On flying across seas.

And so it happened — life changed so fast and so hard and so sideways and linear and upside down at the same time. “Moving countries would do that to you”, your best friend said at 5 am in the morning while you were still in Lagos and they were struggling with their winter-induced insomnia in New York. You thought they were exaggerating, making things seem more complicated than they are — which is a very Nigerian trait that is part of you, no matter how long you’ve lived away from its shores.

Five months into your move, you found out they were right. Things expanded, things contracted, a few things broke, and some things came together. You learned so much about who you are but only after losing sight of who you once were and who you still are. Your shadows moved through bars, drinking a shit ton of iced tea and ginger ale and convincing people you didn’t drink alcohol anymore because you never did like it.

You also found out that you felt very connected to, but also afraid of water. Not in the mami water way of being Nigerian, but in the way that the sometimes calm and sometimes violent exterior that reminds you so much of how your life has been.

Money and family and love and sex started to mean different things to you. Money to you becomes a means to an end (strictly for living) and not a tool for senseless power plays, deceit and friction between strangers, the people you love back home, and the ones you’d come to love in the new country you’ve decided to call home.

Family becomes people who indeed see you for who you exactly are and love you not because you’re broken, but because you bring all the other parts of yourself through the door the minute you walk in. Family also stops becoming the people who string along only because they realise you’ve been a giver all your life and like most other people, they take advantage of it and stretch you thin.

Sex consumes you to the point of fury and then dependency. You run through cities, small towns and streets because the sudden freedom tasted like rivers of honey, without the possibility of your mother and father telling you to stop drinking, or it might be the death of you.

In the spring when things started to break free again from the shackles of a complicated marriage between the seasons, you met someone who put a valve that stopped the river from flowing. You spent nights in their apartment learning where things tickled, the part of their shoes that hurt the most, and their patterns of madness and happiness. And then when you got too close and told them how they made you feel, they changed their minds and turned into a ghost.

But in your usual pattern which you learned as a child, you always mourned ghosts before they became ghosts, so that when they did disappear, you felt nothing.

Then summer came with 25 degrees celsius in your apartment at night, the extreme urge to always be outside, the most dramatic sunsets in June, the earthly feel of being naked at nudist parks whilst reading fiction, and fresh butterflies in your stomach for someone you did not see coming.

In the true fashion of always having an unconventional path in life, this connection is also not conventional. They make you feel things that you perhaps haven’t felt with the same heat and intensity. Dinner dates and intense orgasms turn into sleepovers and breakfasts and showing them both your broken self and the parts of yourself that are whole. You hope more than ever before in your life that this one blossoms.

But today, you’re still standing in a dense rainforest wondering if this time, things will go somewhere. You’re wondering all these things about life, sex, God, money, family, buying new combs and missing your mum calling you Nwa every morning back in Lagos.

And today, the sun has noticeably started setting earlier.