You know what I’ve come to realise about horrible days? They start like every other day. They give you no inkling of the poison they’ve swallowed; no warning of the venom waiting to seep into your bones. But horrible days come with lessons too. They teach us to appreciate the boring days—the days nothing happens.
September 20, 2021, was a horrible day. I remember waking up that morning feeling particularly lethargic. The previous day had been spent at a work-related event that had made huge demands on my social battery, so I was drained and feeling out of sorts. Unfortunately the pile of unwashed clothes in my laundry basket had long overstayed its welcome. They sat there, mocking me with silent judgment and crumpled defiance. I’m an African woman and I hate disrespect, especially from dirty clothes. So I decided to do something about them.
I carried the clothes to the bathroom, set them down beside the washing machine, filled the black wash basin with water and placed it on the toilet seat, and began to wash by hand. I happen to be the chairman of the Don’t Trust Your Washing Machine Association, and our motto is simple: The hands will always get you a better wash. The washing machine is nothing more than a symbol of my ability to afford it, a testament to the fact that capitalism wasn’t always the bad guy.
Beside me was a white paint bucket perched atop the washing machine, ready to collect the freshly washed clothes. Lost in the mindless motion of scrubbing and rinsing, my mind wandered, drifting between daydreams and memories as the mind often does when it is momentarily free from the burden of focused thought.
Then my phone rang.
The ringtone made me chuckle. For the umpteenth time, I made a mental note to change it. I had set it as a dare from Fabulous, and while I loved its quirkiness, Sandaru Sathsara’s rendition of “It’s My Life” was the last thing I wanted blaring during a business meeting.
I wiped my hands on my jean shorts and checked the caller ID. Speak of the devil, it was Fabulous. I rolled my eyes in mock offence. Two days ago, she’d said she wanted to tell me something and I’d been badgering her about it. She knew all too well that I didn’t do well with suspense. So that morning, when I called her twice and she didn’t pick up, I forgave her in advance because I knew she had probably gotten immersed in something. Fabulous wasn’t the type to play games with your frame of mind, so I let things slide and patiently waited for her to finish whatever she was doing.
Still, in a friendly, not-so-friendly, my-best-friend-is-calling-me mood, I answered, “Eh-hen? What do you want to hear, madam? Why are you calling me?”
But instead of the familiar sass on the other end, I heard fast, shallow breathing. Just like that, my face rearranged itself.
“Fine wine, you well so?”
Then, a voice. A very unFabulous voice.
“Hi, Big Sis, It’s…uhm. It’s me.”
I instantly recognised Demilade’s voice; Fabulous’s little brother— if we could call a 23-year-old man little.
I remember sometime in 2018, I’d gone for a “job interview” at Ibeju Lekki, only for me to get there and find it was a GNLD seminar held at a decrepit-looking shell of a building. I had left in a daze, my anger riddled with holes. My brain was hurting from a banging headache and demoralisation. I badly needed to go to my happy place, so I texted Fabulous to inform her I was coming over to her house.
She replied: “Sure Baybee. Still in traffic though. See you soon. Don’t stress yourself with any yeye cooking. Tell Demz to make you noodles and egg” I chuckled at the message. This was the first time I was meeting Demz because he was always in school on the previous occasions I had come visiting. I therefore found the proposition of telling him to cook for me slightly awkward. He wasn’t the one that asked me to go and get bamboozled by Lagos swindlers. But I got to her place and he was such a warm soul. Before I could gather my strength to enter the kitchen, Demz was headed there too, smilingly telling me to relax so he can take care of me as the man of the house. I laughed for the first time that day.
Fabulous was right when she said Demz was a male version of herself. Our conversation was easy and banter-filled. Most of his jokes were good-natured jabs at Fabulous. You could just tell that between them lay an eternity of fondness for each other. By the time Fabulous got back home, Demz had taught me how to play Call of Duty and had killed me exactly six times. So immersed were we in our world that she said in mock consternation, “I see you’ve finally donated me to charity and have bought yourself a new sister”, and without missing a beat, Demz replied, “Yes, I have. She’s a bigger sister than you could ever be,” and he made a height gesture with his hands. I playfully smacked his head at the double entendre because Fabulous towered over me at 5’9. But it’s stuck since then. He called me Big Sis and I called him Small Demz in all his 6’2 glory.
I tried to refocus my attention on the call, shifting my tone and forcing my voice into polite neutrality.
“Small Demz, how far? Why are you calling me on Fab’s phone? Where she dey?”
Silence. A tiny prickly hesitation loaded with a thousand unpleasant possibilities. I ignored the sudden weight in my chest. It was an unspoken warning, curling in the pit of my stomach like dark tendrils of smoke. I wonder how the body is always able to pick up these portentous signals. By some imperceptible sixth sense, I had a deep foreboding about what would come next. I clung to that fragile and spectral bliss—the bliss between knowing and unknowing—and in that moment, I realised that I would do anything to stay there, to stretch that sliver of time before reality shattered through like a deluge of broken glass. But reality came crashing down anyway.
Uhm. Fabulous. She… uhm.” He didn’t sound like he wanted the words to come out, so he forced them through his airways and they came out like a painful wheeze, “She’s gone.”
Everything inside me stilled. The world—my world—came to a complete and absolute stop. A piercing ringing in my ears drowned out everything else. My body moved without permission, staggering backward, and I crashed into the washing machine. The white paint bucket, holding a few clothes I’d washed earlier, toppled to the floor and fell on my left leg but I didn’t register it. I staggered out of the bathroom and into my room. I remember that. I remember reeling from the weight of the words so violently that I staggered from my room to the living room. Everywhere felt hot and cold at the same time. My pink tank top was clinging uncomfortably to my skin and I felt like the air was being choked out of my lungs. I wanted to hold something. I wanted to let go of everything.
I don’t remember ending the call. I only remember wishing to run away from my thoughts because thinking was painful— it meant processing the full weight of those two implacable words: “she’s gone”. Then I heard it. A sound so raw that it shook the very air around me. It was dripping agony in rivulets. It took me a moment to realise the screaming was coming from my throat.
Mummy Akintola, my middle-aged neighbour, ran into my apartment. Later, she would tell me what she saw: how she found me curled up on the floor in a foetal position, gasping for breath and gripping my chest as if I could hold my heart together with my hands. She would tell me how she called my name over and over, her voice trying to reach me, and how my eyes locked onto hers, without quite focusing.
How I kept repeating, “She’s gone. She’s gone. This can’t be. This can’t be.”
And then the mind, that cruel and pedantic machine, latched onto something else; something supposedly inconsequential in the face of monumental grief. But somehow, it managed to make itself the centre of everything.
Mummy Akintola said I kept repeating:
“She said she had something to tell me. She said she had something to tell me. She said she was going to tell me something.”
And maybe that is what haunts me the most, the fact that I’m frozen in eternal suspense. It’s why I can’t bring myself to delete our chat. Fabulous died and left behind a single message:
“Baybee, there’s something I want us to talk about. Very important. I’ll tell you when next I call you.”
But there will never be a next call.
And I will never know what she wanted to say.
Life is a long game of forgetting. You forget the pain of scraped knees, the faces of people you swore you’d never let go of, and the way you used to laugh before the world got to you. My little act of rebellion against forgetting is to write.
I started journaling when Fabulous died. I didn’t want to forget anything. I would not have been able to live with what was left of myself—for she took parts of me along with her— if I didn’t immortalise her memory. I didn’t struggle to remember anything. Maybe because I was experiencing a mind-bending clarity that understood the stakes. I was high as a kite, and grief was my drug. The first thing I wrote in my journal was, “No one laughs like Fabulous.” Because I couldn’t dare write about her in past tense. When you lose the person closest to you, the word “was” takes on a new, savage meaning.
Our friendship started with laughter. It was the kind that filled a room and made people turn their heads. We were both in 100 level, sitting in our first class of the semester, when she let out this loud, booming laugh at something the lecturer said—something so insignificant I can’t even remember what it was. But I do remember the silence that followed. The entire hall went still.
The lecturer squinted, scanning the room. “Which boy is that?” he asked. That was how scandalous her laughter was.
And then she raised her hand, traces of amusement still dancing on her lips. “It’s me, sir.” Her voice was light, and you could tell that she just needed a little encouragement and she’d burst into another round of boom box laughter.
“Ah, you’re even a girl. Did you swallow loudspeaker?” The lecturer asked in a heavy Yoruba accent that made the “loud speaker” sound like “lau-speekah”
The class chuckled, but you could tell she had made a ripple. Girls weren’t supposed to laugh like that. Not in public. Not with that kind of abandon.
After class, I got a good look at her as she walked out of the lecture hall. She wasn’t like anyone else I’d met that day. She was wearing a powder-blue button-down shirt with sleeves rolled up at the elbow, grey baggy jeans, and black kito sandals. Then there was her bag—a black net handbag where you could see everything inside: books, a bottle of water, biscuits, an afro comb and Robb. No effort to fit in whatsoever. She had packed her hair into a loose bun, strands flying across her face in the breeze. She looked like someone who had built her identity around what she loved, not what was expected of her.
At first, we were just class acquaintances—exchanging casual hi’s and hey’s when we crossed paths. But then one day, we ended up sitting together in front of a lecture hall, waiting for a lecturer who was taking his sweet time to show up. She noticed the novel I was reading on top of my lecture notes and raised an eyebrow.
“What’s the title?”
“The Great Gatsby.”
She smirked. “So you’re one of those people who sneak novels into class, abi?”
I shrugged. “It’s a tradition I carried over from secondary school. I don’t see why I should stop now. Books need to be read, even while taking a dump.”
She laughed her signature laughter. Loudspeakers really had nothing on her. It was at that very moment that I took a complete liking to her.
I soon came to learn that Fabulous was generous with her laughter. She didn’t require layers of wit or carefully calculated punchlines. It was impossible not to feel like the funniest person alive around her, so I found myself cracking more jokes, just to hear her laugh.
We got kicked out of a few classes because of it.
Soon, we started walking home together. She would cook the ugliest concoction rice—too spicy and questionably seasoned—but I enjoyed eating it, just so I could tease her to pieces. We would both balance on the floor, crossing our legs into a basic yoga pose, as we blew the rice, with sweat dripping from our faces. We would prop her tiny Samsung Chromebook in front of us and watch some low-budget movie while we harrumphed and pointed out all the mistakes and loopholes, like we were examiners and the movie crew were the candidates.
“Look at the jump. Too fake.”
“Sheyy. That guy should have just done a soft body toss. Nigerian movies and over sabi.” She’d chime in while simultaneously cleaning her nose and sniffing loudly from the pepper raging on her tongue.
I was there when she fell in love—or rather, when she developed the kind of crush that made her eyes shine. His name was Deji, an engineering student. He was tall, ridiculously fine, and apparently funny enough to keep up with her. She was giddy in a way that had me rolling my eyes in mock exasperation. We had both gone for night class to do some studying, but Deji ended up becoming the only thing Fabulous wanted to study. I remember when she introduced herself as Olamide and I let out a snort of laughter. The only thing Fabulous ever called herself was Fabulous. To be giving her government name to this guy meant only one thing: my girl was down bad.
But she never let romance rearrange our friendship. She found a way to keep the balance. Deji would eventually introduce me to Ralph, who also knew not to come between Fabulous and me. When things fell apart with Deji—as things sometimes do—I was there. She let me hold her and I rocked her like a child, rubbing her back and waiting for the storm of her tears to pass.
By 300 level, she moved out of the school hostel and became a plant mom. She was hellbent on acquainting me with all her plants.
“This one is Sweet Basil,” she’d say, touching the leaves softly. I got it from that horticulture guy in Yaba. That one is Garden Proton. I don’t know why she’s not doing well. I’ve trimmed her stems but she’s just a very stubborn girl.
Then she’d quiz me. “What’s the name of that plant?” pointing to the flowerpot closest to where I was standing.
“Fine wine, I just want to eat.”
She’d roll her eyes and tell me anyway, “It’s Blue Mistflower. I told you the last time you came around. How do you want these plants to feel when they know their second mummy does not even know their names?”
“Why should I care? Something tells me I’m not the owner of these children. We need to run a DNA test, stat.”
Our conversations were weird and refused to straighten into predictable portions. We talked about everything and anything, ranging from astrophysics to conspiracy theories. Fabulous was intellectually sound, and we both rubbed off on each other like henna on fingers.
In 400 level, she got into card-making and art. For my 21st birthday, she made me the biggest card I had ever seen: Aqua blue, with red glitter spelling out my name. She filled every inch of space with words: affirmations, Bible verses, jokes, and our crazy argots— all the things she knew I needed to hear.
By the time we both went for NYSC, Fabulous served in Enugu and she bombarded me with pictures from her drawing classes– an initiative she had come up with. She spoke excitedly about the children she was teaching, and it was clear that she was having the time of her life.
One day I called her to ask about how she was preparing for life after NYSC and how we needed to take our lives seriously.
She replied quietly “But Ife, I’m already taking my life seriously. These kids. I love them. I enjoy this teaching thing. My life couldn’t get any more serious. I rebuffed her and told her to snap out of it. “An Arts Teacher in this economy? Really??? Be for real nah. How much will they pay you? Wake up from this yamayama. You’re romanticising suffering and it’s a martyrdom complex.”
I knew the exact moment she shut down from the conversation. It ended up becoming our biggest row. We eventually resolved it, but at the time, I could not wrap my head around how she was able to immerse herself in the things that gave her the most sense of fulfilment without anchoring her decisions on money. It irked and baffled me in the same breath.
Four weeks after Fabulous passed, Demz and I decided to meet up. He and his mom had just returned from Osogbo, where they had spent the month observing the rites for her passing. The father’s family had insisted she must be buried in their family house, with only family members in attendance, and I resented them for it. They robbed me of the opportunity to say goodbye to my friend. My only comfort was I knew she’d have raised hell and highwater if she were there. “You coons! Ife is more family to me than you could ever know!”
I comforted myself with the thought.
We decided to meet at Tantalizers in Ikeja City Mall. When he saw me, he made our familiar greeting, raising his hands above his head to signify my tallness in an alternate reality, but there was a limpidity to his movement which made my eyes blur with tears that threatened to fall at any second. This hangout was the most painful thing we had ever had to do— we had both become, to each other, painful reminders of what we had lost.
I stood on my tiptoes to hug him and he bent to meet me. We compressed the fellowship of our suffering into that embrace. After a few shaky breaths and watery smiles, we went in and settled into a table at the far right of the restaurant, ordered our food and ate in silence, the weight of unspoken things settling between us. Then carefully, he began to tell me what happened. I didn’t want to hear it. But I needed to.
She had gone to the hospital the night before, complaining of a blinding headache and they admitted her immediately. She was diagnosed with Ruptured Brain Aneurysm— the type of thing that you refuse to associate with someone like Fabulous.
The doctors said some brain vessels in her brain had weakened, leading to a brain haemorrhage, and they were suspecting that she had inherited a genetic predisposition to weak blood vessels. Within 15 hours, everything unravelled; she started having seizures and was immediately referred to “a specialist hospital that could handle her case” and in less than an hour, they rushed her to Lagos State University Teaching Hospital. By the time she got there, she was gasping for air, and they had to fix her to an oxygen tank. Outside her ward, her mother was squaring it out with the doctor, trying to wiggle information out of him.
“The headache must have been terrible and she was silently gritting in pain. It’s like she didn’t want us to know how bad it hurt.” Demz said.
Then she asked for a song.
“Sing Steve Crown’s You Are Great for me,”
It was her favourite song of all time.
So he sang, holding her hands. As his voice filled the room, she slipped away.
Fabulous had gone the way she lived: wrapped in faith and carried on the wings of worship. I smiled but it was small, swallowed up quickly by a sadness so profound I could barely contain it.
I wanted to be there. I should have been there.
When I moved from Lagos to Shagamu, she had complained about the distance, playfully griping about how I was abandoning her. But I’d told her it would give us a reason to finally take lots of long-distance selfies together. I wish I had known. I would have run to her. I told Demz he should have called me, but he said nobody knew.
“Big Sis, everything happened so fast. it wasn’t supposed to be the end,” he whispered. And he was right.
Fabulous was larger than life. She never got sick except for the occasional headache. She was full of light and a truckload of laughter. For someone like that to just up and die without a heads-up and an opportunity to say goodbye?
We don’t stay the same after things like that.
No one ever does.
The first six months after Fabulous’ passing were the hardest months of my life. I would catch myself on her Instagram page, scrolling repeatedly through the coloured threads of her life that were now frozen in time. I began to see how each picture held a new lesson, something I had missed when she was here. It’s interesting how many details you overlook about people when you presumptuously believe you have the luxury of forever with them.
For instance, her captions. I had seen them before, liked them absentmindedly and moved on. But now, they demanded my attention.
• Service is the order of things.
• First of all, Love.
She believed so much in giving, in showing up for people and in loving loudly. It struck me with a pang that she had lived to the fullest. My mind soon began to revolve around these things too. I was experiencing the kind of awakening that sears itself into your bones. I rummaged through my purse and realised I had run out of time to waste. All I had left was a deep urge to apply myself to everything that made my heart breathe, to throw myself into the things that set my soul ablaze.
On the 5th of July, 2022, I opened a mini community class where I taught interested adults to read and write. I informed my hairdresser, who immediately expressed interest and spread the word. It wasn’t some grand initiative. Just a small, quiet thing. The first day, three people showed up— two mothers with their little ones in tow and one man. It was the most fulfilling thing I had done in months.
I wanted to apologise all over again for that argument we had back in NYSC. I badly wanted to tell Fabulous how much I understood her now.
Ifenimi Francis Davis is a premium ghostwriter with a healthy knack for braiding ideas into compelling narratives. When she’s not working, she’s nose-deep in a book, taking long walks, or drafting minutes from the council meetings happening in her head. Above all, she believes in the supremacy of sleep.
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