She sounded too dramatic, but better that than the Nigerian president, she with her ill-fitting wigs and gaudy jewelry, who always read haltingly from speeches in a flat monotone as though she were seeing the sentences for the first time on camera. In the background on the TV screen were groups of men, Black and white and Asian and Hispanic, in suits, in hoodies, in T-shirts, holding placards. Respect the bodily autonomy of men. Government hands off my seed. Our Body Our Choice. Obinna didn’t understand why Americans always made a fuss over things that should be left unsaid. Male masturbation was technically illegal in Nigeria, too, but men did it all the time. Men had needs after all, he had done it many times himself, but everyone kept it quiet. The American who had challenged the law claimed he wanted to live in his truth and stop hiding the fact that he masturbated; it was his body, and he should be able to do whatever he wanted with it. Live in his truth sounded silly to Obinna, and why did Americans always have to make everything public? Still, he wanted to have a more sophisticated opinion about the decision, something that would impress Eze. He wondered if Eze still tinkered with old engines, old clocks, anything that had once worked and no longer did. Remembering how much Eze loved machines, and especially how he loved fixing and bringing them back to life, brought Obinna a poignant feeling of nostalgia, for a life that used to be.

They had kept in touch only haphazardly in the eleven years Eze had been away, but there were still things that made Obinna long for their time in university together, made him think, Only Eze will understand. Best friends in secondary school, they had become even closer in university, and people called them twins, not because they looked alike but because they were always together: Eze, the tall, handsome ball of fire, burning things in his path, and Obinna, inward, focused, always walking on the edges.

It was Eze who first made Obinna think he could actually be a poet. In secondary school, Obinna wrote poems in the back pages of his notebook and sometimes tore out the sheets and crumpled them. Once, Eze picked up a crumpled sheet, smoothed it out, and read it. “You wrote this?” he asked, and his expression was one Obinna would never forget—an admiring awe, an awed admiration.

“It’s nothing,” Obinna said, trying to sound dismissive.