ARDENT

I see him at Sunday service.

This is the sanctuary I walk into now not because of him but because of what I found here.

God.

The encounter that arrived slowly and then completely and that has been the ground underneath everything since.

He is already seated when I arrive.

Third row from the front, right side. His usual seat. The one he has been in since before I started coming, the one I know now the way I know all his specific habit.

He does not see me come in.

Or if he does he does not show it.

I take a seat on the left side. Fifth row. Far enough that the distance is not obvious. Close enough that I can see the back of his head for the entire service. His coily hair. His set of shoulders. The way he is still in worship with the stillness that is not absence but presence turned entirely inward.

The worship begins.

I sing.

My voice does the thing it does in this place. Finds the frequency of something larger than itself and rests in it. I have always been able to sing even when everything else is failing. The voice does not know how to perform worship. It just worships.

Halfway through the second song I look across the sanctuary.

He is looking at me.

He doesn't look hurt, I guess. It's his usual look with me, right? Or am I the one thinking that way? Looks like….

The Romeo look. The one that I have been missing for days in the way you miss something that has become as ordinary and essential as breathing.

I look away first.

I look at the front.

I put everything I have into the rest of the service because if I stop putting everything I have into the service I am going to have to sit with the five feet of sanctuary between us and what it is costing both of us.

After the service I speak to Ngozi, who coordinates the children’s ministry and who I have been talking to about the Imani curriculum. I speak to Bayo about the upcoming fellowship event. I make myself useful in the courtyard for fifteen minutes because being useful has always been the thing that keeps my internal world from becoming too loud.

When I finally look up he is gone.

I stand there.

The congregation filing out around me.

Inside: you should have gone to him.

Inside: I know.

Inside: why didn’t you?

Inside: I don’t know.

I go home.

I sit on the rooftop.

The PCOS sits with me the way it has been sitting with me for six weeks now — present, quiet, the specific weight of something you cannot put down because you have not told anyone you are carrying it.

I look at the city.

I think about the room in the Maitama house.

The possibility built in.

His words. His design. His decision — made before the diagnosis, before the fear, in the specific hope of a man who was already imagining the children we might have.

Inside: he does not know.

Inside: I know he does not know.

Inside: and you are sitting here letting him not know. When will you tell him?

I pick up my phone.

I look at his chat.

His last message. Friday.

“I need a few days, Sewa. To think. I am not going anywhere. I just need to think.”

I am not going anywhere.

He said that.

But will he really stay? If he finds out I can't have a child?

Do I need to tell him?

What's going to happen if I do?

He's going to love me less or stop loving me at all.

Who wants a woman who can't have children?

I put the phone face down.

I look at the city.

She is on the left side.

Fifth row.

I see her the moment she comes in because I always see her the moment she comes in — this has been true since the first service she attended, when she sat in the back and I was at the front and I felt the shift in the room’s energy before I located its source.

She does not look at me.

I look at her.

She is singing with the full voice. The one that does not perform worship, just worships, the one I have been listening to for a year and which always reaches something in me that the theology alone cannot reach. She has her eyes closed. Her hands are at her sides. She is entirely present in the worship and entirely absent from the room and from me and from the five days of silence between us.

I look at the front.

I try to worship.

I do worship — genuinely, the encounter with God that this place has always held for me, that does not require the absence of personal pain to be real. God meets me in the pain. He always has. Tonight the pain is quiet and persistent and shaped like the woman five rows behind me.

Halfway through the second song I look back.

She is looking at me.

The open look.

She looks away first.

I look at the front.

After the service I stay in my row for longer than necessary. I speak to PKay about the fellowship board meeting. I receive greetings from people I know. I am present. I am functioning. I am entirely Romeo from the outside and inside I am sitting with the ache of a man who has been thinking for three days and has arrived at several conclusions that he has not yet had the opportunity to deliver.

The first conclusion: I was wrong about the delivery.

Not the concern. My concern is real and I have resolved it through Dotun without touching her timeline, which is the solution that required creativity rather than capitulation. But the delivery. The co-founder hat in the wrong room. The red pen where a partner was needed.

The second conclusion: something is wrong with Sewa that is not about the curriculum.

I have known this since the site visit when she said it is fine in the voice that means it is not fine. I have known it since the Augustine shelf — which was a small thing, a genuinely small thing, and she went to move the book with more energy than the book required. I have known it since the Friday she did not respond to the voice note I sent about the Imani site meeting and I had to follow up with a text.

Something is sitting in her chest.

She has not told me what it is.

And knowing her, she will not tell me yet.

I know Sewa well enough to know that she tells the true thing when she is ready and not before and that pressure does not accelerate the readiness, it delays it. So I have been giving her the space. The thinking time. The room to arrive at the telling in her own way.

But three days is becoming almost a week days is becoming a distance that has a different quality from the thinking space I asked for.

When I look up from my conversation with Pastor Kayode she is gone.

I stand there.

The congregation filing out.

I go to the car.

I sit in it for the requisite moment. The Olusiji system, the space between what just happened and what happens next.

I think about the service.

The left side. Fifth row.

The look she gave me and then looked away from.

Inside: she is running.

Not the dramatic running. The internal version. The one I have been watching approach for weeks like weather gathering on the horizon. She is present in every room and retreating from every room simultaneously and I do not know what she is running from but I know it is not me — or not only me — because the quality of the retreat is bigger than a curriculum fight.

Something is wrong.

And she has not told me.

I have been giving her the space to tell me and the space is becoming a chasm.

I start the car.

I drive home.

“God, please, help me. Guide me.”

GET A BOOK BY SEIDE AGOSU

Juliet calls at 4:47 a.m.

Before my morning walk. Before the verse — which I have not sent for six days and which I am aware of every morning when I wake and pick up my phone and put it down again because I am not ready to reach across the silence yet.

Because every morning I wake up and I think: today I will send it.

And every morning the wounded place in my chest says: not yet.

I listen to it. I hate that I am listening to it. I send it to God instead and ask Him to hold it for me until I am ready.

“Romeo”, Juliet says.

“Julie.”

“I had a dream about you last night”, she says.

I sit up.

Juliet’s dreams are not casual. This is established. She has the prophetic gift — confirmed, consecrated, the thing the word over her has been building toward since before she was born. When she calls me about a dream I listen.

“Tell me”, I say.

“You were standing in the Maitama house”, she says. “In a bedroom facing the window. The window was open and there was wind coming in and you were holding it shut from the inside. Not to keep the wind out. To keep something in.”

A pause.

“I was outside the window. And I said: Romeo, open it. And you said: I cannot. Not yet. And I said: you are not protecting the room. You are suffocating it.”

The bedroom.

The east-facing window.

“Juliet”, I say.

“I know”, she says. “I know it is about Sewa.”

I am quiet.

“Talk to me”, she says.

I do.

I tell her everything. The curriculum meeting. The delivery. The co-founder hat in the wrong room. The days of thinking. The Sunday service where she sat on the left side and I sat on the right and neither of us moved. The something-wrong that I can feel but cannot name because she has not named it.

Juliet listens.

She does not interrupt.

This is new. The Juliet of three years ago interrupted constantly. This Juliet has been practising the listening the way Ọrọ has been practising it, the way all the people in this story have been practising the things they were not born knowing. Marriage does that. Faith does that.

When I finish she is quiet for a moment.

Then she says,

“Romeo.”

“Yes.”

“Your ego is bruised”, she says.

I open my mouth.

“Don’t”, she says.

“Do not tell me it is not. I have known you all your life. I was in the womb with you, remember?. I know when your ego is bruised because you go quiet in a way that you have been going since we were seven and someone at school said your drawing was terrible. Romeo, you did not speak for a day.”

I am quiet.

“Your ego bruise is real”, she says. “You gave your best thinking and it was received as interference. That is painful. You are allowed to feel that.”

A pause.

“But Romeo — you have been holding the window shut for dayssssss.”

“I asked for thinking time”, I say.

“And how much thinking does a man who processes at your speed actually need?” she says.

“Six days, Romeo. You are not thinking anymore. You are protecting something.”

“What am I protecting?”

“The part of you that was bruised”, she says. Simply.

“The part that said: I gave her my best and she rejected it. And instead of sitting with that and taking it to God and coming back, you have been — sitting across from it.”

I look at the wall of the apartment.

The reading chair that is no longer here because it is in our study now.

“And Sewa”, Juliet says.

“Whatever she is carrying — and she is carrying something, Romeo, I could hear it when she called me last week. She sounded burdened even though she kept saying she's fine. She is carrying it alone because the person she would tell is holding her out.”

I close my eyes.

“Send her the verse”, Juliet says.

“Today. This morning. Not because everything is resolved. Because it is the truth. Because you do love her. Because the verse was never about the fight and it should not have become about the fight.”

I am quiet.

“And then go to her”, she says.

“Don't go to have the curriculum conversation.Go. Go to what she is actually carrying. Because it is something bigger than a curriculum.”

“She is not ready to tell me”, I say.

“Romeoo. Don't be slowwwwww. She will not be ready until you show up”, Juliet says.

“That is how she works. You know how she works.”

I look at the wall.

The wall where the reading chair used to be.

“Yes”, I say.

“Romeo”, she says.

“She needs you. Not the co-founder. Not the reviewer. You.”

“I know”, I say.

“Then go”, she says.

A pause.

“After you send the verse”, she says.

Give a gift subscription

I open the Bible.

Not to find a verse. I know the verse. It has been in my chest for six days, the one I have been sending to God on her behalf every morning when I woke and put the phone down. The one that was always going to be the first one I sent when I was ready.

Zephaniah 3:17. The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.

I type it.

I look at it for a moment.

Then I add two lines beneath the verse.

“Good morning, Tesoro. I am sorry for the silence. It was never about you.”

“I love you, Tesoro. I am here.”

I send it.

I put the phone down.

I pick up my keys.

Start Survey

I am sitting at the dining table when it arrives.

Not eating. I have not been eating properly for six days, the PCOS management requiring food at regular intervals and my appetite not cooperating with the requirement. There is toast on the plate that I have been looking at for twenty minutes.

The phone buzzes.

I look at it.

Romeo.

My chest does the complicated thing.

I open it.

Zephaniah 3:17. The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.

“Good morning, Tesoro. I am sorry for the silence. It was never about you.”

“I love you, Tesoro. I am here. Please,talk to me, Evie.”

I read it.

I read it again.

He will rejoice over you with singing.

Romeo sent this.

Romeo, who has been quiet for three days, chose this one.

The tears arrive before I have given them permission.

Not the managed tears. The real ones. The ones that have been accumulating for four weeks. The PMOS diagnosis, the fertility fear, the engagement doubt, the curriculum fight, the three days of no verse, the Sunday service where we sat on opposite sides of the sanctuary and neither of us moved.

All of it.

Coming up.

I sit at the dining table and I cry properly for the first time in six weeks.

Not for long.

But properly.

When I stop I look at the toast.

I eat it.

All of it.

Then I look at the phone.

I do not respond to the verse yet.

Not because I do not want to. Because I am going to Dr. Yetunde in an hour and I want to carry the verse into the session. I want to sit with it in the room with the plants that are all still alive and the woman who has been asking the right questions for six months. I missed my session last week Monday because I wasn't in the right mental frame to speak to anyone.

I pick up my bag.

I go.