It is the season of first rain. Campus air—damp lecture theatres. Muddy walkways swallow up sandals. My coursemate Tola’s patience is wearing thin, like the battery of our shared power bank.
I am settling into the rhythm of my second year in the Department of Microbiology. It is in this season that I meet Amaka.
She is nineteen, and she isn’t. She isn’t whispering answers during Genetics 202. She isn’t waiting for bread and akara at the vendor’s shed. She isn’t braiding her hair on the bench under the neem trees. She isn’t laughing loudly with classmates in the faculty lounge. She is only nineteen, according to the mathematics of Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) and registration numbers.
You may think this is a story about ambition, but it isn’t. It isn’t a story about heartbreak either. This is not a tale of campus rivalry. I noticed Amaka’s solitude, but this is not about loneliness. This is about everything but that.
This is about Amaka’s umbrella, patched and proud, braving the morning drizzle as she heads to the laboratory. This is about me, watching her sketch cell structures in her notebook with careful, patient strokes, her focus unbroken even as rain drums on the windowpanes. This is about her brother’s voice on the phone, distant and hopeful, reminding her never to miss practicals, to keep dreaming.
This is about me promising to introduce myself—next week, when the ground is dry, when I have managed to borrow lab goggles from Tola. This is about Amaka sitting on the steps beside the ICT centre, eyes on her tablet, lips moving to lyrics only she knows, as if the world is just background static and she is composing her own song.
This is about Amaka seeing past me, into a world where she is not just another face in the crowd, but a scientist at a conference, her voice confident, and her words clear as lightning. In that world, she does not know me. Maybe there, I will be the one scribbling notes, wishing I had her certainty. And afterwards, I will write about her—copy her words into my phone and carry her brilliance like a secret charm.
But Amaka glances up, the briefest nod, pulling me back to this rain-soaked faculty, this semester, this year. Where umbrellas close and open, and the world keeps moving. All of us carry Amaka in our stories, unsure how to let her know.
*****
Image: Rodrigo Souza Unsplash modified