The grey Corolla joins the column of cars at Departures. Stepping out, my body collides with Lagos’s sweltering heat, which burns despite the earlier drizzle. Noon at MM2 is bustling with pickups and drop-offs of people walking briskly towards their destiny. His flight is not until 3.30pm, but I worry he is already late.
Fifteen minutes later, a silver Lexus pulls up. His bulky frame is clothed in a woollen sleeveless jacket, ready for the Canadian winter, his strong, muscular arms outlined in his tight, dark-blue shirt. The wheels of his blue luggage hit the ground with a muffled thud. Is this all, I wonder? All the personal possessions we spent many days mulling over at our living quarters in Warri, and the foodstuffs his mum decided to gather back in Enugu, could not be crammed into this single box. With one hand trapping the parting gift I packed, the other hand pulls the box behind me. His sister follows with another lightweight bag.
We join the mad rush into the already crowded halls. The compulsory stops at openings and crossovers. Metal detectors scan for contraband. The dogs sniff through us. The weighing of bags. Luggage gets tagged. Sweat and salt pull under my armpit. All this time, I have barely looked at his face. When I manage a glance in the elevator, worry colours his eyes. His eyeballs seem alert, the pupils grow smaller. We share a hasty smile before the doors slide open.
The international wing of the airport looks bland, stripped of any signs of the Christmas holiday celebrated two days earlier. Festive seasons have thinned into quiet, restrained traditions, like adult males who only mark their birthdays but do little to nothing to celebrate them. Everyone here is hurrying out of the country. Now on the second floor, we seek directions. His first flight is from Lagos to Doha since he chose Qatar Airways. Then, a layover for five hours before getting onto a longer connecting flight to Toronto. Afterwards, a two-hour, thirty-minute flight to Edmonton, where his university, his shared apartment, and a new life await.
The Qatar check-in sits in the middle block of other airline booths. We approach the line, pulling the bags, our faces still heavy with confusion.
“Who is the one travelling?” the uniformed official barks in a fierce tone. Her suit is faded from excess use. We gesture to the person among us coated in wool. “The rest of you move back. Behind that line,” she says and turns away.
I push my gift into his hand before we retreat to the window to watch him check in. In the package is the copy of New York, My Village I rushed to get from RovingHeights that morning because he needed a book to read on the 41-hour trip. I also got him a customised T-shirt, but he doesn’t know that yet.
His sister opens TikTok to pass time. I watch him struggle to pick up bags we could have helped with, those muscular arms strained by the weight of his travel load. People behind him grow impatient, burdened with luggage, eager to get to their ticket too. The regular boarding calls from overhead speakers make us all more anxious about him missing the flight. I pick up and drop my phone again, restless. Families cluster in circles, taking final photographs with the intending traveller, often a young adult. A mother presses advice and kisses into the traveller’s ears, hopeful it sticks longer. The siblings take this fleeting opportunity to show affection, however clumsy. I had returned to Lagos in the heat of Christmas partly for this moment, to witness him cross over and to document it. Looking ahead, he is not in sight, overtaken by the heads of other travellers. My palms are already clammy with apprehension, dampness on the surface where they had been resting. I am yet to get a photograph.
With another ounce of boldness, I advance towards the travelling crowd, which has grown larger. I approach him.
“Have you taken the picture?” he asks, sullen.
I shake my head. Lifting the phone, I aim it in his direction and click the shutter. I want to remember what he looks like during the last moments before his departure. It is his first international travel too. Surely, he must be afraid. The photo is an awkward take, so I delete it.
Almost immediately, the official finds me again, urging me out of the area with a raised alto. For the last time, she says. I wonder if she chooses not to see that this is a moment we cannot have again. Having aided so many travels, she may feel irritable at the sight of final goodbyes.
Boarding calls echo throughout the building. People hurry from one end to another. This business of travel. He is soon out of sight, and I am back by his sister’s side, walking around, watching others say their goodbyes. At this time, his cousin who drove them to the airport has joined us.
We made a mistake, I say to them. There was no need to rush to board. The flight is not until 3.30, and it’s only 1pm. I pray he comes out after getting the boarding pass.
His sister gets a call from their mother. She wants to know the status of things. In Igbo, his sister relays that he has gone in, adding how we are yet to get photographs but her faith is high that he will come out.
The boarding call for his flight rings out. His call enters simultaneously. The sadness in his tone when he says he cannot come out again. We have lost him. We must return home.
*
The day after, I am sitting in Bob’s Diner in Ikeja, awaiting a friend while the day slides into darkness. This is the last of my friends who still live in Lagos, one of the Nigerians who returned in 2020 after the war broke out in Ukraine, where he had schooled and lived, so a PhD degree was put on hold at best or unfinished at worst, and so was his life and dreams for the life abroad he began some 12 years ago. During our occasional calls, he often talks about gathering money to move abroad again. And now, waiting at the restaurant for him settled in me some gladness, that the least person I expected to remain here, still is.
One of the Lebanese men who runs the restaurant brings me the WiFi password. He asks if I want something to drink and tells the waiter to get on it. He asks if I am comfortable sitting close to the noisy action of the smoothie-blender. I don’t mind it at all. Two distinct groups of people, heavily dressed for what seemed like a Sunday gathering of friends, take up the tables in the larger diner area. They appear middle-aged, the oldest probably 50. As I wait, troubling my phone now and then, their laughter and chatter travel to me. They also don’t seem eager to go home as the day grows dark and the bright lights above us find more purpose.
My mocktail arrives before my friend. The sight of him in an unbuttoned checkered shirt, a white Tee and beige chinos brings warmth. We share a hug and take our seats. He has settled into the tech lifestyle, living out of a self-con in a high-rise building in Ikate Lekki, paying ridiculously for 24/7 electricity in a country where that is aspirational. My half-cooked steak tastes way better than his half-done option; something we laugh about.
“My friend is still on his way to Canada. He left yesterday, I can’t believe it,” I say out of the blue.
“Oh, good for him.”
“When are you even leaving?”
“Don’t know. Don’t have the funds yet.”
After the meal, we take photographs. Selfies of us goofing around, his fair self contrasting my caramel skin. We wanted full photographs, but the entire Bob’s Diner staff were waltzing to and fro, taking orders or preparing fresh meals and drinks.
When I look up from our end, the groups have dispersed, and couples have replaced them at the tables. Before I resist it, I toy with the thought that keeping community could be harder for me in a few years, almost utopian, with all my friendships hollowed out by movement into multiple geographies.
Afterwards, we go to Ikeja City Mall to walk around. We end up playing games the whole night, and he takes unposed pictures of me as I shoot bullets into a virtual world.
*
In February of 2022, the week of St. Valentine, I arrived at the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Abuja to process my visa, alongside eight other Nigerian students, for an all-expense-paid trip to a petroleum conference in Riyadh. When I informed a family friend based in Saudi at the time that I was headed there, she carefully interrogated what type of visa was being processed for me, and what I would be coming for. A visitor’s visa, of course, only valid for 30 days at a time, and up to a year. The conference is only for a week, my return ticket already booked.
“I just wanted to be sure. So, you don’t plan to come here and try to settle here. Many Nigerians are doing it. They come here on a visitor’s visa and never leave.”
I tried to picture a person, scholarly and promising, needlessly refusing to return to Nigeria after the conference ends, hiding out in hotels or homes of strangers, cloaked in scarves and modest clothing, hoping to escape immigration and make my way illegally in the foreign land.
The imagination could not parse.
*
The year before, at a prophet’s church in the heart of Mile 2, Lagos, after the power-packed prayer service, my family schedules a one-on-one counselling session with the man of God. The church secretary gives everyone waiting a number. My belly rumbles, but we wait. The church is essentially two consecutive shops in the plaza where it is located, sparsely decorated with attributes of sacred spirituality. Natural light and air keep us from suffocating, as there is no proper lighting inside. Our number is called, and my family goes in. When the man of God starts giving prophecies, there are terrible things about to come. There are curses to break. Spells to be returned to sender. Family liberations to perform. When he gets to me, he announces that my husband is abroad. My life is not here at all. As if invigorated by the news, my parents smile at me, and my mother rejoices with a twirl. I have read somewhere that the Nigerian Dream has three compartments: joining and reaping from politics, doing just better than your neighbour, and leaving Nigeria.
*
In reading about the sufferings and anguish of the enslaved Africans in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, I cannot help but reflect on the present conditions of Africans within and outside the continent, many generations after the first slave ships crossed the Atlantic.
At home, our government is brutal, cannibalistic, and unbothered by the daily throes of hardship we encounter. Kidnapping along the Nigerian interstate roads has become commonplace, so that flights or the use of security-escort vehicles are the only guaranteed means of safe travel. Our naira is embarrassingly feeble, and the average Nigerian is unduly impoverished. Left unattended, our lives are summatively bleak.
Outside, world powers are tightening their fists around immigration laws, and racial violence and abuse towards Blacks persists, so that some Nigerians in the diaspora are now returning with their heads bowed after spending thousands of pounds to acquire degrees without the promised jobs.
Regardless, the rest of us here are still dreaming and scheming of moving away, to be free from the hardships of our home. Yet the freedom we seek is not promised in immigration. Instead, one is opened up to another form of confinement, one that readies you to be oppressed, to be unfree. A friend of mine, working on his PhD in America, cannot return to Nigeria for a holiday, fearing his visa might not be renewed, given the new Trump laws. Only the free can begin to dream of happiness, but where the hell is freedom for people like me?
*
The evening after I saw my friend off to the airport, I opened my laptop and looked up Sweden MSc scholarships. Then I called an ex-schoolmate who moved to Sweden for school the previous year. He told me his school is stressful but worth it, there is no single Nigerian in his Gothenburg neighbourhood, his part-time jobs have earned him permanent back pain, and he would love for me to come. After the call, I closed my laptop and set it aside.
My resolution to be tethered to this country is probably a natural conclusion; an unplanned effort towards or against fate. The people who leave me behind are more than those who are here. I have not worked so hard to leave either. And if I leave, I will most likely not be headed to where they are. I am not sure what joy awaits me abroad, aside from access to a less unstable society. I wrote my statement of purpose for an MFA in creative writing but did not apply, as if from the start I had concluded that I wanted to write, to publish, to work as a writer, without resigning my livelihood to creative writing and its academia: writing as a vocation has not proven to be a financially liberating choice. I have not submitted one application for an MSc abroad. I have not applied for opportunities that will take me away from this place. I do not wear my life as a parked cargo that I will begin to unpack once I pick up a new IP address.
Instead, I groan with the rest on Twitter when fuel pump price skyrockets to an impossible degree; I adjust my expenses each month on an unchanging paycheck; I do not take long-distance road trips as often; I cross-check my voter’s information on the INEC website to be sure my PVC is valid for the next general election, and I make a mental note to update my polling unit as the election season draws near.
The minute I get home from seeing my friend fly away, I add a new time zone to my World Clock. Edmonton. I calculate the appropriate timeframes for a phone call. I theorise on the length of time we have before life weans him off my charm. I download Snapchat at his request, so we can share daily streaks to keep close. I grieve the absence of a final photograph at the airport. I count how much longer I have with those who still remain.
*Photo by Winston Tjia on Unsplash