"The Patient Flame" - A Story of Waiting, Burning, and Becoming

INTRO:

It’s the ache between two people who met too soon, parted too early, and learned that love doesn’t always promise a home.

Here’s the story of Ọzọchi and Ehiọkhẹ.

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THE PATIENT FLAME

Ọzọchi believed that love was a slow-burning fire.

He first met Ehiọkhẹ in the cramped, buzzing halls of a Lagos tutorial center in February 2017, the air thick with the scent of textbooks and sweat. She was 16, sharp-witted with a quiet grace; he was 19, driven but tender-hearted.

He saw Ehiọkhẹ bent over a JAMB form, her pencil tapping a rhythm against her teeth as she calculated post-UTME cutoffs. The overhead fan churned the scent of their shared ambition: ink, stale bread from rushed breakfasts, and the coconut oil she used to tame her edges.

For those few months, something bloomed between them—unspoken, fragile.

Then, like a sudden gust scattering embers, they were both admitted to universities that same year.

Her, to UNILAG for Nursing.

Him, to UNN for Agric Economics, far away in Nsukka.

THE DISTANCE THAT TESTED HIM

UNN greeted him with harmattan dust and too many soft-spoken girls who didn’t understand why he’d retreat when their fingers brushed while sharing lecture notes.

His roommate, Emeka, would groan, "Ọzọ, even monks date!" as yet another pretty Mass Communication student sighed over his quiet refusal to attend weekend crushes.

What they didn’t see was the Nokia 3310 he charged nightly like a sacred duty, its green message light blinking sporadically through Nsukka’s power cuts.

They missed how he’d press his forehead against the hostel window during Lagos thunderstorms, as if his body could steady the crackling connection when she whispered, “Network’s bad, let’s talk tomorrow.”

While his classmates chased fleeting flames, he kept his heart fixed on Lagos—on the girl who didn’t promise him anything but somehow owned him completely.

He buried himself in books, in late-night calls with her, in the stubborn belief that what they had was worth the wait.

His friends called him a committed fool.

"She’s not even your girlfriend!" they’d say.

But Ọzọchi would just shake his head and smile.

“There’s only one fire I’m tending.”

Most of all, they never understood how he marked time—not in semesters, but in her clinical rotations at LUTH; not in birthdays, but in the way her voice changed when she said, “Just passed 300-level,” with that exhausted pride.

THE YEARS BETWEEN

For eight years, they spoke—through texts, calls, laughter, and fights.

Silences came, heavy with unsaid things, but they always found their way back.

In 2020, he finally confessed what she had always known: “I love you.”

She hesitated.

“I feel it too,” she admitted in 2023. “But how do we make it work?”

Their fights followed patterns as familiar as malaria symptoms:

“You’re comparing me to ghosts,” she said during his NYSC in Ogun, when he mentioned a corps member’s wedding.

“No,” he said. “I’m comparing me to the man I promised you I’d become.”

Her family was to relocate to Benin two days after her induction in April 2025, a ceremony she had personally invited him to.

The day of her nursing induction, he noticed three things:

How her hands didn’t tremble when pinning the cap—steady, even now.

The new gap between her front teeth from a bike accident she never told him about.

And that, after eight years, he still couldn’t look directly at her smile without feeling scorched.

Her goodbye hug lasted exactly four heartbeats.

“You make waiting feel holy,” she whispered.

“But I can’t be anyone’s religion.”

THE FINAL FLAME

Coming Soon

Now, standing at his NYSC lodge in Ogun, Benin’s coordinates blink on his cracked phone screen.

Ọzọchi types his final confession with soil-stained fingers from that day’s farm work:

“You were never the fire—just the light by which I saw myself burning.”

He presses send.

Then he waited—not as the boy who hoped, but as the man who finally understood.

Walks to the stream.

Watches the sunset bleed into water.

Written by Chidubem Egwudike