“The System Decided Our Story Was Over” — Nigerian Man on Lost Love Over UK Visa
The statement reads
We dated for a year after I asked her out at Elegushi beach, and we planned our whole future together. We applied for the same master’s degree in the UK, filling the forms with our fingers intertwined at a cybercafé with good WiFi. Same course, same university, same dream. But the embassy gave her a student visa and rejected mine. A visa officer who never even met me looked at my bank account and decided I was too poor and too Nigerian to return. They said I was a flight risk.
She cried and offered to cancel her trip so we could try again next year, but I told her no. Asking her to wait was asking her to drown with me, and I could not let her lose her dream over my bad luck.
Our last moment was at the airport food court. She was wearing a thick sweater for a cold she had never felt. We forced ourselves to eat a dry meat pie in silence. I kept giving her advice about buying a winter coat just to stop myself from begging her to stay.
When her flight to London was called, she hugged me at the door and whispered that she loved me. I could not say it back because it felt like a promise we could no longer keep, so I just told her to walk inside and not look back. I went back to our empty table and watched her flight board. We did not cheat and we did not fight. A system that does not care about love just decided our story was over.
