Abena is dead! She died three months ago and has since been buried!”
Joe’s words stung deeply as I heard them. I felt like my heart had been seared with a hot iron. I stood there dumbfounded, unable to speak for what seemed like eternity.
“I.. I didn’t know… I’m I’m sorry..so sorry” I stammered awkwardly as I found my voice. I couldn’t look at his face. I bit my lip in regret.
“But I thought she was your friend. I’m baffled you never heard. She had been battling cancer for two years. Almost everyone around her knew she was suffering. It’s quite strange she never mentioned it to you. What’s even more strange is you not even knowing about her demise until three months after. What kind of friendship did you both share?”
Those words stung. I couldn’t wrap my head around why she didn’t inform me. I used to think we were quite close.
I looked at Joe, Abena’s husband as he walked away with his two sons. I wondered what pain he was going through at the moment. Having to raise their two sons alone.
I got back to my house in deep sorrow. Tears flowing freely down my face. So, I wondered, if I hadn’t bumped into Joe at the shopping mall, I would not have known my friend had died. Indeed, what kind of friendship did we share?
I went through the pictures we took together, all the beautiful pictures we had. I also went through our chats. Not a mention of her sickness. I tried to recollect our last conversation almost four months before. She had mentioned that she would be leaving the country briefly. She needed to see her mother in Sweden. From then, our correspondences became far in between. we eventually stopped communicating and I assumed she was probably just having a great time. And I never bothered to check up on her. I had no idea she was sick. It was quite a devastating realisation.
At that point, I got a message from my younger brother, Koffi and I gasped. It read, “Seun is in critical condition at the hospital. He attempted suicide this morning. All the major blogs have reported the story”
I screamed as I almost dropped my phone. Seun and I had been friends for a while. He had called me two days before to say he was feeling extremely depressed and needed someone to talk to. I wondered what on earth would make Seun depressed because he seemed to have it all together. First, he was the only son of a rich oil baron in Nigeria. Unfortunately, I had quite a busy day at the office, and I got home late and extremely tired. I had planned to give him a call later that day.
I suddenly felt sick as guilt tightened my stomach. Praying that he would be okay, I picked my phone to give Koffi a call. His line was engaged. I tried to call his roommate, Kwame; the number was switched off. It was then I decided to check Sabiblog, a major blog that would likely have the story. They did. And for the second time that day, I was thrown into mourning. They reported that he had died. And I was shocked as I read that his father was a security guard. Not the oil baron that Seun had claimed he was.
I was baffled. Why did Seun live a false life? Where did he get his money from? Sabiblog described him as a “yahoo guy”. And it dawned on me that I may not have really known my “friends”. First it was Abena, and now Seun.
Koffi’s call came in and broke my reverie. “Afua, he’s dead” he said with a broken voice.
“I know” I responded. We both cried as we spoke for a while. And ended the call.
Realisation hit me that my supposed friendships were merely superficial and lacked depth. It tasted like a bitter pill in my mouth. I didn’t really know my “friends”. It had to take two unfortunate deaths for me to realize this.
#Fiction
Storyteller 