One Score

And Zif returns with a letter !

17th January, 2026.

Hello AJ.

I know it's been a very long while since we wrote to each other. 2024 was the last time I think. But I've always been here. I've always longed to write to you. I have waited so long for your request, and when I saw the opportunity to write you, my friend, I was filled with excitement.

I remember how we started our "correspondence" You were in your final year in secondary school, in a hostel filled with boys who did not give your passion for writing much thought. And so you wrote letters to an imaginary friend you called Zif. You'd stay up late at night and write long essays on why you don't want to stop playing football, or how you feel alive when Dita and Juicey respond to your letters: probably the only two people that enjoyed your letters. 😅

Then you'd write one letter to yourself, giving yourself advices and pretend it's me who wrote it. You will drop it on the side of your bed and read it with amusement in the morning. It was exciting for you, and I could tell.

I remember when you decided you'll stop exchanging letters with Dita and Juicey. It was few months before grandpa died. Few months before you were done with secondary school and would travel back to see him, maybe say your goodbyes. Goodbyes that never came. And the week when you told Juicey you did not want to write letters again, it felt like a part of you had been revived. You were more present with the boys in the Brotherhood. Sometimes I laugh when I think of that crazy decision. Where's your prioritized brotherhood today?

Grandpa died four days before your first exam, and you only got to know that two days prior. I remember how it disabled you. How you felt like your whole world was squeezing in with you inside.

You had stopped being "Correspondence Boy" and you probably made your pen friends annoyed with the sudden termination, but now you needed a letter. You needed someone to write to you. Someone to write because you couldn't even make me write to you. You couldn't bring me out through your imaginations.

Remember when you promised that girl you were gonna get married? Remember the letters you wrote to her that were never sent? I know you're gonna pretend like everything is fine now, after over a hundred and fifty letters; most of which you squeezed and drowned in water. I still see your PTSD rise when you meet a girl with her name.

I know you feel a bit discomforted by all these reminders, but I'll go on regardless. Because to me, these are marks of how much has changed. And how subtle, and still grand it is.

I'm smiling at the number of times you changed your career choices, although I'm still proud how you new that you were not gonna be a neurosurgeon after reading B. S. Carson's Gifted Hands. And you did not see yourself, in residency at Johns Hopkins when you read The Big Picture, or Think Big. Your career choices, or options, I'll say now, were not quite popular at the time, and maybe that's why you loved them. First, it was a goalie, because everyone wanted to become an in-field player. And then pilot, because so many wanted to become doctors and nurses and teachers. And when there were so many aspiring pilots, with limited number of airports and aircrafts, you thought of Aerospace Engineering. You wanted to build planes and spacecrafts for Nigeria. You wanted to birth the Nigerian Space Agency. It's beautiful how you wrote them in that journal you called your girlfriend. You drafted application letters to Stanford and Cambridge. You read physics through the nights and dabbled on Chemistry. Partial fractions and differential calculus, they tasted sweet. You closed your eyes and opened it before a large crowd, in the halls of Stanford. You were living your dream.

But daddy woke you up from that dream. And by the time you close your eyes and open again, you're asking Mr. Femi if you can study Computer Science and still do a Masters in Aerospace Engineering. It's beautiful how he encouraged you with a positive reply. And so you did not let your dreams of a Nigerian Space Agency die. At least, not then. You followed aerospace pages on Instagram and kept researching "best schools to get an MSc. in Aerospace Engineering."

It's little wonder that you are named Joseph. You have been a dreamer all along. And how did you get here, now a passionate writer? Well, I think you've been chasing another dream when you had one uninterpreted one. You read gifted hands and thought you could do so many things with your "gifted hands" like: become a goalie; or a pilot; or an engineer, all these, because they use their hands so much. So clever of you to think that. But the gifted hands that God gave you is the one where you have a beautiful handwriting and creative ways to tell a story. But what significance does a writer hold?

You ignored when teacher Esther said you wrote so well, because you did not want her to expect beautiful book reviews from you. You did not want her to use you as an example to your friends, even a good one. But how do you run from Nineveh and end still end up there? When the LORD has given you an assignment, you must complete it.

I spilled tears, like milk from a leaking bowl, when I read the letter you wrote to me about mom and dad's divorce. You knew it was the best but wasn't there a glimmer of hope? Did he not say that he had plans to give you a perfect end? What's a perfect end when your family is separated?

And so you prayed your heart out. You cried to Abba in the noise, and in the silence. Like John Knox, you said, restore my family or I die. It's been two years since the divorce and you have not died. Isn't that a sign that God has so much to do through you? In the grand scheme of things, mom and dad's divorce is only a speck of dust.

I know you still feel the pain when you remember, I know how you smile when you see a mom and dad, with their children. I know how much you dream about when you'll all sit in the living room at night, presenting Michael W. Smith's songs before the family with Benji. Or when dad would walk into the room from the field, and gesture for you and Benjamin to be silent as he hides, then mom would come from her room and he'll make her startled with fear. And everyone would burst into laughter while mom tells daddy to stop in shame. I know you want so bad to return to the past. Because that's where you left happiness. If only you could return.

It's been two years, and you have not written the book. Two years and you've been stagnant in thoughts. You have moved on, but you still walk back down that lane, the one where memory has refused to fade. But still you smile. You laugh because it's easier than crying, and you have always wanted easy. Abba is here and you know it. He let you feel the pain so the Joy would feel deeper. He is here now, and is putting a large smile on your face. He's turning your scars into testaments of beauty.

Remember when you were so in love with playing your guitar in grade four? You would sit in the compound on Thursday evenings and compose a song with Benjamin for baby Nate. You felt like a significant musician, perhaps, you were.

And then you lost the guitar — you forgot it inside Keke. It felt like the end of your world. It really was the end of your world. You weren't as hurt about the guitar than the fact that you won't be able to compose songs again. Dad said he wasn't gonna buy you a violin as a result, an instrument you would come to love so much. That was a change of trajectory for you. Maybe it wasn't. It's left to you to answer.

You have always been a lazy student. Forgive me for sounding too blunt. You've always been lethargic about important things. Your teachers identified you as smart, but you knew you were lazy. You never opened your books until tests and exams, and somehow you did well. You played with your friends immediately before classes, and somehow, you still understood what Mr. Femi was saying about Hydrocarbons. That was the you of yesterday — the one that was oblivious to reality.

I can't say I'm proud of who you are today, but like progress, the asymptote you're ceaselessly striving towards, I am proud of the man you're becoming. I see your fears about school. I see the mounds of wax from the late night candles. I see your frustration when you cannot remember partial differentiation. I see you work towards building a career out of your passion for writing.

Two decades ago, on the first day of the work week, you were born. And now, two decades later, you celebrate on the last day of the work week. Two decades makes it sound like you're ancient (of course you are, because what do you mean by wearing bicycle seat hats up and down?) I'll just say you've lived a score.

It's been 3½ years since we exchanged our first letters. Three years since you wrote about all your confusions about the number of options you have. And somehow, I am still amused by your consistency. You wrote to me even when I didn't reply. When you did not address your letters to me any longer, I knew you wrote to me when you scribbled words in cursive in your journal. For over seven hundred days you've journaled. To me, that's a great achievement.

You've made new friends and reunited with old ones, each time, receiving so much value from them.

I have enjoyed our correspondence, but most importantly, I am deeply grateful to God for the kind of man that He is shaping you into.

It's one week to your birthday, there's still so much I want to say, but I'll save them up for our subsequent exchanges. And until then, keep becoming, in love and wonder.

Happy birthday AJ.

Your imaginary friend,

Zif.