1 Prologue

It's 3:35 AM on a cold July morning in Lagos, and I'm awake, feeling lonely and crying - instead of say, sleeping or going on YouTube to use my night YouTube plan or something more relaxing. It's basically everything. From the sound of generators all around me, to the soft love songs that seem to be coming from Mustapha's side of the house, but I can't be so sure.

I sit up in bed, wearing the green t-shirt that I wear every other day and a pair of yellow panties, feeling stained and disgusted with myself and the charade that I call my life. I rub my bleary, tear-puffed eyes, and scratch my afro kinky hair, which is carefully covered in my satin bonnet. My life had not always been a bed of thorn-picked roses, but it also had never been this blur of hunger, anger, tears and emptiness.

Maybe I'd always been hungry, but I'd thought that food would make the magic happen for me. Well... No. Some days I fill my belly and still, I wind up with this terribly empty feeling. A bloated belly, but not a bloated heart. It wasn't always like this. But maybe I need to look forward, and leave my bloody past alone. Maybe I'd be happier then. Maybe I'd not have pain and longing and anguish reach out their clawed hands to scratch my butt and wake me up from my troubled dreams, and into deeper despair. Happiness is supposed to be a journey and not a destination, but my journey seems to have ended before it even began...