BEFORE SHE BECAME EASY TO READ

There is a photo from Amaka’s birthday. The one from the year they rented out the restaurant upstairs, before Amaka moved to Abuja.

She is mid-sentence in it.

Her hand is up. She is making a point or disagreeing with something or saying the wrong yes at the wrong moment across the table. Her face is doing too much. She looks like someone about to say something she hasn’t fully decided on yet, and isn’t concerned about this.

She doesn’t recognise that face in the mirror anymore.

There was a time when she answered the phone while she was still laughing.

Whatever she had been doing before the call, she brought it with her. The conversation started in the middle of something. She didn’t compose herself first.

She used to call people just because she thought of them. Not to catch up. Not with a reason prepared. Just because someone crossed her mind and the distance between thinking of someone and reaching for them was very short then.

She would hang up having said almost nothing useful.

And not notice.

She used to disagree out loud before she knew whether it was worth it.

Not rudely. Not looking for a fight.

The thought arrived and the thought left her mouth and the gap between those two things was not yet managed.

She said things that turned out to be wrong. She changed her mind in the middle of sentences. She started stories she didn’t know the endings to yet.

Ngozi used to say she was too much. Not as a verdict, the way you call someone too funny. A fact about volume. You are just so much. She had not found this uncomfortable then.

She didn’t know warmth could disappear.

She made jokes that didn’t land sometimes.

And didn’t track it afterward. Didn’t replay the moment later. Didn’t file the information away for next time.

The joke didn’t land and the evening continued and she was already somewhere else by the time the silence passed.

She was not performing lightness then.

She just had it.

She was comfortable being misunderstood.

Not permanently. Not without caring.

But in the moment, when someone took her wrong or missed the point, she could let it sit. She didn’t always reach in immediately to correct it. Sometimes she waited to see if the conversation found its own way back.

Sometimes it didn’t. And she moved on anyway.

She had not yet learned how much smoother things became when you explained yourself early.

At Bisi’s wedding she spent an hour talking to the caterer’s assistant, who had mentioned she was thinking about leaving the catering business. She found it genuinely more interesting than the table she was supposed to be at.

Bisi laughed about it afterward. It was a story people told for years.

She would not do this now.

She used to want things out loud.

Not quietly. Not after checking whether the wanting was reasonable. Just, she wanted something, and she said so.

And if it didn’t happen, she was disappointed in a way that was also visible. She didn’t arrive at wanting something with an exit already prepared.

She wanted it. It showed.

She didn’t know yet that wanting things openly was a kind of exposure.

The photo is still on Amaka’s wall. She sees it every time she visits.

Amaka has never taken it down. She has never asked her to.

When she looks at it she is not sure what she feels. It is not regret exactly. She said things that landed wrong sometimes. People sometimes looked relieved when she finally got distracted by something else.

And she knows it wasn’t all loss.

But the face.

The face in that photo is doing something she hasn’t seen her own face do in years.

It doesn’t know yet that it’s going to be read.