A Day That Lives Forever

Some days never end.

They hover over the years that follow, like shadows at noon, hidden in the light yet somehow always present. You go about your life, grow older, meet people, lose people, celebrate birthdays and achieve things you once thought impossible. But somewhere in your mind, a particular day remains untouched by time.

For me, that day is 4 November 2019.

Seven years ago today, my father died.

I remember that afternoon with a clarity that sometimes frightens me. The heat was unbearable, the sort of scorching Lagos sun that chased people indoors the way heavy rain would. I walked around the backyard, drenched in sweat, staring at the sky and reciting prayers to steady my racing heart. I remember wondering whether the drops falling from my body might feel like rain to the ants crawling through the grass below.

It was a strange thing to think about, considering what was happening — My father was dying.

Then my phone rang. It was my aunt. She told me he had passed.

In the background, I could hear the sounds of hospital machines and my mother’s wails cutting through the connection. I remember being struck by how composed my aunt sounded. How could she speak so calmly when the world had just collapsed? Weren’t women supposed to be the emotional ones? It was a foolish thought, perhaps, but shock has a way of making the mind reach for the most ridiculous things.

I cannot remember everything she said. I remember the news. I remember the sounds behind her voice. I remember the heat.

And I remember that my father was no longer alive.

Not long afterwards, another call came through. This time, it was my uncle, the one who lived close by.

“You’re the first son. You’re the man of the house now.”

Then came the instruction.

“Don’t break the news to them just yet. Be strong until I get there.”

There were family members inside the house who did not yet know. Somehow, I was expected to walk back into that house carrying news that would change their lives and pretend that nothing had happened.

I have often wondered what my face looked like at that moment. Could a Black man’s face turn white with shock? Could grief drain the colour from someone before they had even begun to cry?

I went back inside wearing the best poker face I could manage.

My mother’s sister was on the phone with her siblings, and they asked to speak to me as I entered the living room. One after another, they took turns praying for my father’s recovery. They prayed for healing, for strength, and for God to restore his health. And I stood there listening, knowing that the man they were praying for had died only moments earlier.

What could I say?

I said “Ameen.” I thanked them for their prayers. And I waited.

There are moments when childhood ends without asking whether you are ready.

One minute, you are someone’s son, still figuring out what to do with your life. The next, somebody tells you that you are now the man of the house, as though grief comes with an immediate promotion and a list of responsibilities you must somehow already know how to perform.

I had lost my father, but there was barely any time to understand what that meant.

There were calls to make, people to receive, arrangements to discuss and questions to answer. Relatives arrived. Conversations filled the rooms. Everyone seemed to need something, and I found myself responding because that was what was expected of me.

I buried my grief beneath the noise of other people’s grief.

But when the visitors left, and the house finally grew quiet, there was nothing left to hide behind.

I cried.

Not the restrained tears I had allowed myself around other people, but the kind that came from somewhere I could neither reach nor control. I cried for the man I had lost, for the things we had not said, and for the life that had changed while the sun continued shining as though nothing extraordinary had happened.

Death has a cruel way of making ordinary things feel offensive.

The next morning still arrives. People still go to work. Vehicles still move through traffic. Someone somewhere is laughing at a joke. A neighbour is complaining about electricity. The world continues its routine, while yours has been violently interrupted.

And you wonder how everybody else can carry on when someone who occupied so much of your world is no longer in it.

I used to think death changed people immediately.

Perhaps because that is what we are taught to expect from tragedy. A person loses someone, experiences a profound revelation, and emerges with a renewed understanding of life. Suddenly, they become disciplined, purposeful and determined never to waste another moment.

For a while, I believed that would happen to me.

My father’s death made me painfully aware of time. Everyone’s clock was ticking, including mine. I began questioning the decisions I had made, the opportunities I had wasted, and the future I was supposedly working towards.

Was this the life I wanted?

Was I becoming the person I had promised myself I would be?

Was I doing enough?

For a while, the questions frightened me into action. I made plans. Set goals. Promised myself that things would be different. I would take my career seriously. I would stop procrastinating. I would become more disciplined. I would make something meaningful of my life.

And then, as humans often do, I slipped.

The urgency faded. The promises became easier to postpone. Old habits returned, and the pain settled into something like a low NEPA bulb, flickering in the background but refusing to go out.

Then a memory would return, and the bulb would burn brightly again.

“Abdulwahab,” my father once said, “I’m worried about you. Of all my children, you are the only one I’m worried about.”

I have carried those words for years.

At the time, I knew he was right. That's perhaps what made them so hard to hear.

My career was not progressing the way I wanted. I should have taken some things more seriously, postponed decisions, and avoided responsibilities I wasn't eager to confront.

My father could see it.

And I hated that he could.

Not because I thought he wanted to hurt me, but because his concern forced me to look at parts of myself I had become very good at avoiding.

So I avoided him instead.

I became distant. Less available. Less willing to have conversations that might eventually return to the subject of my future. Sometimes, it was easier to remain silent than to admit that I was struggling to become the person he believed I could be.

I told myself there would be time.

Time to get my life together. Time to make him proud. Time to sit with him and explain why I had been so withdrawn. Time to show him that his worries had not fallen on deaf ears.

Then came 4 November 2019.

And time, which had seemed so abundant, suddenly became the one thing I could no longer ask him for.

Today, seven years later, I am approaching my thirty-second birthday.

I wish I could say that I have become everything he hoped I would be. That the years since his death have been a steady procession of achievements, personal growth and fulfilled promises.

They haven’t.

There have been successes, certainly. Things I wish I could tell him about. Decisions I think he would approve of. Moments when I have looked at what I was building and wondered whether he would finally stop worrying.

But there have also been setbacks. False starts. Unfinished plans. Periods of uncertainty and the familiar disappointment of knowing I could have done better.

Sometimes, I still hear his voice.

Not always as a reprimand. Sometimes, it sounds like concern. Other times, like a question I have spent seven years trying to answer.

Are you going to be okay?

And perhaps that is what makes his absence so difficult.

I cannot call him to tell him that I am trying.

I cannot explain the things that have happened since he left or ask what he thinks I should do next. I cannot sit across from him and say that I understand his worries now, even if I did not know how to receive them then. I cannot sit with him, as a fully grown man looking to start a family, to pick his brain on what kind of husband and father I should be.

There is no opportunity to revisit those conversations. No chance to replace my silence with something kinder. I can only carry what remains.

For seven years, I have prayed for him. I have asked Allah to forgive his shortcomings, have mercy on his soul and grant him Jannatul Firdaus. I have prayed for the strength to become a better man, not merely because my father wanted it, but because I have come to recognise how much of his concern was rooted in love.

And I have wondered what he would make of me now.

Would he be proud?

Would he still worry?

Would he tell me to stop overthinking and get on with my life?

I do not know. That uncertainty is part of what death leaves behind. We inherit questions whose answers have been buried with the people who could have given them.

For a long time, I treated my father’s final concerns as a debt I had to repay. Every achievement became something I wished he could witness. Every failure felt like further evidence that I had disappointed him.

But perhaps I have been unfair to both of us.

Perhaps he was not asking me to become a perfect man. Perhaps he was simply afraid that I would spend too much of my life standing in my own way.

And perhaps making him proud was never supposed to mean living forever beneath the weight of his expectations.

I am still learning that.

Seven years have passed, but I remain, in some ways, the young man sitting beside that window, sweating beneath the November sun, listening to prayers for a man who was already gone.

The difference is that I no longer expect grief to transform me overnight.

Death does not necessarily make us wiser. It does not automatically cure procrastination, strengthen discipline or give us the courage to confront everything we have spent years avoiding.

Sometimes, it simply leaves us with an absence and waits for us to decide what to do with it.

We continue living. We make mistakes. We fall back into familiar habits. We remember, regret, try again and occasionally discover that we have changed in ways we did not notice while they were happening.

Perhaps transformation is not the thunderclap I once imagined. Perhaps it is quieter than that.

It is choosing to do something differently because you remember what someone taught you. It is finally confronting a weakness you have spent years disguising. It is recognising your father’s voice in your own decisions, even when you can no longer hear him speak.

And sometimes, it is accepting that becoming a better person does not require you to spend the rest of your life punishing yourself for who you used to be.

Today is 4 November 2026.

Seven years since the phone call. Seven years since the prayers I answered with “Ameen”, knowing they had arrived too late. Seven years since I was told that I was now the man of the house.

Seven years since I last had a father in this world.

I still have things I wish I had said. I suspect I always will.

But if I could send him one more letter, I would tell him that I am still trying. That I have not forgotten his words, even when my actions suggest otherwise. That I am beginning to understand the difference between living under the shadow of his worries and allowing his love to guide me towards something better.

I would tell him that I miss him. That I love him deeply. That I am sorry for the distance I created when we still had time.

And that, wherever life takes me, there will always be a part of me that remains his son, still hoping to give him one less reason to worry.

Some days never end. They simply grow older with us. And every 4 November, I return to that afternoon, not because I have failed to move on, but because love has a way of keeping certain moments alive long after the people within them are gone.

Seven years later, the letter remains unread.

But I will keep writing.

In loving memory of my father, who passed away on 4 November 2019.

May Allah forgive his shortcomings, illuminate his grave, grant him Jannatul Firdaus and reunite us in goodness.

Ameen.

• The Unread Letter (VI)
• The Unread Letter (V)

The Unread Letter (VII) was originally published in Catharsis Chronicles on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My alarm goes off in the morning, and, on most days, I know exactly what happens next. I get out of bed, perform ablution, observe Solah, brush my teeth, take a shower and get dressed. Depending on how much time I have wasted pressing snooze or doomscrolling on the toilet seat, I either grab some coffee, eat breakfast or convince myself I will find something to eat later. I check that I have everything I need, leave the house, and join hundreds of thousands of other Lagosians doing roughly the same thing.

We enter traffic together. Different cars, different buses, different destinations, different lives, but the same general agreement: there is somewhere we are supposed to be by a particular time. Except for the remote workers who can spend their time sleeping in or jogging before settling down for work. But the sentiment is the same. Wake up, get ready and get to work.

Five days a week, I make some variation of this journey. I arrive at work, do what needs to be done, answer messages, attend meetings, solve problems, create new ones, complain about how quickly the day is moving and, somehow, also complain that it is moving too slowly. Eventually, it is time to leave. Maybe I go to the gym. Maybe I go straight home. Maybe something comes up and the evening becomes different from what I expected.

But eventually I am home. I eat, take off the clothes I wore for the day and think about tomorrow. Sometimes, I even bring out what I intend to wear because apparently one of the privileges of adulthood is doing favours for your future self. Then I sleep and wake up to do it again.

There is something almost absurd about how much of life is repetition. We wait desperately for the weekend only to develop routines for that too. Saturday might mean sleeping for a few extra hours, getting a haircut, washing the car, seeing friends, or attending a wedding because somebody somewhere in Lagos is always getting married.

Perhaps watching or playing football. Perhaps drinks. Perhaps watching Lewis Hamilton race around a track somewhere in the world. Perhaps absolutely nothing because you have spent the entire week looking forward to the privilege of doing absolutely nothing.

Sunday comes with its own rituals. Church for some. Laundry. Cleaning. Groceries. Meal preparation. Ironing clothes. Calling family. Trying to convince yourself that you will sleep early this time. Then Sunday evening arrives, and you look at the clock and feel personally betrayed.

Monday again — shit!

The funny thing is that we have been practising for this our entire lives. As children, somebody else designed the routine for us. Wake up, bathe, put on your uniform, eat, go to school, return home, do your homework, play, eat dinner, and sleep. The details changed as we grew older, but the structure remained.

Finish primary school so you can enter secondary school. Finish secondary school so you can enter university. Finish university so you can get a job. Get a job so you can make money. Make money so you can afford a life. Then, depending on the life you want, perhaps you get married. Perhaps you have children. And one morning you find yourself standing over a sleepy child, telling them to get out of bed because they are going to be late for school. The cycle begins again.

Of course, life does not follow this sequence for everybody. Nor should it. There are countless ways to live. But almost every version eventually acquires a routine. Even freedom needs one.

The entrepreneur who left a nine-to-five because they wanted control of their time discovers that businesses have their own clocks. The freelancer who wanted to work whenever they pleased eventually discovers that clients also have routines, usually involving deadlines. The unemployed person has one too: wake up, search for openings, adjust the CV, send applications, check emails; hope, repeat.

Even unhappiness develops routines. You wake up carrying yesterday’s sadness. You go through the motions. You search for things that might make you feel better. You return home and sleep. Then you try again.

Perhaps this is why so much of adulthood is really an attempt to improve the quality of our repetition. We work so that we can afford better routines. You endure public transport because you hope to buy a car someday. You buy the car and begin dreaming of one that is more comfortable. You spend hours commuting and start dreaming of living closer to work. You earn more money so you can pay someone to handle the chores that consume your Saturdays.

You buy a washing machine. You order food instead of cooking. You pay for convenience. You move somewhere with better electricity so that your evenings and nights do not include listening for the sound of the generator. The dream is rarely to eliminate routine entirely. We just want a nicer one. A softer one. One with more money, more rest, more choices and fewer hours spent sweating inside traffic.

And perhaps that is why disruptions affect us so much. Routine creates the illusion that life is predictable. Your alarm will ring tomorrow. You will go to work. Salary will come at the end of the month. Saturday will arrive. That person will call. You will see them next week. The ram will be slaughtered at Ileya. Christmas will come again. Next year, you will finally do that thing you have been postponing.

We build our lives around these assumptions. Then something happens.

You lose the job. The relationship ends. The car has a flat tyre or it refuses to start on the morning of an important meeting. You fall ill. Or someone falls ill.

Someone dies.

Death is perhaps the ultimate truncator of routine because it does not care what was supposed to happen next. It does not consult Google Calendar. It does not care that someone had work on Monday, that there is rice in the fridge they intended to eat tomorrow, or that their clothes have already been ironed for the morning. It is indifferent to the unfinished Netflix series, the meeting scheduled for Wednesday, the flight booked for December, the loan that will be completely paid off in six months, or the friend they promised to call back.

Death simply arrives, and suddenly, an entire routine stops.

I think that is one of the strangest things about losing someone. The world does not only lose the person; it loses all the little things that person was supposed to do next. The usual morning phone call does not come. Their chair remains empty. Their side of the bed stays untouched. Nobody hears their key turning in the door at the usual hour.

There is a toothbrush in the bathroom that has suddenly lost its purpose. Shoes waiting for feet that will never wear them again. Appointments belonging to someone who no longer has a future.

Meanwhile, everyone else’s routine continues.

Morning still comes. Traffic still builds. People still complain about Monday. Emails still arrive. Somebody somewhere is still asking, “Any update on this?”

There is something almost offensive about how ordinary the world remains after someone dies. You want everything to acknowledge what has happened, but the neighbour starts their generator. The Danfo conductor keeps shouting destinations. Your phone reminds you about a meeting. The sun rises with the same indifference with which it rose yesterday.

And eventually, painfully, you begin constructing another routine around the absence.

That is what we do when life disrupts us. We rebuild, sometimes badly and sometimes slowly, but we rebuild. A new job creates a new morning. Heartbreak eventually creates evenings that no longer revolve around checking whether someone has replied. Grief teaches you how to enter rooms where someone used to be. A relocation gives you new roads, new shops, and new faces. Eventually, what once felt unfamiliar becomes ordinary.

That is both the comfort and the cruelty of routine: we adapt.

Maybe that is why discipline matters so much. Not because every day must be productive or because we should turn ourselves into machines optimised for maximum output, but because so much of becoming anything requires returning to it.

You cannot build a relationship entirely from grand gestures. You cannot build a career from one excellent week. You cannot become good at something through occasional bursts of enthusiasm. Most meaningful things are constructed quietly, through repetition: showing up, trying again, doing the boring part and returning tomorrow even when yesterday gave you very little reason to.

There is something profoundly unromantic about discipline. Nobody applauds you for waking up on time for the hundredth consecutive morning. Nobody throws a celebration because you completed another ordinary working day. Yet so much of what we eventually become is built through these small, repeated acts.

A career is built through days of work. A skill develops through hours of practice. A relationship grows through countless ordinary moments of attention. A life is shaped not only by the extraordinary things we achieve, but by the things we continue doing when nothing extraordinary is happening.

Of course, not every routine deserves preservation. Some habits exhaust us. Some schedules leave no room for living. Some patterns keep us trapped in circumstances we have outgrown. Discipline also means recognising when something needs to change. There is, after all, a difference between having a routine that supports your life and having a life that exists only to sustain your routine.

Still, time accumulates through repetition. Five working days and a weekend become a week. Weeks become months. Months become years. The route you once needed Google Maps to navigate becomes one you can drive without thinking. The junior employee becomes the person training somebody else. The child being dragged out of bed for school becomes the parent standing beside another bed, saying, “Wake up, you’ll be late.”

Perhaps that is what I mean when I say time is the evidence of routine.

We rarely feel our lives passing in years. We feel them in repetition. The birthdays keep coming. The haircuts reveal more grey hairs. Parents grow older. Friends marry. Children grow taller. Familiar places disappear. People leave. Somewhere inside all of this, we keep doing the ordinary things: waking up, showing up, working, eating, loving people, arguing with them, forgiving some, losing others, making plans, postponing plans and trying again.

Perhaps routine is not the boring part of life we need to escape before real living begins.

Perhaps routine is the living.

The extraordinary moments — the promotion, the wedding, the birth, the holiday, the breakthrough — are interruptions. Beautiful ones, hopefully, but interruptions nonetheless. Soon enough, even the thing you once prayed desperately for develops a routine of its own. The dream job becomes the place you complain about on Monday mornings. The person you once could not stop thinking about becomes the person asking what you want for dinner. The house you saved years to afford becomes the place whose leaking tap you have been promising to fix for three weeks.

Maybe there is something comforting about that. We cannot control how much time we get. Death makes sure we understand that eventually. But while we are here, we get to decide, at least partly, what we repeatedly do with the time between waking and sleeping: who we call, where we go, what we build, what we postpone, who gets our attention, and what deserves another attempt.

We spend so much of our lives preparing for tomorrow. We lay out clothes, set alarms, make appointments, save money, write plans and promise ourselves that next week will be different. And we have to. To live is to behave, in some small way, as though tomorrow is coming.

But perhaps the trick is remembering that routine is not a rehearsal for life.

These ordinary Tuesdays — the traffic, the meals, the conversations, the work, the laundry, the people waiting for us at home — this is not the space between the important moments.

This is where most of our lives will happen.

Until one day, without consulting the routine, time stops asking us to show up.

©️ Fọlábòmí Àmọ̀ó 2026
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When Money Makes You Quiet

Until Tomorrow Stops Coming was originally published in Catharsis Chronicles on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Lagos–Ibadan Expressway is supposed to be straightforward. One carriageway takes you towards Ibadan. The other brings you back towards Lagos.

Simple!

But let traffic build up around Kara, and suddenly both carriageways become two-way roads.

Vehicles heading towards Ibadan occupy lanes meant for Lagos-bound traffic. Vehicles heading towards Lagos encounter motorists coming directly towards them, flashing headlights and expecting everyone to make way.

It doesn’t matter whether the carriageway has four lanes or five. Once drivers begin occupying the wrong lanes, the available space for legitimate traffic shrinks.

And here is the part that makes the entire exercise even more senseless: the people passing one-way still have to return to the carriageway they abandoned.

Where exactly are you going?

If your destination is Ibadan, driving towards Lagos does not magically change that.

At some point, you must turn around again or find a way to rejoin the Ibadan-bound carriageway. And when dozens of drivers attempt this together, they create another bottleneck farther ahead.

The people who patiently remained in their lanes now have to accommodate those forcing their way back into traffic.

You have not solved the problem. You have moved it forward, multiplied it, and made everybody pay for it.

What Happened at Kara Bridge Two Weeks Ago?

We do not even need to imagine the consequences.

On Tuesday, 15 September 2026, a container-laden truck crashed around Kara Bridge, compounding congestion caused by ongoing bridge repairs and an earlier multiple-vehicle accident.

What followed was one of those Lagos traffic experiences that people will remember for a long time.

Motorists spent between six and fourteen hours on the road. Some slept in their vehicles. Others abandoned their journeys and trekked long distances. The congestion stretched through Berger and adjoining routes, affecting movement far beyond the original accident scene. <Cite refs={[“turn476462search2”,“turn476462search4”]}/>

Imagine leaving the Island at 5 p.m., expecting to get home, eat, bathe, and rest before another working day, only to find yourself approaching your house at 5 a.m.

Twelve hours.

An entire night lost to the road.

The fallen container and bridge repairs were serious obstructions, but they were not the whole story.

As traffic worsened, motorists began passing one-way. Some occupied three of the four lanes meant for vehicles heading towards Lagos, leaving just one lane for legitimate traffic.

And when those drivers attempted to reconnect to their original carriageway around OPIC, they created another obstruction. Even after the crashed vehicles had been removed, traffic struggled to recover.

Look at the video.

Look at the vehicles facing one another on a road designed to separate opposing traffic.

Then consider how many people spent the night away from their families, how many missed work or appointments, and how many had to pay inflated transport fares because some motorists decided that their inconvenience mattered more than everybody else’s.

The fallen container caused an obstruction. The wrong-way driving helped turn that obstruction into a much wider crisis.

One Driver’s Impatience, Everybody’s Problem

I have experienced a smaller version of this myself.

A few weeks ago, while I was sorting out an incident involving a delivery rider who had hit my vehicle, another driver began reversing so he could take one-way.

In the process, he struck a danfo and reversed into my vehicle. One incident was already being resolved, and someone else’s impatience created another.

That is what passing one-way does. It creates risks for people who never agreed to participate in your shortcut.

And the danger becomes even greater at night, when visibility is poor, headlights are unreliable, and an unsuspecting driver may suddenly encounter a vehicle approaching head-on.

The fact that you believe you can manoeuvre safely does not mean everyone else should have to gamble on your confidence.

Sometimes, You Simply Have to Wait

I understand Lagos traffic. Trust me! As a resident since I was born, I understand it like mad!

I understand the exhaustion of leaving work and spending hours on a journey that should take forty minutes.

I understand the frustration of watching the opposite carriageway move freely while your own side remains stationary.

But sometimes, traffic is on your side. Sometimes, it is against you.

That’s life. That is how it goes.

You cannot demand that other road users surrender their safety because you have somewhere important to be.

And the fact that you can get away with passing one-way does not make it acceptable.

There are traffic laws. There are enforcement agencies. But personal discipline should not begin and end with the possibility of seeing LASTMA or FRSC officials.

We complain about Nigeria’s disorder every day, yet some of us contribute to it at the slightest inconvenience.

We want better roads, better systems, and a country that works, provided the rules do not interfere with our personal convenience.

The next time traffic builds up around Kara, Berger, Ibafo, Mowe, Ikorodu Road, or anywhere else, stay on your carriageway. Follow authorised diversions where available. Allow traffic officials and emergency responders to do their work.

If you have to wait, wait!!!

You may lose an hour. Or you may arrive home late.

But you will not have endangered innocent people or created another traffic jam simply because you could not bear to remain in yours.

An expressway cannot function when everybody believes they have the right to drive in whichever direction suits them.

And a society cannot function when everybody believes their inconvenience is more important than everyone else’s safety.

©️ Fọlábòmí Àmọ̀ó 2026
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When an Expressway Starts Going Both Ways on Both Sides was originally published in Pen With Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Nonfiction Story

“Guy, why did you let our streak die? We were on 450+ days, for God’s sake. You no get level jàre.”

That was the first notification I saw when I picked up my phone.

I stared at it longer than I should have. Not because it was serious. It was just Snapchat. Just a streak. Just one of those silly little rituals friends use to prove continuity. But something about it landed wrong.

Four hundred and fifty days of showing up in a small, meaningless way.

And then I stopped.

I had been in a haze of pause. Not rest. Not peace. Just suspension. Living, breathing, eating when I remembered; existing inside my body like a tenant who had stopped caring about rent. Time passed, but I did not move with it. I watched days arrive and leave from the same corner of my bed.

Usually, I was the life of our iMessage group. The one with the jokes. The voice notes. The sarcasm. The perfectly timed meme. The one who made silence feel impossible.

But this time, I was struggling to show up.

How do they see me now? I wondered.

A failure?

I locked the phone and sank further into the comfort of the dark room.

There were no lights on. No curtains drawn. Only the steady machinery of a ceiling fan spinning at full speed because Lagos heat does not care about your emotional state.

In that darkness, there was a husk.

A husk of regret. Of postponed plans and forgotten dreams. Of a life that once aspired loudly and now whispered excuses into its own palms. A husk of sleepless nights, unfinished ideas, and mornings that arrived before I had properly escaped the previous day.

But there was comfort in the dark too.

No judgement. No questions. No need to perform wellness. No need to explain why I had become smaller than my own name.

The darkness allowed disappearance.

And maybe that was the danger.

Because inside that room, time stopped counting. There were no deadlines, no streaks, no progress reports, no evidence that I was falling behind. Just a thick, passive quiet. A place where nothing was demanded and, therefore, nothing could fail.

Then another message from the group came in.

“I know sey you no like to dey take pictures normally. But are you okay?”

This one was harder to laugh off.

I typed something. Deleted it. Typed again.

"Lol, I’m good. Just been busy.”

A lie with familiar shoes.

My friends didn’t fight it immediately. They knew my tricks too well. They let me deflect. They followed me into small talk, allowed the conversation to wander through football, work, nonsense, and life. But friendship has memory. It knows when laughter is being used as a curtain.

So after a few minutes, one of them asks again.

“No, but for real. Are you okay?”

The question sat on my screen like a hand on my shoulder.

I wanted to be annoyed. It would have been easier to call it a disturbance. To say people should allow me to breathe. To insist I was fine and make my silence look like privacy instead of collapse.

But I knew what they were doing. They were choosing whether to leave me to my own mechanisms or keep knocking until something in me answered. They were choosing whether to respect the wall or recognise it as something I had built in a hurry, badly, with fear and darkness and old shame.

And the truth is, even when people love you, your dark room is still yours.

They can call. They can text. They can notice what has changed. They can send jokes, food, prayers, voice notes, and insults wrapped in affection.

But they cannot be inside your body for you.

You are the one alone in the room.

You are the one who knows exactly how the silence feels when the phone stops buzzing. You are the one who hears the ceiling fan, who feels the weight of your own unfinished life, who knows the particular shame of becoming unavailable to people who have always believed you were light.

Still, maybe their messages are not interruptions. Maybe they are ladders.

Small, imperfect ladders lowered into the dark by people who do not know exactly how deep you are but are trying anyway.

And maybe the selfishness is not in needing help.

Maybe the selfishness is in deciding, without asking, that your absence does not affect them too.

But life is passing — mine and theirs. These are hours we will never get back. And while I sit in the dark, thinking my disappearance is private, they are standing somewhere in their own lives, wondering whether to knock again.

Who do we lean on in our moments of darkness?

The answer sounds simple until it asks something of us.

Because we have to let people be our friends. Not just when we are funny. Not just when we are useful. Not just when we can show up polished, clever, and easy to love.

We have to let them be friends when we are delayed replies and dead streaks. When we are dark rooms. When we are unfinished sentences. When all we can offer is the truth that we are not okay yet, but we are still here.

I picked up the phone again.

The screen lit my face faintly.

I did not know how to explain the whole room. I did not know how to name the husk, the regret, the lost time, or the strange comfort of disappearing.

So I typed the only honest thing I could carry.

“I don’t think I’m okay. But I’m here.”

This time, I sent it.

©️ Fọlábòmí Àmọ̀ó 2026
If you enjoyed this, please consider reading:

The Key That Still Worked

Dead Streaks & Dark Rooms was originally published in Catharsis Chronicles on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The key was already in his hand before he reached the gate.

That was how old the habit was. His fingers found it in his pocket without thought, separating it from the others by touch alone. The flat one for the main gate, the smaller one for the front door, and the stubborn silver one that needed to be lifted slightly before it would turn. Even after six years away, his hand still remembered what his mind had tried to outgrow.

The gate was still green. The paint had peeled more at the bottom, curling away from the metal like tired skin. He stood outside it with his travel bag pressing into his shoulder, listening to the house breathe behind the wall.

A neighbour’s generator coughed. Somewhere, a woman called a child’s name thrice, then gave up with a sigh that spoke volumes: “If I catch this boy…” The afternoon sun sat heavy on the street.

He slid the key into the lock. It turned. That was the first thing that unsettled him.

Not the silence. Not the closed curtains. Not the fact that nobody had come out to meet him. The key still worked. As if the house had not noticed all the years he spent becoming someone who no longer belonged to it.

He pushed the gate open and stepped inside.

The compound was smaller than he remembered. The mango tree still leaned over the side wall, but the branch he used to climb had been cut off. The veranda tiles were cracked in the same places. Beside the front door, the old plastic chair remained, faded by sun, one leg slightly bent inward. His father used to sit there in the evenings, newspaper folded on his lap, watching the street like it owed him an explanation.

Now the chair was empty.

Femi adjusted his bag and walked to the door. The silver key resisted at first. He lifted it slightly, just as he had always done, and it gave way.

Inside, the house smelt of dust, camphor, and something recently cleaned. The kind of cleaning done before a visitor arrived, not before a son came home.

“Mummy?” he called.

No answer.

He set his bag down near the shoe rack. There were fewer shoes now. His mother’s slippers, his father’s black sandals, and a pair of church shoes polished to a shine that felt almost aggressive.

On the wall, the family photograph still hung above the console table. Everyone younger. Everyone pretending better. His father’s hand rested on Femi’s shoulder in the picture, not affectionately exactly, but firmly, like a reminder to stand straight.

Femi touched the key in his palm.

It had been given to him at seventeen, the day he got into university.

“You are not a child again,” his father had said, placing it in his hand. “You can come and go. But know what you are carrying.”

At the time, Femi thought it meant freedom.

He had held the key that day like a passport. He imagined late nights, returns without interrogation, the pride of opening the gate himself instead of knocking like a boy. But the first time he used it after midnight, his father was waiting in the plastic chair.

The memory rose with the smell of camphor.

Femi was nineteen, shoes in one hand, trying to enter without sound. The gate gave a small metallic cry. His father looked up from the darkness.

“What time is it?”

Femi froze.

“Sir, I — ”

“What time is it?”

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The key was still in the lock behind him.

His father stood slowly. “A key does not mean there is no house.”

That sentence followed him into adulthood.

It was there when he declined parties early. There when he apologised before explaining himself. There when he moved out and still felt guilty locking his own door. There, when he stopped visiting and told himself distance was the same as peace.

Now he was back, holding the same key, because his mother had called three days ago and said, “Your father wants to see you.”

Not “misses you”. Not “asked after you”. Wants to see you.

As if the old man had summoned a document, or called up a worker from the factory

Femi found him in the sitting room.

His father sat by the window, thinner than before, wrapped in a cardigan despite the heat. His walking stick leaned against the armrest. The television was on mute, showing men in suits arguing silently.

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

His father’s eyes moved to the key in Femi’s hand.

“You still have it,” he said.

Femi looked down, as if surprised to find it there. “Yes.”

His father nodded once. “Good.”

That was all.

No embrace. No question about the journey. No complaint about how long it had been. Just that small approval, placed on the table between them like a plate nobody was sure who should eat from.

Femi sat opposite him.

The key pressed into his palm, its teeth leaving a faint mark.

His mother came in with water and malt, smiling too brightly. She asked about work, Lagos traffic, whether he had eaten. Her voice filled the room with soft furniture. His father watched them both, saying little.

Later, when his mother went to the kitchen, his father shifted in his chair.

“The doctor says I should not be climbing stairs,” he said.

Femi nodded.

“The back room leaks when it rains.”

Another nod.

“The gate lock is bad.”

Femi looked at him. “It opened.”

“It is bad,” his father repeated.

The old irritation rose in Femi’s throat. The familiar one. The one that came from being told a fact by someone who had already decided your experience did not count.

He almost said, It opened for me.

Instead, he looked at the key.

The metal was dull now, scratched from years of sharing pockets with coins and other keys. It had opened hostels, flats, office drawers, and briefcases. It had lived beside him through versions of himself his father never met.

“It sticks,” his father said. “You have to lift it.”

“I know.”

His father’s gaze sharpened slightly.

Of course he knew. His body knew this house better than either of them could admit. He knew the bad lock, the weak step, and the cupboard door that snapped if you closed it too hard. He knew the silence after correction. He knew the weight of being trusted with entry but not softness.

His father looked away first.

That was new.

In the evening, Femi stood outside by the gate, waiting for the locksmith his mother had called. The key was back in his pocket, but he kept touching it, checking it was there.

His father came out slowly with his stick.

“You don’t have to stand,” Femi said.

His father ignored him and lowered himself into the plastic chair.

They watched the street together.

For a while, nothing happened. Children ran past. A woman balanced a tray of oranges on her head. The sky darkened by degrees.

His father said, “When I gave you that key, I thought I was teaching you responsibility.”

Femi kept his eyes on the gate.

His father continued, “Maybe I taught you permission.”

The sentence was so small it almost disappeared into the evening.

Femi turned.

His father was looking at the road, not at him. His face remained stern, but his hand on the walking stick trembled slightly.

Femi wanted, suddenly, to be angry. Anger would have been easier. Anger had shape. This was something else. An old door opening onto a room he had stopped expecting to enter.

The locksmith arrived before Femi could reply.

He changed the lock in twenty minutes. Removed the old one, fitted the new one, and tested it twice. Clean turn. No lifting. No resistance.

He handed Femi two new keys.

“Smooth now,” the man said.

Femi held them.

They were bright, too light, and not yet marked by use.

His father reached out a hand.

Femi placed one key in it.

For a second, their fingers touched. His father’s skin was dry and warm. Neither of them moved quickly.

Then his father closed his hand around the key.

Femi looked at the other one in his own palm.

The old key still sat in his pocket, useless now, but present. It no longer opened the gate. Still, he knew he would not throw it away immediately. Because some keys stop opening doors and start opening memory.

©️ Fọlábòmí Àmọ̀ó 2026
If you enjoyed this, please consider reading:

When Money Makes You Quiet

The Key That Still Worked was originally published in Tantalizing Tales on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A lack of money doesn’t just limit what you can buy. It changes how you take up space.

It makes you quieter in rooms where you used to speak freely. It makes you weigh your words, not because you have nothing to say, but because you start wondering what your words are worth without proof behind them. In a country like Nigeria, where money often gets mistaken for competence, confidence, or even character, being broke can feel like being invisible in full colour.

It’s a strange kind of shrinking. Physical, almost.

You sit differently. You laugh less loudly. You delay eye contact when conversations turn to plans – travel, investments, wedding contributions, house rent, hangouts, and large purchases. You start smiling at things you can’t relate to anymore, then you go home and feel the smile slide off your face like a mask that has done its shift.

And with family, a lack of money can make you feel like a child again, even when you’re grown.

Not because anyone says it directly — sometimes they do — but because the family conversation is often coded. A request comes, and you already know your “I can’t” will be heard as a refusal, not a limitation. A small contribution is needed, and you calculate how to send something without exposing how much you’re struggling. You learn to speak in half-promises: “Let me see", “I’ll try", or "Next week", because “I don’t have” feels like a confession.

And then there’s the quiet humiliation of younger siblings doing better.

Not because their success is bad. It’s beautiful. It’s what you prayed for, in a way. But it rearranges the family hierarchy. Suddenly, the younger one is the sponsor. The younger one is the fixer. The younger one is the one people praise at gatherings, while you sit there clapping and swallowing a bitterness you hate yourself for tasting.

You want to be proud without feeling compared.

But comparison happens anyway — if not by others, then by your own mind. You start counting years like debts. You start replaying choices. You start asking where you went wrong, why your life is late, and why your efforts don’t look like progress. You start seeing yourself through the eyes of relatives who only know how to respect what they can measure.

Amongst friends, the shame is quieter but sharper.

It shows up at restaurants when the bill lands and there’s a moment of theatre around who will pay. The friend who always picks up the check smiles and says, “I got it,” and you laugh and say, “God bless you,” but inside, you are tired of being the one receiving grace you cannot return. You tell yourself it’s friendship, it’s love, it’s community — and it is. But it can also feel like living on someone’s shoulders with no strength left in your own legs.

You stop suggesting hangouts because you don’t want the pressure of spending. You start declining invitations with excuses that feel believable: "Work is hectic,” “I’m not feeling well," or "Let's do it next time.” You become less present, not because you don’t care, but because care has become expensive.

Sometimes you show up anyway, and you spend money you don’t have just to feel normal for two hours. And the next day, you’re paying for that normalcy with anxiety.

In relationships, lack of money can do something even more intimate: it can shrink your sense of worth.

You start feeling like love is a privilege you have to earn with provision. You become overly grateful for simple affection because you fear it can be withdrawn when reality is seen clearly. You avoid conversations about the future because the future sounds expensive. You become defensive when money comes up, not because your partner is attacking you, but because you already feel attacked by your own circumstances.

And the hardest part is this: you want to show up for people who show up for you.

You want to be the friend who sends money without being asked. The sibling who sends money to their parents. The partner who plans dates without calculating panic. The person who gives, not just receives.

But you can’t.

At least, not yet.

So you live in this awkward space where you are loved, but you feel like a burden. Where you are supported, but you feel like you’re failing a private test. Where you are surrounded by people, but you still feel alone because your struggle is isolating in a way that doesn’t always have language.

Lack of money makes you feel small because it turns life into a constant negotiation with your needs, with your pride, and with your place in every room.

And what you want, quietly, desperately, is not luxury. It’s dignity.

The ability to stand on your own feet and say, without embarrassment: I’m here. I can carry my own weight.

I can show up for you, too.

©️ Fọlábòmí Àmọ̀ó 2026
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Silent Interests

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When Money Makes You Quiet was originally published in Pen With Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Boundaries are often treated like walls: cold, defensive, a sign that someone is unwilling to “show love". In reality, boundaries are closer to engineering. They are load-bearing structures that keep relationships from collapsing under the weight they were never designed to carry.

Every relationship has demands – time, attention, emotional labour, money, and compromise. Those demands increase with intimacy. The closer two people are, the more access they have to each other’s lives. That access is not automatically healthy. Without limits, access becomes consumption: one person’s needs can quietly expand until the other person’s identity and bandwidth shrink.

This is why the absence of boundaries doesn’t produce freedom; it produces chaos.

A simple cause-and-effect chain shows it. When boundaries are unclear, expectations become implicit. Implicit expectations become assumptions. Assumptions become resentments. Resentments become conflict. Conflict becomes withdrawal. Withdrawal becomes distance — often the very distance people were trying to avoid by refusing boundaries in the first place.

In other words, “no boundaries” is not a sign of closeness; it is often the beginning of erosion.

Boundaries create clarity. Clarity reduces misinterpretation. Reduced misinterpretation lowers conflict. Lower conflict increases safety. Safety increases honesty. Honesty increases intimacy. So boundaries do not compete with love; they provide the conditions for love to remain stable over time.

Consider the common relationship patterns that break people down: one partner constantly “borrows” time without asking, expects instant replies, demands emotional availability at any hour, or treats personal space as a sign of rejection. When the other partner tries to accommodate everything, it may look generous in the short term.

But over time, accommodation without limits becomes depletion. Depletion becomes irritability. Irritability becomes blame. Eventually, the relationship becomes a site of fatigue rather than support.

Boundaries prevent this predictable decline by properly distributing responsibility. They make it clear what is mine to carry and what is yours. They stop one person from becoming the sole container for the other’s anxiety. They also prevent “mind-reading relationships", where love is measured by how well someone anticipates needs without them being spoken.

That model is unstable. People are not telepaths, and the cost of pretending they should be is constant disappointment.

A healthy boundary is not an insult. It’s information: this is what I can offer reliably; this is what I cannot. This is what helps me show up well; this is what makes me shut down. When this information is shared, both people can adjust. The relationship becomes less about emotional guessing and more about intentional agreement.

This logic applies beyond romance. In family systems, boundaries prevent constant intrusion. In friendship, boundaries preserve respect. At work, boundaries prevent burnout. In all cases, the pattern is consistent: people with no boundaries are easier to access, but harder to keep. People with clear boundaries may disappoint others sometimes, but they remain stable and present longer.

The objection is obvious: boundaries can be used selfishly — “I’m protecting my peace” as an excuse to avoid accountability or empathy. That is true. But misuse doesn’t invalidate the tool. It clarifies the definition. Healthy boundaries are not the refusal of responsibility; they are the refusal of exploitation. They still include care. They still include reciprocity. They still include repair.

The strongest evidence that boundaries are love is what happens without them: love becomes a duty, not a choice. Resentment grows quietly. People start fantasising about escape. They “act fine” until they collapse. Then the ending arrives, and everyone claims it was sudden when it was actually structural.

So the conclusion is simple: boundaries don’t reduce closeness. They prevent closeness from becoming consumption. They protect relationships from predictable failure modes.

They keep love from turning into exhaustion.

©️ Fọlábòmí Àmọ̀ó 2026
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A Quiet Exit

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Bloody Sweet Writers — A Publication

Boundaries are Love was originally published in bloody sweet writers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

He didn’t like it
when the stars moved.

Said the sky
felt safer
when everything
stayed where it belonged.

So he watched the heavens
with suspicious eyes,
counting each shift
like a warning.

Even the smallest change;
a trembling branch,
a fallen leaf,
a lone dewdrop
slipping from dawn’s grasp,

felt like proof
that the world
was slowly becoming
something
he could no longer hold still.

©️ Fọlábòmí Àmọ̀ó 2026
If you enjoyed this, please consider reading:

A Quiet Exit

Dewdrop was originally published in Loose Words on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The message arrives at a time that makes it harder to ignore.

Not in the middle of a busy afternoon, where silence can hide behind meetings and traffic and errands. It arrives at night, when the house has settled and the day has stopped making excuses on your behalf. The phone lights up beside a cup of water. A name appears. A few words. Sometimes a question mark that feels too small to hold what it’s asking.

“Hey. Are you okay?”
“Did you get home?”
“Can we talk?”
“Just checking in.”

The thumb hovers. The mind opens a drawer of possible replies and finds none that feel clean.

A reply would mean entering something. A reply would mean choosing a direction. A reply would mean admitting the thing that has been sitting quietly at the edge of the relationship: the hesitation, the thinning interest, the lack of readiness, and the growing certainty that what was once possible is no longer kind.

So the phone is turned face down.

Not dramatically. Just… placed.

The next morning, the message is still there. The day begins with it in the background, like a song stuck on low volume. It doesn’t interrupt breakfast, but it colours it. It doesn’t stop the commute, but it rides along. It sits at the corner of the mind while emails are answered and tasks are ticked off, waiting for a moment when courage might arrive.

Courage does not arrive. Only time does. And time never stops for anyone, not least for the weight of unanswered messages.

By afternoon, the message has become heavier. Not because it changed, but because the silence around it has expanded. The longer it sits unanswered, the more the options shrink. A quick response now would look careless. A late response needs explanation. An explanation invites questions. Questions invite honesty. Honesty invites consequences.

And the simplest route becomes disappearance.

Ghosting is rarely one act. It is usually a series of small delays that stack into an absence. It begins as “I’ll reply later”, then turns into “tomorrow”, then becomes “it’s been too long”, then ends as “maybe they’ve moved on”.

It sounds neat in the head. It feels less neat in the body.

There is a difference between not responding and not caring, but the difference doesn’t always translate to the person waiting. A message left on ‘read’ becomes a small humiliation. A double text becomes a risk. A third message becomes embarrassment dressed as concern.

“How far should the dignity stretch?”
“Is it better to try again, or to stop and pretend it never mattered?”

Nobody asks those questions aloud, but they sit there, quietly, beneath the screen.

The person who disappears often has reasons that look sensible up close.

Work is hectic.
Life is heavy.
Emotional capacity is low.
Words feel hard.
The timing is wrong.
The interest faded.
Another person appeared.
The connection didn’t deepen the way it was supposed to.
Something about it felt off.
Nothing felt strong enough.
Or nothing felt off; it was just too perfect.

And still, there is a message waiting. There is a name that keeps showing up on a screen like a small insistence.

Sometimes it isn’t even about not wanting them. Sometimes it’s about not wanting the moment. The moment when a decision has to be made in plain sight. The moment when the truth becomes real enough to hurt someone. The moment where kindness stops being vague and becomes specific.

Because specific kindness asks for language.

It asks, “I don’t feel the same anymore.”
It asks, “I don’t think I can do this.”
It asks, “Am I ready?”
It asks, “Is this what I want?”
It asks, “I don’t want you.”

And those sentences feel sharp in the mouth.

They turn you into the villain for a second. They create a story where someone is the wound, and someone is the hand that caused it. Even when nothing cruel happened, clarity can still feel cruel. Even when the truth is simple, speaking it can feel like breaking something that was already cracking.

So silence becomes a soft exit. A door that closes without sound.

The contrast is always interesting: how easy it can be to talk when things are warm, and how difficult it becomes when things cool. How quickly “good morning” can turn into “seen”. How the same hands that once typed paragraphs can suddenly be unable to type one honest line! How the same voice that recorded long voice notes can go silent, as if it was never speaking in the first place

It is also interesting how disappearance can masquerade as peace.

The phone stops buzzing. The guilt quiets down. The day moves on. There is no difficult conversation, no emotional spill, no confrontation. The mind calls it “avoiding drama". The body calls it relief.

But the relief has a shadow.

Because the person left behind still has to carry the ending alone. They have to build a conclusion from fragments: a change in response time, a shift in tone, a sudden quiet before a final disappearance. They have to rewrite the story without the final chapter. And sometimes, the story stays unfinished forever.

And even the person who disappears is not always free.

They see the unread message days later and feel the old weight return. They scroll past old photos and feel a small pinch, not of love, but of unfinishedness. They type a reply and delete it. Type again. Delete again. The cursor blinks like a small accusation.

What is the real cost of a clean exit that wasn’t clean for both people?

It isn’t only the other person’s confusion. It’s also what ghosting trains in the self: the habit of leaving without language. The habit of avoiding discomfort until it becomes someone else’s burden. The habit of treating other people’s feelings like weather — unfortunate, unavoidable, and not personally caused.

Another contrast appears when it is watched closely: the difference between being busy and being absent. Busy can still reply. Busy can still say, “I can’t talk much, but I see you.” Busy can still offer a sentence that anchors the other person in reality. Absence is not about time. It is about choice.

Still, choice is complicated.

Sometimes the words don’t come because the truth feels too final.
Sometimes they don’t come because they don’t want to be disliked.
Sometimes they don’t come because they want the door left slightly open — just in case.
Sometimes they don’t come because the person is still negotiating with their own uncertainty.

Sometimes it really is fear: fear of being seen as the bad one, fear of hurting someone, fear of being asked questions that require answers. And sometimes it’s just fatigue: the tiredness of being responsible for feelings that are not yours but are now in your hands anyway.

So the phone stays face down. The day continues. The gap widens until it begins to feel normal.

The message stops coming eventually. The screen goes quiet. The name becomes a memory. The relationship turns into a small story told to friends: “It just faded.” A small lie to paint yourself as the hero: “I think he was no longer interested.”

But there are moments, late at night, in a silence that feels too honest, when the mind returns to the first message, the one that could have been answered easily if the ending wasn’t waiting behind it.

And a question sits there, unasked, carrying its own subtext:

Was it really easier to disappear… or just easier than saying one true sentence?

©️ Fọlábòmí Àmọ̀ó 2026
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Craving the Unavailable

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Welcome to ‘Pen With Paper’ — A Publication

A Quiet Exit was originally published in Pen With Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Adulthood is heavy in a way nobody properly warns you about.

Not the obvious heavy: work, bills, or responsibility. I mean the quiet weight that sits on your chest even on days nothing “bad” happens. The weight of always needing to be something – productive, responsible, stable, strategic, or improving. The weight of being measured by outcomes rather than effort.

The weight of waking up and immediately doing mental arithmetic – what is due, what is missing, what you can afford, what you can't, and what you must postpone again.

As a child, life was simple in the most luxurious way.

Your needs were basic, and your world was small. Hunger meant food would come from somewhere. School meant your biggest problems were homework, whether you’d be late, or how to avoid punishment.

Joy was easy. It lived in silly games, cartoons, running outside, laughing until your stomach hurt, and getting excited about things that didn’t need to make sense. You could be tired and still feel light. You could be broke and still feel rich.

There was also something soft about how time behaved. Days felt long. Weeks felt endless. The future was not a deadline. It was a distant place you could dream about without panic.

Adulthood is the opposite.

Time is always speeding. Months disappear. You blink and realise a year has gone by, and you can’t remember what you did with it, other than survive. You start seeing your life as a series of decisions that solidified quietly: roads you took, roads you didn't; moments you delayed because you thought there would be more time.

And that’s where the hollowness creeps in.

Not because adulthood has no good moments. It does. But those moments are often interrupted by the knowledge that they are expensive. Expensive in time, in money, in energy. Even rest feels like something you have to earn. Even happiness feels like a break in the schedule, not a natural part of living.

You start living in the future: planning, preparing, strategising. You go to bed thinking about what you didn’t do and wake up thinking about what you must do. You measure yourself constantly. You turn your life into a scoreboard.

And then regret shows up.

Regret about time wasted. About choices made out of fear. About staying too long in places that shrank you. About not starting earlier. About not being braver. About thinking you had forever.

You remember the times you could have tried harder, spoken up, left, started, moved on, finished, started again, invested, and believed in yourself. You remember the versions of you that almost became real, and you wonder what you would look like if you had chosen differently.

Sometimes adulthood feels like carrying the consequences of your younger self’s ignorance. And that makes you want something impossible.

You, I, want to be a kid again!

Not because childhood was perfect. It wasn’t. But because childhood had permission. Permission to be small. Permission to be unfinished. Permission to dream without immediately needing a plan. Permission to fail without it costing rent money. Permission to exist without constant performance. Permission to just ‘be’.

I wish I could go back and change so many things. I wish I could sit my younger self down and say:

"Listen, time is not patient. Start now. Love better. Do better. Choose yourself earlier. Don’t waste years trying to impress people who won’t remember your effort. Don’t doubt what you have inside of you, because you are amazing!"

But you don’t get to go back. Sadly.

You only get to feel the weight, name it, and keep walking anyway, trying to rebuild softness in a life that keeps demanding hardness.

That’s the crushing part of adulthood: you have to become your own rescuer, even when you’re tired of saving yourself.

©️ Fọlábòmí Àmọ̀ó 2026
If you enjoyed this, please consider reading:

Happiness Is Lovely. Peace Is the Gift

I Want to Be a Kid Again! was originally published in Promptly Written on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.