We can help,” the men said.
And I learned that help is sometimes just another name for exploitation.
That night, my mother stared into nothing.
Not crying.
Not yelling.
Just… gone.
Before dawn, she finally spoke:
“You should have told me.”
“I was afraid,” I whispered.
“I know.”
She did not forgive me.
She did not condemn me.
She simply carried the weight—quietly, brutally.
When the sky began to pale, she said:
“Whatever comes next… I did it. Not you. Do you hear me?”
I did not understand then.
I understand it too well now.
