The Architecture Of Friendship.

The three of them had been friends since school. Nosa, Charles and Mira the kind of friends that did not need to explain themselves to each other , did not need to perform or impress or be anything than exactly who they were, fifteen years of that kind of friendship does something to people, It builds walls around them, Solid ones, the kind you stop noticing after a while because they have always just been there.

Nobody told them the walls could crumble.

It started the way most things start between people who have known each other long quietly and without any single dramatic moment to point to, Charles got a job offer in Lagos, Good money, opportunity, the kind of thing you do not turn down when you have been hustling in Benin for three years with nothing substantial to show for it, He took it without telling Nosa and Mira, Just called them after he had already accepted, packed already half gone in his mind.

Nosa found out he said nothing, at least not to Charles.

"He should have told us." he said to Mira one evening the two of them were sitting outside her gate the way they always did when something needed to be processed, The Benin heat was doing its thing, heavy and unbothered and the generator from the neighbors compound was providing background noise to a conversation that had no good ending.

"He told us." Mira said carefully.

"He told us after, That is not the same thing."

Mira was quiet for a moment, she knew Nosa was right, She also knew that Charles had his reasons and that those reasons were not as simple as Nosa was making them sound, Charles came from a home where decisions were second guessed by everyone around him, Where sharing plans before they were finalized invited interference and opinions and pressure that he had spent his adult life learning to shut out, Even with them, even with the two people who would never have done that to him.

"You know how he is." she said finally.

"I know how he is." Nosa agreed, 'That is why it hurts."

Charles came back to Benin three months later for a weekend, The reunion was the kind that looks fine on the surface but has something underneath it that nobody wants to talk about, They went to their spot, a small bukka off Sapele road where the owner knew their orders without being told and they sat and they talked and they laughed at the right moments, Something was different and all three of them felt it without saying so.

It was Mira who finally broke it open, because Mira always did, that was her role in the three of them, she had accepted it long ago.

"Are we going to pretend everything is fine, are we going to talk about the fact that something shifted between us and we are all just eating pepper soup and ignoring it."

Charles put his spoon down.

Nosa looked at the table.

The generator inside the bukka hummed.

"I didn't tell you because I was scared." Charles said after a moment, "Not of you. Of wanting it much and then it not working out, If I told you both and then it fell through I would have had to come here and face that, It was easier to do it and tell you after."

Nosa looked up.

"You think we would have made you feel bad if it didn't work?"

"No." Charles said quietly, "I think I would have made myself feel bad, I didn't want witnesses."

Something, in the air shifted, The kind of shift that happens when the real thing finally gets said loud after weeks of circling around it, Mira exhaled slowly, Nosa leaned back in his chair.

The walls had crumbled.. Sitting in the rubble of them with pepper soup going cold and the Benin evening settling around them the three of them remembered why they had built those walls in the first place.

Not to keep each other out.. To have somewhere safe to fall apart.

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