My mom died when I was four years old. I don’t remember her face, her voice or her name. Just when I was growing up to learn the language of my father and what it takes to be a man, my dad also died. I was ten years old. I saw him. I remember how much he loved me. I still see his face. I remember how his voice sounded like. He’s a name I will never forget because I have his name.

I lived with an aunt who had five kids of her own. Nothing was enough in that house; what to eat, what to wear and where to sleep. I didn’t have a shirt of my own. As a matter of fact, none of us did. We wore what was available. I remember fighting with my cousin because he had worn my favourite shirt for far too long. “Why don’t you take it off so I get to wear some?” I asked.

He called me greedy. My aunt agreed with him and that day purged the spirit of greediness from me through advice. “If we are all content with what we have, even though there’s little, it’s always going to be enough for us,” she told me.

We grew up by the sea. It was always cold at night but we didn’t have clothes that covered our feet up to our shoulders. We were three people in a half-piece cloth, fighting for a larger share of the cloth because at dawn the breeze was unforgiving. I grew up believing there’s not enough for everyone, so we have to share the little we have.

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My wife. She grew up in a different environment. The love she experienced was different from mine. While I lived on little, she lived as if there was enough. I questioned how much meat she put on her food: “You have too much soup on your fufu, why?” I would ask. “You bathe too much water, what if tomorrow the tap doesn’t flow again?”

She was shocked about my questions but one thing she never did was call me stingy or close-fist man. One night she asked about my childhood. She asked why I called too little too much. I told her the story of how I grew up. The shirt I never had. The unforgiving breeze at night. The fact that three people had to share a toothbrush. She said, “I get it but it looks like you forget who you are now. You’re no longer lacking. You’re a manager. Do you even look at your pay slip and see how far you’ve come?”

I try but it’s not easy to forget where you came from. I don’t know how to eat the last bar of chocolate in the fridge. I have to break it into two and leave half for my wife. She will see it and laugh.

Our marriage is only four months old. She’s the only woman who has loved me truly and patiently. She’s my classmate so it’s safe to say she was there from the beginning. Last dawn I was feeling cold. It had rained and the fan was so high. The cold night reminded me of the unforgiving breeze of Ekumpoano in the central region where I grew up. I tucked my hand in between my thighs and coiled into a foetal position. I was almost shivering until my wife pulled the cloth from my feet until it covered me up to my shoulder. She hugged me from behind and stayed there until the morning came.

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She had always told me there was enough but I couldn’t relate until last night. She didn’t say anything but what she did told me that in this house, there’s enough love and this love is a blanket big enough to cover my feet up to my shoulder. I’m not the lovey-dovey type but I kissed her forehead in the morning and said, “Thank you for being enough.”

—Abeka

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