By Evans Ufeli Esq
The first thing you should know about Tunde and Amarachi is that they never met a thing they couldn’t misplace. Keys? Lost. Umbrella? Left somewhere it very much wanted to be. Sanity? Occasionally misplaced after a football match. They lived together in a third‑floor flat with the optimistic belief that gravity preferred to keep things on the street, not in drawers.
Tunde was the sort of man who locked his front door and then stood outside scratching his head while his wallet blinked its small, accusing LED from the inside pocket. Amarachi was the sort of woman who labelled everything; not to find things, but to create new things to ignore. “Sugar,” read a jar that contained three pens, a rubber band and an emergency receipt from a jollof rice purchase two years prior.
Their carelessness was competitive. It began with little incidents: Tunde once took Amarachi’s toothbrush to work because it looked like his; he’d assumed anything blue was a public service. Amarachi once returned the tea kettle to the shop because she was convinced they had bought an “advanced boiling appliance” when, in fact, they had bought a kettle and a saucepan and two spoons. The shopkeeper still keeps the kettle on the shelf as a memento.
They worked odd jobs which suited their lifestyle: Tunde freelanced as a delivery driver (he delivered packages to the wrong houses, which created delightful new friendships), and Amarachi ran a small business called “Occasionally On Time,” a party planning service that was honest in its title. Guests never arrived early; they never arrived at all sometimes, which lends any cancelled party a certain legendary status.
One rainy Saturday, an opportunity for legendary carelessness arrived in grand style. Amarachi decided to bake a cake for their upstairs neighbour’s birthday. She found a recipe online, printed it, and then used the paper as a coaster for a boiling cup of tea. Tunde, trying to be helpful, took what he thought were cake ingredients from the cupboard: a bag labeled “Flour” that actually contained glitter (a remnant of Amarachi’s failed DIY glitter curtains), and a jar labelled “Sugar” that contained… well, the three pens and a rubber band were not in the mix.
The oven, which was also forgetful and had a tendency to overheat, reacted to the glitter with a theatrical shimmer. The cake emerged like an abstract art installation: sticky, luminous and suspiciously caffeinated thanks to the stray espresso grounds Tunde mistook for vanilla. They draped it in icing, which was actually mayonnaise from a sandwich they threw out that morning, and presented it to Mrs. Okoro with the confidence of people who had never been held responsible for anything before.
Mrs. Okoro examined the cake with the polite curiosity of someone who has seen worseher nephew once brought a casserole that screamed “regret” across three continents. She took a bite, paused, and then smiled. “This is… unique,” she said, which, to Tunde and Amarachi, was high praise.
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The true pièce de résistance came the following week, when both of them attempted to be extreme minimalists and got rid of things they never needed to begin with. Tunde donated their sofa to charity. Amarachi donated their curtains. They woke up to discover that minimalism is less a state of mind and more a state of cold. The flat felt like a stage set for an avant‑garde production called “Breezy Misplacement.” They spent the day chasing drafts and their dignity.
Some carelessness, however, cannot be apologized away. On a Tuesday evening, Amarachi managed to put the TV remote in the refrigerator; “To keep it cool,” she reasoned and Tunde responded by putting the milk in the toilet “to make more room” in the fridge. Their neighbour, hearing the commotion, knocked and asked if they were alright. Tunde opened the door in a dressing gown and explained the situation with the calm of a man telling someone their car had turned into a loaf of bread.
“You two are like a comedy duo waiting for a break,” the neighbour observed.
“We’re not a duo,” Amarachi said. “We’re a pair of very committed individualists.”
And yet, like all great pairs, their mistakes balanced each other. Where one left a trail of lost things, the other created a map of amusing recovery attempts. When keys were lost, they turned misadventures into treasure hunts. When the sofa was gone, they invited friends over to sit on the floor and tell stories. They never found the TV remote that week, but they discovered, to their mutual surprise, that listening to the neighbour’s radio through the walls was oddly comforting.
At the end of the month, they sat on foldable chairs in their comfortably drafty flat, sipping tea made in a saucepan and eating a small victory pastry that was definitely not the glitter cake. Tunde looked at Amarachi and said, “Do you ever think we should be more careful?”
Amarachi considered the question and then sighed, as if releasing a long, foolish hope. “Only on days that end with ‘y’,” she replied.
They laughed, because laughter is their most reliable possession. Things went missing, alarms were missed, and sometimes the fridge contained abstract art. But in a city where everything asks to be taken seriously, Tunde and Amarachi were proud to be exactly what they were: two careless people who managed, by sheer accident and a great deal of charm, to keep each other found.
