There is a certain loneliness that comes with losing friends during adulthood. Sometimes you just outgrow them and other times your values change with time and you people have to tear apart. This was exactly how I lost Kevwe.
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I used to think I would marry him when I was growing up. He was tall, dark, and handsome, I cannot forget how he had just one punctuation-like hollow in the fullness of his cheek that became obvious only when he grinned.
It was rare to see someone on the estate who was rich and wild. All the rich children seemed to have been taught to be well-behaved towards adults and snobbish towards other children. Being that we were not rich rich, we lived at the far end of the estate and had to drive all the way out when we wanted to leave.
Kevwe used to run after our car, a fan-produced with paper and broom in his hand, the wind slapping across his face. Whenever my father spotted him in the rearview mirror, he would slow down so that the boy could catch up with us and just when Kevwe thought he was getting close, my dad would speed off again.
I lived in that estate for a long time, only seeing Kevwe standing on the street to get groceries as we got older, or seeing him playing football with the kids on the streets. He was an amazing sight to watch and I couldn't just wait for the first day we would talk. That day came a week before we moved out of the estate.
I was sent to get some tins of sardines by my mom, Titus in particular, and on that fateful day I searched for that particular brand throughout the entire supermarkets in the estate but for some reason, they just didn't have it. I was already on my way back home when someone's shadow caused me to turn around.
That was another thing about Kevwe, as tall as he was, he was light on his feet.
“Hey, you've been walking around for a while now. Having some trouble?”.
I naturally thought that my tongue would stick to my upper palate and I would probably have butterflies in my tummy but instead, my tongue was more loose than I could remember and the only thing in my stomach was hunger.
“Yes, I'm looking for Titus sardines. They don't seem to have them in the estate”
“Then why don't we go out of the estate?”
“Excuse me?”
“I've also been looking for the sardines to buy but I didn't want to walk alone all the way”
There was no harm in trying and my mom really needed those sardines so I placed a call across with my small Nokia torchlight and told her they didn't have that brand in the estate but that I was being directed out to where I could get it.
By the time Kevwe and I arrived back at the estate, I saw the house he branched into and nearly screamed. He was the son of the man nicknamed “The mayor of Lagos” because of all his wealth, I almost couldn't believe it.
Kevwe and I already exchanged phone numbers so that very evening, we began to chat on Facebook, using opera mini. It was the most exciting time of my life. I cannot forget the day I told Kevwe I was leaving, he expressed how bad he felt and promised to keep in touch.
I have never seen anyone keep a promise with such doggedness.
There were times I forgot to call, or text back but Kevwe never forgot. He never failed to call me every single day, or text, whether I was responding or not.
When I walked into my first relationship, Kevwe didn't back down. He never told me he had a crush on me, or that he liked, or anything of the sort, but everybody said it. My mom, my siblings, even my ex boyfriend.
I didn't pay any attention to them, Kevwe was my best male friend and I flaunted it in everyone's face. It took the death of his father for me to turn away from Kevwe.
His father died when he just finished his secondary education and just like we saw in the movies, his uncle came over and asked his mother to marry him. I thought he was joking until he started crying over the phone.
Three weeks after that, they were thrown out of his father's house, his father's will was just a draft and wasn't even valid at the time.
I was Kevwe’s support throughout that period, I even went to see him when I traveled back to Lagos, he was still very handsome, but a shadow of his usual self. It was that day he told me,
“Look Treasure, I'm going to be a Yahoo boy”
I laughed at first, but then he was dead serious. To me, he wasn't even suffering. His mother owned a tricycle warehouse so she was earning well, he just wasn't living the kind of life he wanted ordinarily.
I did everything I could to try to dissuade this young man from going into fraud but he had already paid a cultist to show him how it was being done. The fact that he was friends with a cultist alone made my skin crawl.
There was nothing I didn't say to Kevwe, trying to talk him out of it. Eventually, he said I couldn't be friends with him again, that it was too dangerous.
I almost couldn't believe my ears.
To date, I still see Kevwe's posts on Facebook and I marvel at how a promising, young man like that just wasted his life, the life a million others would have killed to get, simply because he wanted to get back at his uncle.
I miss Kevwe, I can never forget him, but I have lost him.