Chapter 2 – Father's Shadow
People say a boy becomes a man the day he realises his father is human. For me, that day came too early.
After losing his spot at the market, my father didn't make a fuss. He just carried his wooden stool, his worn-out bag of tools, and his dignity back home. But there's a difference between not making a fuss and not feeling the blow. I could see it in the way he sat longer than usual before starting work, the way his eyes stayed fixed on the ground as if searching for something he'd dropped but could never find again.
He set up by our doorway, trying to make the most of what we had. The hot afternoon sun pressed down on him, baking his neck dark brown. Dust swirled whenever a bus roared past, settling on the shoes he was trying to polish. But the customers weren't coming. Not like before.
The market had been his battlefield. There, he was part of the noise, the bargaining, the constant flow of feet looking for repair. Here, at the corner of our street, the only people walking by were neighbours who already knew he'd fix their shoes for free if they begged hard enough.
Some days, he'd work on a single pair of sandals from morning till evening. Other days, he'd sit all day, his tools untouched, his mind elsewhere.
One Saturday, I found him sitting on the bench outside, an old newspaper spread on his lap. I thought he was reading, but when I leaned over, I realised the paper was months old — already yellow around the edges, the ink faint in places. The headline read:
"Youth Entrepreneurs Changing Nigeria."
Beneath it was a photo of three young men in perfectly tailored suits, their smiles wide enough to swallow the sun. Behind them stood glass buildings that reflected the sky like mirrors.
"Papa, you can be like them," I said without thinking.
He chuckled, but it was the kind of laugh you give when you've already buried the hope someone is offering you. "Michael, people like us are not in that kind of paper. We are in the obituary pages."
I wanted to tell him he was wrong — that his life didn't have to end where it started. But a part of me was scared he might be right. His words didn't kill my dreams; they fed them. They made me want to run so far, so fast, that I'd never see the obituary section.
But ambition doesn't come with a map. I was still in my final year of secondary school, my grades just good enough to pass. My father told me to learn his trade.
"It's better than doing nothing," he said.
But every time I held a shoe in my hands, I felt like I was holding my own future — worn, patched, and going nowhere.
One evening, after dinner, the air warm and heavy with the smell of pepper soup from a neighbour's room, I asked him, "Papa, what's the one thing you regret most?"
He didn't even blink before answering. "Not trying when I was young. I was always afraid of losing, so I didn't play big. But when you grow older, you realise the biggest loss is not playing at all."
His words stayed with me that night. I lay on the mattress, staring at the same water stains on the ceiling I had stared at since I was a boy. Somewhere in that darkness, I swore to myself that I would not live his life.
I would play big. Even if it killed me.