Welcome to Okafor Uzoamaka's blog.

Every night we die For 't's then our sorrows come alive We recount the day's sour tale Even stories we thought stale Every night we die For 't's then incubus comes alive Whispering distasteful nonsenses We can't recount with our senses Every night we die For 't's then our debts come alive Debts owed both in cash and kind In times we wish we could unwind Every night we die For 't's then the dead come alive Spirits haunted into leaving Spirits haunting the living Every night we die For while asleep We do not know if we'll slip Into the land of no return Every night we die.                                    Okafor Uzoamaka

We have been here before. Those times we argued till we had our backs up against the wall. We've been here, together but alone. Speaking in loud silence, till our unspoken words made the other fade; then vanish. Vanish gradually, like lead being erased from paper, as if to effect less shade before being erased. Totally. We've been here those mornings I confronted you about the condoms I saw all around the room. Used. They were just two or three and carefully tucked in the corners of the visitors room by a careless person. That was initially. You got bold and littered them all around the parlour, as if telling me: see where all the sperm we would have used in trying harder to get a child went to. I shouted, cried and begged till I was tired. Then, suddenly I stopped. I stopped begging. I stopped crying. I refused to get mad or ask you anything about it. You knew I knew you were still having affairs. You just didn't know why I refused to ask you anything about it again. T...

The aloe vera plant on our balcony refused to grow. It preferred to remain stagnant, until it started to shrink. It was no fault of ours. It was a personal choice of its, for it had a mind of its own. We watered it daily, made it accessible to adequate sunlight, put it in good soil. What else did it need? So when my mother compared my sister to the aloe vera plant, I knew she was one step from giving up on her, just as we were from giving up on the aloe vera plant. "At least if we throw away the aloe vera, it could be manure." My mother said. "You'll have no use even if you're thrown away." On a lighter note, I would have shouted: one-zero, indicating that my mother just scored a savage point against my sister. But this wasn't a lighter note, and since I wasn't interested in having my previous misdeeds exhumed like my sister's, I kept quiet. I couldn't quite get the reason for all the shouting initially, but I knew it had to do with our...

Whenever Tecno and Wizkid's Mama comes on, I replace 'money' with 'bae', praying my hustle for one pays off. 'Who did I offend?' Has been the constant question on my mind. It wasn't easy to be single at this age, and of all places in Lagos! Lagos where all assortment of men existed. Orishirishi. Gbogbo ti gbo. Yet I could not lay claim to one, at least. I didn't come to Lagos to find love. I came for money, but no matter how much I tried, I could not pretend that my relationship status wasn't affecting my psyche. Motivational speakers could not even help in this case. "Build a good relationship with God and a stable career, men will come in droves." I was tired of hearing that line or anything similar to it. "Ada guess what!" Said Folake, my colleague, snapping me out of my thoughts. She didn't even wait for me to guess. "Lanre is planning a surprise trip for us to La Campagne Tropicana for Valentine. I...

AUTHOR: DIANA NWAOKOLO There are days I love him, and there are days I just hate him with my whole being. I put my heart on my fingertips and pour emotions from my ink pen to paper, but this one man... This one sensual being makes it hard for me to write coherent sentences. I had poems about all of them,that I wrote at the height of my feelings for them. But this one man . Oh, just this numero uno makes words that fall so easily from my tongue, stick to the up of my mouth!! I want to write about him, but then he leaves me breathless without even trying. This is the love spin, and there are days- like today, where he just makes me see trolls and monsters and say things I can't believe and not be there when he's supposed to. So I sit to think with a glass of milk of all the times he's done me bad and I've just been going along with it and I say to myself, "Girl, he gon get it today!" He drives over right about then and his hands and lips tell me tales ...

While humming Enya's Oiche Chiun Chorale, you tucked your hair behind your ear once more as you tried to avoid the sun rays that sneaked into the room through the curtain. "Why do you keep dodging the sun rays?" I asked.  "I do not want to admit it's morning yet," you said. "We decide when it's morning in this world of ours, not the sun." I said.  You smiled. This year, we decided not to prepare the conventional Christmas meal of rice and chicken for ourselves. We decided not to do anything 'normal' that year. So instead of having rice and chicken, we went for yam and egg sauce and shared rice and chicken for the children. We decided not to take any fancy trip or decorate our house. We called all the roaming children on our street and had them sit under the canopy we erected the previous day. Initially, we were torn between going to visit the less privileged and calling the ones we saw on our streets- we opted for the later. ...

You looked at me with eyes that spoke. "I love you," you said, "but cannot be with you." That wasn't what I heard when I listened to your eyes. I heard, "I'd love to be with you forever." I heard only the 'I love you', without the 'but'. "Why?" I asked. "I can't actually say," you started, then went on to ramble about being from an endogamous people. It wasn't enough to be an Igbo, I had to be from your village too. "It's not you Kosarachi,' you said, 'it's me. It's my village people. I cannot marry a girl that's not from my village." "Really?" "Really. I swear it." "What are the consequences?" I asked. "I don't know, but I know it will give my father a heart attack." "The same father that didn't have a heart attack when you got a Yoruba girl pregnant." "Pregnancy is different from marriage. It...