No Sleep For The Poor - by Matthew Okibe

There has been no light for four days. Not the romantic kind of darkness that poets borrow to sound deep. The kind where your power bank is dead and you are mentally auditing every relationship within walking distance to figure out who you can ask for help without it being awkward. That kind of darkness. The kind that does not care. I left the house around 2pm. There is a man who lives close to me with a generator. I know him. Or I used to — before the long quiet gap that opens between two people when life gets busy and greetings start replacing conversations. I stood in my head doing the calculation that broke people know intimately: is this relationship still strong enough to knock on this door? To ask him to let me plug in? We had not spoken properly in a long time. I was not sure where we stood. I kept walking. Further down, on the road toward the charging center, there was another man. I know his face. I know his greeting. That is the full extent of what we are — two people who nod at each other on the way to somewhere else. I thought about asking him too. Kept walking. There are people you can ask things of and people you cannot, and the distance between those two categories is one of the quiet cruelties of having nothing. Because when you need help, you also need to spend what little social capital you have very carefully. So I went to the charging center. Left my power bank there on credit. Told the man I would pay tomorrow. The only reason tomorrow felt real — the only thing giving that promise any weight at all — was a sports competition I had entered. I had picked the correct scores. I was certain of it. If they announced me as a winner, the money would come, I would pay, and the chain would hold. I was building a tomorrow out of a prediction and hoping the architecture was strong enough to stand on. I went looking for hotspot while I waited. I found some people I recognized from different jobs I had worked — the kind of faces that belong to the same circuit of hustle you move in. I asked. They let me use their data. I refreshed the page. Nothing. No update. No announcement. Just the same blank page, indifferent and unhurried, while I stood in the heat having spent the whole afternoon building toward it. I collected my power bank around 8pm and went home.<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/519798.png"/>--- There is a girl I have been thinking of letting go. Not because I don't care. That is the part that sits in my chest wrong — I care. But caring had started to cost more than I had. She needed me present. She needed me to call, to show up inside the conversation fully, to be warm and available and whole. And I was trying. But there is a version of trying that starts to feel like bleeding quietly, where you are giving what you do not have, watching the gauge drop, wondering how much longer before there is nothing left to give at all. I did not know how to say that to her. How do you tell someone who loves you that you are rationing your warmth right now? That you are not pulling away from them specifically, but from everything, because everything has become too heavy to hold all at once? There is no version of that sentence that does not sound like an excuse or the beginning of a goodbye. I was lying in the dark running through it when she called. We talked small. Nothing heavy. Just the sound of a voice that knows yours. And after she hung up I checked my phone and there was data — she had quietly asked someone to buy it for me. And a thousand naira sitting in my account, soft and unannounced, like a rebuttal to every thought I had spent the day building. I did not know whether to feel relieved or ashamed of myself. I settled for both. Just lay there in the weight of it — how close I had come to letting go of someone who, on my worst day, without announcement, without being asked, showed up anyway. --- I tried to sleep. I couldn't. I remembered the charging center man. My creditor. I had already collected my power bank, already owed him money, and now late in the night I went back and asked him for hotspot too. Asked the man I was owing for one more thing. That is what this day had become — a sequence of doors I was not sure I had the right to knock on, and knocking anyway because the alternative was worse. He gave me the hotspot. I refreshed the page one more time. Still nothing. I came back inside. Opened TikTok because that is what you do when you are not okay but you do not want to be alone with that. Video after video. Loud, funny, stupid, forgettable. I laughed once or twice, the hollow kind that moves in your chest without meaning anything. None of it worked. My body was horizontal but my mind was standing up in the corner of the room with its arms folded, refusing to lie down. Then one line found me. I don't know the full song. Just a fragment I must have heard somewhere in passing — by an artist called Mavo. One line that had apparently been waiting for tonight to arrive in my head and unpack its bags. *No more way for poor people.* And once it was there it opened a door. Behind the door was a voice. And the voice was mine — which is the worst kind, because you can ignore other people. You cannot ignore yourself when yourself is telling the truth. *Why are you trying to sleep?* *What exactly did you do today that earns you rest?* *You refreshed a page. You walked past two men you were too uncertain to ask for help. You charged a power bank on credit using money you don't have yet. You asked your creditor for a favour after already owing him. You are lying in a house that has had no light for four days and you want to close your eyes like a man who has finished something. What did you finish? What are you waking up to tomorrow that justifies lying down tonight?* I let it continue. *Sleep is a privilege. It belongs to people who have solved tomorrow. When you have money, rest is just rest. When you have nothing, rest is a lie you tell your body so it doesn't give up completely. The rich man closed his eyes hours ago. His tomorrow is already arranged. Yours is a prediction you made at a charging center this afternoon. You are banking on a competition that has not chosen you yet. You are building tomorrow out of air and you want to sleep through the part where you should be figuring something out.* I had no answer. So I stayed there. Awake. In the dark. Listening. And then my eyes started leaking. Not crying. I want to be precise about this. I was not crying. But when I am extremely tired, truly exhausted down to the bone, tears come out without my permission. My body just leaks. I have no control over it. It has happened in public before — people look at me like something is wrong and I have to explain that I am not sad, I am just tired. My body has its own language for exhaustion and it chose tears as the dialect. So I lay there in the dark, eyes leaking without my consent, not even certain anymore where the tiredness ended and the grief began. Not sure it mattered. Not sure there was a difference.<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/519797.png"/>--- I don't have a resolution for you. I eventually slept because my body staged a coup. Not because the voice stopped. Not because I found peace. I slept the way the poor always rest — not from having arrived somewhere, but from no longer being able to stay awake. Exhaustion won. It usually does. In the morning the light was still out. The page still said nothing. And I was still here — which I suppose is its own kind of answer, though some mornings it is hard to tell if still being here is the victory or just the beginning of the same day again. --- *No more way for poor people.* We sing it. We laugh at it. We send it in voice notes and caption it under memes because what else do you do with a truth that size. But some nights it is not a song. Some nights it walks into your room, sits on your chest, and waits patiently for you to stop performing fine so it can say what it actually came to say. And you listen. Because it is 3am. And you are still awake. And so is it. --

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