I could start this with the cliche story of how I always knew I would be a writer right from childhood. Of how the early noughties saw me crafting mystical worlds filled with elves, fairies, princes, princesses, and ojuju calabars while lying on the carpeted floor of our living room. I could preface this by waxing lyrical on how I have always found writing therapeutic. Of how chasing a narrative thread helped me unravel feelings I was too afraid to name. And all this would be true.However, that is only an uninteresting bit of a very expansive story. I discovered a love for the everyday stories of ordinary people early in life. My father planted the seed on the many warm nights he told us about Igbo folklore, life during the Nigerian Civil War, and how common people navigated this uncommon reality. This seed became a sapling as my teenage heart, afraid but excited, listened to the first boy I fancied myself in lovewith tell me chilling stories about his numerous near-death experiences at the hands of neighborhood gangs in Benin.Years later, in the cold confines of a nondescript warehouse in England, this sapling became a tree as I listened to fellow warehouse operatives tell me stories of lives as tough and as callused as their weatherbeaten palms. Of loves whose intensity made fire seem frigid. Of futures that twinkled with a thousand hopeful plans. That tree sprouted branches in many care homes over multiple cups of sweet black tea as octogenarians and nonagenarians told me stories of a time my parents cannot remember. A time when men wrote long letters to their loves back home, veined hands trembling against a backdrop of explosions. Of interminable happily ever afters, a time when people married young and married long. This tree budded the most beautiful flowers as they told stories of long-awaited homecomings. Of hugging bodies battered by war and calming minds mangled by the horrors on the battlefield. Of how love was the buoy that ferried them through that period. They told me stories of devotion that seemed almost religious. Of being there for the other person, seeing them broken, and at their very worst and silently whispering, ‘I still choose you.’While the tag on my LinkedIn says ‘writer,’ I pride myself as a collector and compiler of the unconventional stories of conventional people. People like me. People much like you, dear reader.