DRAW the lines, shade just a little,

you can see the image in your head, it's waiting on you…

Dele was overjoyed, his drawings were finally taking shape after coming up short the last few days. It had to be the unplanned break his friends had forced on him. 

He'd been cooped up too long, they'd complained, and since he hadn't yet figured out what to present for next week's Fall collection, he'd allowed himself to get dragged along for a boy's night out. 

It had been fun hanging out with them, they'd joked about when he'd told them he was going to create clothes not just for men but for women as well. The disbelief! 

The truth was, if anybody else had said that, they would have laughed it off, but Dele...he was the best science student in their class. He went for inter-school competitions in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and won awards. He was supposed to study engineering after Secondary school, at least, that's what everyone expected of him, including his parents. 

It had been a shock to them, their only son going off to become a designer. A designer! They remembered when Dele needed a place to hide after his parents insisted on taking him for counselling, they'd felt his brain had been tampered with and maybe speaking with the right person would change him. 

It wasn’t funny then, but now, they laughed about it.

 "You remember what you told us when we asked you why you wanted to create clothes and not technology?" One of his friends had asked

 He nodded in response.

 A mischievous smile on his face, he'd answered. "I wanted to have all the girls wearing my name, including your girlfriends." He'd pointed at them and they hadn't hesitated to throw their chips at him. 

Despite the jokes, what they'd said was true, he needed to remind himself why he'd chosen fashion, the unexpected route. 

He'd gone back home and headed to his workshop, which used to be a room until he'd converted it. Some of his awards that he hadn't gotten around to hanging were still in their boxes. 

Was that what it was? Boredom? Had he gotten so used to getting what he wanted that he no longer paid a thought to what had steered him towards fashion?

He'd thought of his grandma, a big tailor in the heart of Lagos. Grandma had started with nothing but a pair of scissors, thread and needle, and her younger brother's school uniform, she’d once told him. That was when she'd realized sewing was a good skill to have if she was to survive. She said she started sewing the uniforms of other students and then their parents, before finally moving to Lagos and opening her own shop. It was the same shop that trained his mother in school, the same shop he'd visited whenever school was on break. That shop had become an empire and the only legacy he cared to follow.