
As soon as the sun went down in Nnewi, I threw my red roses and white lilies into the swimming pool in our compound and watched yellow-plumed birds hovering over the turquoise water scatter into the sky of enameled blue. Shaking my head, I left the balcony for my darkened bedroom, where I liked to hide and read countless articles exploring poisoning, hanging, drug abuse, shooting, and asphyxiation.
I had always been planning to take my life in my bedroom while a great singer, like Kenny Rogers or Michael Bolton, crooned his blues. The walls of my bedroom were blue-painted, but the light from the street lampposts streaming in through the parting in the curtain had given them a purplish glow. Cautiously, I turned on the lights, orange and green and red, and my shadows on the walls disappeared. The rope, mouse-coloured and long, swayed in the wind from the ceiling fan where I tied it with shaking hands.
The buzz of the town had faded, the chirping birds asleep, or fallen into the mouth of a snake or some dangerous animal, but goats still bleated. To drown the disturbance, I put on 3 Doors Down’s hit tract, a song that triggered – no, heightened – this feeling.
I’m so far down, away from the sun
That shines to light the way for me. . .
Now, however, it soothed me, this song, and I put it on repeat. A bat flew across the rainbowed window and leaves began, slowly but consistently, to fan out and land on the mowed grass below this one-bedroom apartment on this three-story building. My hands trembled as I shut this window so I would not see the moon rise and illuminate my corpse. My hands trembled again, as I drew the curtain, silky and flowered, so that no eye, no moon, no sun, will see me decompose.
Slowly I sat on my reading table, my head in my hands, and thought: Dear Lord, I’m so far down, away from the sun that shines to light the way for me.
Now, dear reader, The Fastest Ways to Poison Yourself? Ever read this banned book? I did, indeed, because I was able to steal it from my late Uncle Ijeuwa’s shelf in Oba. This book says that dying is kind, and not painful, and yet I was scared. This book says that most people think killing themselves can be hard, but we, dear readers, “should tell yourselves it is easier with music because it is easier with music.”
Music: my best hobby, my best profession, as you have probably guessed. The piano was my instrument. The piano was my love’s instrument, too. And what a phrase to use for somebody else’s wife. Omalicha was her name. Omalicha was my name, is my name, and I know what you’re thinking now: you are thinking, Christ, that’s crazy. Yeah, boy, yeah: that’s crazy, but I don’t use the funny name. I used my second name, my male name, and that name was Nonyelum. The name of the woman who sold the rope, which I threw into the swimming pool at the first cockcrow the following day, was Nonyelum, or was it Nonyerem? Different dialects, but still meant the same thing: stay with me.
“What’s so special about our name?” she asked me two weeks ago, the day I paid her husband the hundredth visit. Her husband, he was not home. But no regret: his wife, my friend, was fun. I told her the name, Omalicha, made me forget that I was, as Elton John sang, a candle in the wind. I told her it made me forget I was a man. “And don’t ask me why,” I added, stood from the couch, and strolled to the glass window, which the evening sun had reddened with the fluttering bone-white curtain. “Your husband always says you cry at night and you don’t tell him why. Why?”
“The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind,” she said, quoting my Bob Dylan. She was at her piano, striking random keys: a bad habit of hers. A bad habit she liked to show when her husband was in the bedroom, or in his office at Teaching Hospital, Nnewi, or in a beer parlour, or in the church. The church is a place where she sang her best songs, a place where she played the guitar, a place where she counselled folks who were bereaved, folks who were combating depression, folks who wanted to take their lives. I met her in House on the Rock church, Nnewi. That was when I was a Christian; when the desire to kill myself was unbearable. She saved me with her kind words, her beautiful lyrics, her lovely smiles. This, my friend, happened not in weeks but in days. And in days, she taught me how to play the piano well, sing well, dance well, live well.
“We have been friends for five years, Nonyelum, but I swear I don’t understand you,” she said, and giggled. “What brought you here again? You sound so broken. You always sound so broken. Come, let’s sing a hymn.”
“I don’t think I believe in God. . .”
She struck her favourite chord, the F-sharp major, in mock irritation, to drown my words. “But God believes in you.
“I wish I could be happy like you, Omalicha.” I paused. The clouds, a countless drifting pillows the colour of tea filled with too much milk, had reminded me of angels and demons, of life, of death. “I want to kill myself while Bob Dylan sings his blues.”
“Don’t be melodramatic.”
She did not laugh this time, my Omalicha. She did not laugh because she knew I was serious. She knew I had attempted suicide thirteen times. The last time, I remember, was at my paternal grandma’s funeral in Oba. I didn’t climb the cashew tree at the backyard with a rope because Grandma, 94, was buried while we sang “It’s well with my soul. . . .” I didn’t climb it because I lost my teaching job a week before the burial. I didn’t climb it because Chinelo, my girlfriend, was pregnant by Obinna my colleague. I climbed it because. . . Sorry, I don’t know.
“Nonyelum?”
I turned, picked the guitar propped on the wall, and floated to her to surreptitiously sniff her apple-smelling hair cream, or perfume, or whatever. “When will he be back?”
“Who?” she asked.
“You know who I mean.”
“Dave is my husband, but I don’t know him well. You know Dave better than me. So tell me when he will be back for me. Or for you. Dave is. . . Never mind: the word is dirty, so dirty: I can’t pronounce it. But I can sing. Come: let’s drink this red wine and play some music.”
We laughed, though we both knew there was no joke. We laughed. We drank a red wine, we played the piano, we played the guitar, we wrote songs, we sang songs. We cried.
Outside, thunder boomed and the windows rattled. Power outage. Lightning, followed by another thunder, brightened our faces in the darkness. “Mine were tears of joy,” she said, laughing and drying her cheeks with her palms. The lightning was our touch, our moon. “And yours?”
“Of sorrow. Of frustration.”
“You lost your job…”
“I love you, Omalicha. I am so disrespectfully in love with you.”
Silence.
Silence again.
And then, in slow motion, she whirled away from me and said: “I didn’t expect this from you. I’m disappointed. Get out.”
“Look, I love you as a sister. No erotic thoughts. I’m not asking you for an affair if that’s what you think. Christ, I am not even worthy to untie your exquisite shoes. Or your husband’s. And I am dying. I am broken. Tomorrow, you may not see me. I may be a dead man. I will be a dead man. I love you. I want you to know it—know it! You have been so good to me, and I will cry in my grave if I didn’t let you know this!”
“Goodbye, Nonyelum.”
“But he says you kneel with a candle before the picture of Jesus Christ every night and cry. Only came to know why. Not to. . .”
She had begun to cry. “Goodbye!”
“I will be alright. Goodbye.” I groped to the door, pulled it open and stumbled into the freezing rain. If there were tears in my eyes, the rain washed them away, but I am not sure now there were tears in my eyes.
Upstairs in my apartment, I wrote these words on a sheet of paper:
Dear Dave:
Forgive me, but forget me. This note is not about what you probably suspect. This note is about. I don’t know. For five years, I had been fighting these suicidal thoughts. I sing well, I play well, but.
Dear Opeyemi:
Forgive me for this, but forget me. You’re my roommate and erstwhile colleague, so there will be compulsory questions for you to answer. Tell my mother (and my father, if he’s still alive) that I don’t want to be buried. Sink me into a river, and let the world forget me. I’m a failed man: I don’t want to be remembered.
Dear Omalicha:
May your days, and your life, always be beautiful like flowers. Like clean water running over limestone.
With trembling hands, I glued it to the wall whose turquoise beauty always made me think of calm seas. Next: I twisted my Sniper open and brought it to my quivering lips. Pour it in and fade away, I thought, but there was a knock at the door and Opeyemi stepped in. He had his fat Bible. He had his multicoloured umbrella. He had that wan smile of the pious. “The fellowship at the church today was wow,” he said in a delighted tone. “The Holy Ghost came down and…Nonyelum! What are you up to?!”
“Nothing, Yemi.”
Nothing: the word raised his eyebrows. He taught Mathematics at Spring of Light College, Nnewi, this Opeyemi guy. Me: English, Literature in English, Spoken English. Me: Guidance and Counselling. Me: Creative Writing. But I was fired. He was promoted. He was my provider, my protector, my adviser. So: I owed him the truth, nothing but the truth. But did I really know the truth?
“Don’t tell me you want to kill yourself because your friend’s wife overdosed herself this evening and died,” he said.
“Funny,” I said, but thought: God. Oh, God. I have to run. Run to her or run away from Nnewi? The poison slipped from my unsteady hand and onto the sky-blue carpet. “Let me buy a recharge card.”
And minutes later, the scene changed: I was outside and in the rain again, behind intensified thunder and brighter lightning, panting and running toward nothing.
The Author:

Ebelenna Tobenna Esomnofu is a Nigerian creative writing teacher, writer, editor and lover of artworks. He was longlisted for the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, longlisted for the 2019 SynCity Short Story Prize, and longlisted for the 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. In 2017, he was featured in BY THE BOOK in Kenya and in Daily News. His previous publishing credits include short fiction in The Sears’ Craft(print), The Scarlet Leaf Review, The Kalahari Review, StoryZetu, African Writer, Praxis Magazine, The Daylight(print), DNB Stories, Tuck Magazine, Afapinen, and elsewhere. His debut novel, MADNESS, has been completed.