Confessions from a Wedding I Shouldn’t Have Attended

And I Got The Memo Too Late

If freedom had a face, it would have been Aunty Morenike, walking into my life like she was meant to stay🥺❤️

Aunty Morenike never arrived quietly.

Even when she was sitting still, you could feel her before you saw her . Perfume first, then her dramatic gele , her laughter, then that accent that never agreed to live in one country😂

One sentence would begin in London and land fully in Nigeria.

“Don’t be silly, darling,” she’d say, rolling her eyes, then immediately follow with, “Ah ah, are you okay at all?” “Sho gba dun?!”

She had a nose piercing. A small silver stud. Such a tiny thing to cause so much offence.

My older relatives hated it.

“She’s too much.” “Who does she think she is ?”

“Why is she behaving like a young girl? Omo 56!!! . My dad will lament .

“At her age, no husband, no shame. Shiiorr “

They said it like marriage was an apology she refused to make.

She was everyone’s aunty and nobody’s fool.

The Oversabi aunty. The one adults warned children about don’t try nonsense because Morenike is there o but she’s the one children ran to when the world became too confusing to explain.

Her house always smelled like menthol, ground pepper, and something sweet burning on the stove. There was always food. Always noise. Always a couch that belonged more to visiting children than to her actual furniture.

She moved like someone who had lived elsewhere and come back changed. Like someone who had kissed people who were not approved and never apologised for enjoying it. Men. Women. Sometimes both in the same year. Sometimes neither.

She didn’t announce her queerness. She just lived it.

Once, she brought a woman home tall, soft-spoken, smelled like rainbows to me . Introduced her simply as, “This is someone I like.” Another time, it was a man with kind eyes and quiet hands. Nobody asked questions. They were too afraid of her answers.

Her house was freedom with curtains.

You could sit anyhow. Laugh too loud. Ask the wrong questions. She let us miss school on days when our spirits were clearly absent.

“Your body is in class but your spirit is tired,” she would say. “Stay. Go tomorrow.”

She taught us about good touch and bad touch like she was teaching us how to cross the road . You know calmly, clearly, without terror. She taught us before any assembly sermon ever dared.

She explained consent using words that made sense. She believed children were smarter than adults gave them credit for and she proved it by speaking honestly❤️.

“If your body says no,” she said, “listen. Your body is not stupid.”

I liked sitting near her. Even before i understood myself, my body did. I liked how she called me names that felt older than me

“Oko mi.”

“Ayo mi.”

“My strong one.”

She said it casually, like she was naming what already existed.

She was the first adult who didn’t rush me to be anything. The first who didn’t interrupt my silence with panic. So when the confusion began to feel unbearable … when liking boys felt like a secret that might suffocate me i found my way to her kitchen at midnight.

I cried without poetry. Ugly, frightened tears.

“I think something is wrong with me,” I said.

She didn’t gasp. Didn’t pray. Didn’t reach for scripture or fear.

She handed me a glass of orange juice .

“Drink first,” she said.

I drank .

“Now listen,” she continued, stirring stew like the world was not ending. “Nothing is wrong with you. You are not broken. You are just… not common. You’re rare Madè “

She turned to look at me then.

“The problem,” she said gently, with so much love in her eyes “is that the world likes common things. But uncommon things last longer. Like you …🥺”

She didn’t name me . She didn’t force a confession. She simply stayed.

She let us love openly, which was radical in a house like ours.

She let me kiss my best friend on her couch while her door was open . We laughed nervously , lips were unsure, hands kept shaking like we were doing something illegal.

He stayed the night. We stayed up discovering each other softly, clumsily…

There were sounds. Quiet ones. The kind you try to swallow.

At some point, she walked past the room, paused, and turned the TV volume up.

In the morning, she made tea.

No questions. No judgement.

“Did you sleep well?” she asked, already buttering bread with a sweet smile on her face.

That was when I learnt love doesn’t always interrupt. Sometimes it just adjusts the volume.

Because 👇🏽

When I was nineteen , tired of pretending to be headed somewhere I didn’t want, she paid for my first tattoo.

My hands shook.

She laughed. “Why are you shaking like you’re committing fraud?”

“I might regret it,” I said.

She shrugged. “You will regret many things. So just start “

When I joked about piercing my balls, she smacked my head.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “

Years passed. I chose law because it sounded like safety. Because it pleased my father. Because disappointment was easier when delayed. Do you get ?

But art kept pulling me… quietly, stubbornly, like truth does

When i finally dropped out, my father’s reaction was swift and surgical.

“You are wasting my life and my money. My entire existence! “ the man said, voice flat. “You are not my son.”

He was like

My mother cried quietly, like she had been trained to do.

Aunty Morenike stood up from the plastic chair in the living room, adjusted her wrapper, and sighed.

“Ah,” she said. “So this is it?”

Everyone looked at her.

“Because if this is your final word,” she continued, “then let us thank God it came early. Some fathers wait until burial.”

The room froze.

She walked to me and took my hand, squeezed it once.

“Come,” she said. “Artists must eat too. Wa jeun oko mi “ .

She paid my rent when nobody else would.

Came to my first exhibition and clapped like she understood every piece.

She Introduces me to people who saw my work before my fear.

She never asked me to explain myself. She never asked me to be different.

Called me oko mi, Ayo mi, like she was reminding me I belonged somewhere.

I love her so much 🥺❤️

Now it’s my wedding day.

I’m standing in the groom’s room, looking at myself, holding too many truths in my chest . I am a gay man marrying a woman who doesn’t know I kissed a man last night 💔

They said bé bé fé like we were begging to marry her.

But standing there in agbada, smiling for pictures, it felt like I was the one being begged to let go.

I am ashamed. I am confused. I am just alive. “I don’t want to be here “… i sigh

Aunty Morenike walks in without knocking. like she always does .

She straightens my collar.

“Why are you breathing like that?” she asks.

“I’m scared,” I say.

She scoffs. “You? After all your drama?”

Then she softens.

“Ayo mi,” she says. “Life is not about being perfect. It is about being kind and brave. Sometimes to yourself.”

“My dad won’t come,” I say quietly. “Please sit beside my mum.”

She smiles like it was never a question.

At the ceremony, I find her beside my mother . She sits beside my mother like she’s always owned that seat. Nose ring catching the light. Accent moving freely between worlds. She’s solid, proud, clapping gently like she’s blessing something complicated but sacred.

She doesn’t flinch. She just existed like she always had.

Later, I leaned to thank her. She hugged me tight.

“My Ayo mi,” she whispered. “You are brave.”

And standing there, between love and compromise, between truth and survival, I understood something clearly:

Some people don’t save you by fixing your life.

They save you by making room inside it

for desire,

for mistakes,

for softness,

for becoming.

And sometimes, that is enough but Somewhere between laughter ,kisses, legworks and confetti, I noticed my bride’s scent on Auntie Morenike …

her purple lipstick had a little bit of red too …

My mouth opened.

This piece was born from a painting by Anthony Azekwoh

The Aunty💜

Aunty Morenike is the kind of woman people argue about after she has left the room.

In my eyes ; She is queer in the most unperformative way. She does not explain herself to anyone, and she refuses the language of shame. People call her stubborn, irresponsible, too free. She calls it living. She has no husband, no children, and too much joy for a woman society insists should be begging for structure.