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SEWA’S P.O.V
I wake up at 5:47 a.m.
The Abuja morning is still dark.
I lie still for a moment in the stillness of the morning after a day that changed something, and I let the dark be the dark.
Then I look at my left hand.
The ring.
It catches the low light from the window the way it caught the January evening light on the rooftop last night. Quietly, without announcement, the beauty of something that does not need to perform itself.
I look at it for a long time.
Inside: so this is what staying feels like.
Not the dramatic version. Not the version I would have written for myself at twenty-two when staying felt like a concept I understood theoretically and avoided practically. Just — this. A ring on a finger. A morning. The Abuja dark outside the window. The city below not yet requiring anything.
I am engaged.
I am engaged to Romeo Emmanuel Taiwo Olusiji.
The man who was not supposed to take a walk on a Tuesday.
The man who wrote fourteen months of Tuesdays in a notebook and put it on a table beside peonies and got on one knee and said will you marry me like it was the most natural question in the world because — I understand now — it was. It has been the natural question since October 10th of last year. It just needed the Tuesdays in between to become the thing it was always going to be.
I sit up.
I do not reach for my phone.
Not yet.
I go to the kitchen and I make tea — not rooibos, tea, the kind my mother makes on important mornings, the kind that means: sit with this properly before the world gets in — and I carry it to the rooftop.
Our rooftop.
The flowers are still here. He left them. Every surface still full of them, the January morning giving them a different quality from the January evening — quieter, more honest. The flowers without the candlelight being simply what they are.
I sit in my beanbag chair.
I sit in it and I drink my tea and I look at the city coming into itself below me and I let the morning be exactly what it is.
The ring.
The flowers.
The city.
Inside: I am not afraid.
Inside: I am home.
I sit on the rooftop until the Abuja morning is fully itself.
Then I go back inside.
Then I pick up my phone.
Romeo’s voice note arrived at 5:30 a.m.
Of course it did.
“Good morning, Mrs. Olusiji-to-be.”
A pause. I can hear him smiling.
“Psalm 118:24. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. I love you, Tesoro. I will see you this afternoon. Wear comfortable shoes.”
I play it twice.
Then I text back.
Me: Mrs. Olusiji-to-be is a lot of syllables for 5:30 a.m.
Three dots.
My Man: You will get used to it.
I look at the message.
The ring catches the morning light.
I smile.
Me: Comfortable shoes for what, Ife?
My Man: You will see. Noon. I will pick you up.
I put the phone down.
I go to find comfortable shoes.
He arrives at noon exactly.
He looks at me the way he looked at me last night on the rooftop. The full look, unhurried, the one that has been the same since a Tuesday in October and will be the same, I understand now, for the rest of our lives.
“Good morning”, he says.
“It is noon”, I say.
“Good morning”, he says again.
I shake my head.
But I am smiling.
He opens the car door.
I get in.
He gets in beside me.
We drive.
Maitama.
A street I know. I know most Maitama streets, I have been driving them for three years but a turn I have not taken before. The car slows. We stop outside a gate.
High walls. The specific architecture of something new — the bones of it visible even from outside, the structure with the quality of something built carefully, not quickly. The kind of construction that did not cut corners because the person commissioning it did not need to.
The gates open after he does something in his phone.
Romeo gets out.
He opens my door.
He takes my hand.
“Reo”, I say.
“Come on”, he says.
We go in.
The house.
Seven bedrooms. High ceilings. The height that my apartment has, that I chose my apartment for, that Romeo noted when he first saw it and understood without being told that I need space above me. Wide windows. The Maitama light coming through them at noon in January doing something quiet and specific with the empty rooms.
It is unfurnished.
Completely.
Every room is just space. Clean walls. Floors that have not yet been lived on. The specific possibility of a house that has not yet been given its meaning.
We walk through it in silence.
The living room. He watches my face as I take it in. The proportions of it, the way the light moves, the view from the main window of the garden that has been planted but not yet fully grown, the trees that will be something in three years.
The kitchen. Large. The kind that was designed by someone who understands that cooking is not a functional activity but a relational one — room for two people to move through it without negotiating the space.
The study. A room with bookshelves built into every wall. Floor to ceiling. Romeo stands in the doorway of it and says nothing.
He does not need to say anything.
I look at the shelves.
I look at him.
“Reo, What's this? Whose place is this?”
He steps closer and hold my hands.
“Soo, Mr. Olusiji gave this to us as a gift.”
I gasp and I can feel my eyeballs trying to escape their sockets.
“My dad built this place for us. He said he started building it a few years ago and when I told him I was going to propose to you… he told me about it and handed over the keys and documents to me.”
A pause.
“Soooo, this is our home, Tesoro”.
“OM God! Reoooooo… I — I don't even know what to say.”
“You can say nothing. Just stay here with me.”
We stand in the study for a long time.
Then we walk upstairs.
The bedrooms.
The main one. The one that will be ours, I understand this without it being said. With the en suite and the dressing room and the window that looks east, toward the morning when it comes.
I stand at the window.
Romeo stands behind me.
“What do you see?” he says.
I look at the view.
The garden. The street beyond the walls. The Maitama sky.
“Home”, I say.
He is quiet.
“It needs everything”, I say. “Every wall. Every room. It is completely empty.”
“Yes”, he says.
“We get to fill it”, I say.
“Yes”, he says.
I turn around.
He is looking at me with the look.
“Reo”, I say.
“Yes.”
“Your father built this for you”, I say. “Without telling you. For three years.”
“For us. Yes”, he says.
“That is—” I stop. “That is the most extravagant quiet love I have ever encountered.”
He almost smiles.
“He learnt it from my mother”, he says. “She has been doing extravagant quiet love since the 19th century.”
I look at him.
At this man who grew up inside extravagant quiet love and learned its language and has been speaking it to me since a Tuesday he was not supposed to be walking.
“Reo”, I say.
“Yes, Evie.”
“I want to put a reading chair in the study”, I say.
He looks at me.
“Done”, he says.
“And fresh flowers every Friday”, I say. “Delivered here. Not the apartment. Here. When we move in.”
“Done”, he says.
“And the kitchen needs—”
“Adéṣẹwà”, he says as he comes closer.
He cups my cheeks.
“Yes.”
“We have time”, he says. “We have all the time to fill every room.”
A pause.
“We are going to fill it together. Every choice. You and me.”
He holds my gaze.
“But today I just want you to stand in it and know that it is ours.”
I look at the empty room.
The high ceilings.
The east-facing window.
The house that has not yet been given its meaning.
“Okay”, I say.
I look at the empty room.
The high ceilings.
The east-facing window.
The house that has not yet been given its meaning.
“Okay”, I say.
We stand in the empty main bedroom of a house in Maitama that is going to become the most specific, intentional, fully inhabited home either of us has ever lived in, and we let it be what it is.
Possibility.
Ours.
“Let's take pictures to document this memory”, he says.
“That’s newwww”.
“I learn from the best yunno.”
“Yes, you do”. I say as I bring out my phone and set it up to take pictures and selfies. And more.
We are standing at the window.
The one in the main bedroom. Floor to ceiling. The full width of the wall. The kind of window that was designed by someone who understood that the boundary between inside and outside should be as thin as possible. That a home should always know what season it is. What the light is doing. What the garden is becoming.
The garden below is planted but not yet fully grown. The trees are young. The lawn is new. Everything out there is in the process of becoming what it is going to be. Which is, I think, exactly right.
The house not yet furnished. The garden not yet grown. Two people standing at a window that looks out on all of it.
Romeo is behind me.
His arms around me from behind.
My left hand resting on his forearm.
The ring catching the afternoon light — not performing it, just receiving it, the way the real things receive light. Quietly. Without announcement.
The garden beyond the glass.
The sky above it.
I reach up and angle my phone.
Not a selfie angle. Not the content creator angle. Just — what is in front of us. The window. The garden. His arms around me. My hand with the ring. The reflection of both of us faint in the glass — present but not the subject. The garden is the subject. What we are standing in front of is the subject.
The life we are about to build.
I take the photograph.
One shot.
I look at it.
His arms. My hand. The ring. The floor to ceiling glass. The young garden beyond it full of trees that are going to be something in three years.
It is the truest image I have ever made.
When, I got home, I opened Instagram.
525k followers.
525k people who have been watching me live my life — the apartment, the outfits, the dates, the soft girl era, the content that is real and the content that is curated and the growing inability over the last year to tell the difference because I have been becoming more honest in every direction simultaneously.
I type the caption.
I do not draft it.
I do not rewrite it.
It arrives the way the true things arrive — fully formed, already itself, needing nothing added or removed.
For a long time I thought the strongest thing I could do was leave before anyone could love me back at the same volume.
Then, I met My Man.
And I stopped running. Now, I am staying.
And he just kept showing up. Quietly. Consistently.
📍Abuja. January. forever starting now.
I post it.
I put the phone face down.
I sit at the dining table.
I count to thirty.
I pick the phone back up.
Fourteen thousand likes.
Comments loading faster than I can read them.
The first one I see, from an account I do not recognise, says simply:
SEWA is taken!. i’m crying.
I put the phone face down again.
Inside: yes.
She is.
She is taken.
Romeo calls at 8:47 p.m.
“I saw the post”, he says.
“Yes”, I say.
“This womannn”, he says.
“Yes. This mannnn”.
A pause.
“Sewa”, he says.
“Yes, Romeo.”
“I thought you weren't ready to reveal. You've been shouting, ‘i just wanna do a hard launch on the first day of our honeymoon’”.
“Welllll, plans changed. And I can't wait for the world to know I am your baby now.”
“My baby uhn”.
“Yes, your baby.”
“That sound sooo good.”
“Wouldn't it? My Man”.
“Say that again.”
“Myyy Man”.
“Where's the priest? Let's get married right now”.
“Oga, you go like calm down.”
“Noooo. I can't wait to spend forever with you. The wedding still seems so far away”.
“I love you, Reo”.
“I love you too, Tesoro”.
I look at the ring.
The evening light catching it.
The peonies still on the table — two days old now, slightly wilted, entirely honest.
“I know”, I say.
“Good night, Tesoro”, he says.
“Good night, Romeo”, I say.
I put the phone down.
I look at the dining table.
The table that seats six.
The table that has been seating two for a while now.
I look at it for a long time.
Then I blow out the candle.
Then I go to bed.
The ring on my finger in the dark.
The city outside.
The night is indifferent and continuous and entirely beautiful.
She is staying.
Present tense.
Continuous.
Narrator's Nook
The morning after is always the real test. Not the proposal. The morning after it. The quiet before the world gets in. The ring in the dark. The tea on the rooftop.
The house is empty and this is the point. A home is not a building. It is the accumulation of intentional choices made by people who have decided to build something together. The empty rooms are not lack. They are invitation. Romeo’s father understood this when he handed over the keys and said: fill it together. Every choice is yours.
And the caption.
She did not say she is happy. She did not say she is in love. She said she is staying. Because for Sewa Coker, staying is not a passive act. It is the most courageous, costly, deliberate thing she has ever done. And the over half a million people who have been watching her life understood this immediately. Because they have been watching her learn it.
Present tense.
Continuous.
That is the whole series in three words.
Okay now, I just read this and I am grinning rom ear-to-ear. Goshhhhhh.... Love is sweet ooh.
Sad, not all of us can relate. I just dey do "God when". And more rounds of "awwwn awwwwn".
🥺🥹