Dear Jude

Dear Jude,

This is the 365^th letter I am writing to you. I have posted none of them because no one posts letters anymore. Okay, maybe they do – but not in this sense. Even if I wanted to post the letters to you, I do not have an address to send them to.

I am writing these letters and keeping them in an Indomie box under my bed. Sometimes, I pull out the box and read all of them. I start from the very first letter I wrote to you at the beginning of the year and I always wince at my terrible writing. If writing letters to you has done anything good to me, it must be that it has improved my writing. Thank you Jude.

I miss you baby. I wish you were dead but you are not. You see, if you were dead, I would go to your grave and lie down on it like those people in the movies do and I would bring you colourful flowers and lay them on your grave. As an aside, I think it’s a little ironic to be cutting living flowers from their source of life to gift a dead person. I think it is like giving a dumb child fake microphones – it’s pointless anyway.

But I digress. I say that I wish you were dead because I do not want to believe that you are. When you went missing on the 31^st of December last year, I never imagined that I would still be waiting for you to return a year later. Who goes out and does not return home? You, apparently. You always said, ‘It doesn’t matter what you do, what matters is how you do it’. So Jude, tell me, this one that you have done, how did you do it.

How did you manage to disappear from the whole world within hours? How did you just go like that without leaving any clues for me? Where are you now? When I said, ‘I love you’ over the phone the last time we talked and you laughed, were you mocking me? Did you know that was the last time we would talk? How do you manage to create this terrible void in my life? How do you manage to distort my vision so that now, I see your face on other people’s faces? How have you managed to turn me into this letter-writing phone-checking heart-pounding sleep-evading constantly tired woman?

Jude, I miss you and I still love you. But this is the last letter I would be writing to you. I have spent all my hopes on you. I go to church every Sunday and Wednesday and connect every message preached to your return. Every prophecy made by my pastor, I connect it to you – that you would be found. I buy clothes that I think you would like – just in case you show up at my door one day. I am always looking pretty, Jude, just in case, I see you anywhere. I am not myself again. Everyone notices.

This is the last letter I would be writing to you Jude. I am very tired. I still love you but I have to start hoping for myself. You may never return and it hurts to come to terms with that. But I cannot be walking around Lagos tapping every tall, dark and handsome man on the road because I think you are the one. I cannot be checking my phone everyday and calling your number 20 times a day to see if it is switched on. I cannot.

I miss you Jude. I wish you were dead. But I hope you are not.

Love,

Bimpe.