🤫 Confess💔 Relationship Wahala
I Still Dream About the Woman I Met in Kano. My Wife Has No Idea She Exists.
S
Spiral Hornbill from Yola
4 months ago
This was back in 2018, during my second year of NYSC in Kano. I was 24, posted to a local government school, and I was lonely in a way I had never been before. The harmattan was dry and cold, and every evening I would sit on the veranda of my PPA, watching the dust settle on the streets. That was when I met Zainab. She was a widow, maybe 32, with two small children. She sold suya near the school gate. The first time I bought from her, she smiled and said something in Hausa I didn't understand. I smiled back. After that, I found excuses to pass by her stall every evening. Omo, the thing about Zainab was not just her beauty. It was the way she looked at me like I was the only person in the world. She would save the best pieces of meat for me, and we would talk for an hour after her last customer left. She told me about her husband who died in a car accident, about how she was raising her children alone. I told her about my life in the south, about my family, about my girlfriend back home who I was supposed to marry. One night, she invited me to her room behind the suya stand. I knew it was wrong. I knew I was betraying someone. But I went anyway. That night, and many nights after, we shared something I have never been able to explain. It was not just sex. It was two lonely people holding each other in a city that was not home to either of us. When my service year ended, I left Kano. I told her I would come back. I never did. I married my girlfriend, had two kids, built a life in Lagos. But sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wake up and I can still smell the suya smoke and hear her laughter. My wife sleeps beside me, and I carry this secret like a stone in my chest. What I learned: some people enter your life not to stay, but to teach you that the heart does not follow maps. I loved Zainab in a way that had no future, but it was real. And I have accepted that some love is meant to be a memory, not a destination.
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