Yasir’s essay riffs on grief but not the grief of death – of living. A graphic designer, writer, and founder, his essay is about loss and pain and resilience, all forged in the smithy of something we know too well in Africa – black tax. -Editor
Nobody tells you that grief does not always arrive with a death or a coffin.
Sometimes it arrives with a phone call. A doctor’s voice. A word you have heard before but never in relation to someone whose hands you know, whose face you have studied your whole life. You hang up, and the first thing you do is calculate, not how to feel, but what to do because you are the firstborn; because that is what firstborns do.
I put all my money together. It was not enough. So, I took a loan.
That was around March last year. Since then, I have learned things about grief that nobody writes about, not the clean, literary kind, but the administrative kind. The grief that comes with a repayment schedule. The grief that arrives every morning as a phone call from a number you already know, a voice that does not ask how you are doing, that sometimes carries curses in it as if it has the right. The grief of owing money you borrowed to do the right thing, and being reminded of it daily by someone who does not know or care what you borrowed it for.
The loan is from an app. Monthly repayments are automatic and scheduled on a system that does not know or care what kind of month you are having. I have been paying. I am still paying. But things have gotten tighter than ever, and the margin between paying and managing keeps shrinking.
The calls come from different numbers, different reps, a rotation of voices that do not know each other but carry the same pressure, sometimes curses folded into the texts as if it is their right. Messages designed to make you feel small, irresponsible, like you chose this.
I did not choose this. I chose my father. And I would choose him again. But the choosing does not make the repayment lighter.
I am a student, a designer, a freelancer, a founder all at once, in Lagos. My sister’s school fees are due next month. My own salary is already exhausted before it is paid, spoken for by the loan, by the fees, by the accumulation of things that needed handling before I had the money to handle them. This is not a metaphor. This is a literal accounting of how I move through every month: calculating what can wait, what cannot, and what I will have to perform confidence about in the meantime.
People who know me have told me they believe in me, good people, people who mean it, some who have asked me to join their teams and build alongside them. I am grateful. I am also quietly aware that they are seeing a version of me assembled from the outside. They see the output. They do not see the texts. They do not hear the phone ringing.
They do not know about the arithmetic cobwebbing around my head.
There is a specific kind of grief in carrying a thing alone that was never meant to be carried alone. In being the one who is supposed to hold it together, for a father, for a sister, for a family that is counting on you in ways they do not always say aloud but that you feel in every conversation, every visit, every look.
I cry sometimes. Not in the wailing way. Not in the way that gets witnessed and comforted. In the quiet way, the kind where the tears arrive without warning and you clean your eyes immediately, before anyone around you can notice, before anyone can ask what is wrong. Because explaining what is wrong would take too long. Because you are not sure you have the energy to hold someone else’s concern on top of everything else you are already holding.
So, you dry your tears. You keep your face still. You keep your cool not because you are not breaking, but because breaking in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in front of the wrong people, costs something you cannot afford right now, maybe more than the loan that weighs you down.
I am looking forward to the day I finally break. I mean that seriously, not sadly. I am looking forward to it the way you look forward to rest after a long journey, not because the journey was wrong, but because the body deserves to put the weight down eventually. I hope it comes in a moment of success, not failure. I hope it comes when I can look back at all of this, the loan, the calls, the salary already gone, the tears I cleaned before anyone saw, and finally let them mean something other than pressure.
There is a quote I return to, from a fictional soldier who carried more than anyone around him knew: those who cry are not weak. They have just been strong for too long.
I believe that. I am living inside it.
The grief of living is not the grief of losing. It is the grief of trying, of being in the middle of something hard with no clear end date, no guarantee, no moment where someone officially tells you it is okay to feel how you feel. It is the grief of a salary already spent. Of a father’s diagnosis that rearranged everything and the relief that he is fine now, which somehow does not cancel the weight of what it took to get there. Of a loan you took in love that is still being paid, month by month, rep by rep, text by text, tear-drop by tear-drop.
But I am still here. Still paying what I can, when I can. Still building, still writing, still showing up to every version of myself that needs showing up to.
The grief is real. So is the choice to keep it tethered inside and keep going.
On most days, that is enough.
Yasir is a Lagos-based graphic designer, writer, and founder. He writes personal essays and spoken word poetry. This is among his first submissions to a literary publication.