I’m standing under one of the busiest bridges in Lagos and bodies are bustling around me. At some point, an incredibly smart person will try to imagine that I’m made of air then attempt to waltz through me and consequently become momentarily enraged that a person is standing on the sidewalk. Lagos doesn’t like people or things that don’t like to drift with the quick pace of its waves.
My feet are aching in my shoes that have finally dried after dripping rainwater and I can almost swear that my toes are squealing from being cooped up so long. My backpack — it’s always a backpack — is a little too full and the straps remind me that they aren’t stitched for this hard life. But I’m standing here under Ojuelegba bridge and for a minute I envy the men sitting under its arches, wary yet resting.
If I think clearly enough I can remember the first time I stopped here and came down from a danfo bus a little over a year ago. You don’t forget the first time your senses are violently and abruptly accosted when you just arrive at a different city. Whether it’s New York or London, Lagos or Accra, one thing stays the same: people are constantly arriving.
I must have been about eighteen the first time Lagos was a seed thrown into the soil of my mind. There was no reason for me back then to have come up with the Western city's name but I did. After I had said it aloud, I rolled it around my mouth and my taste buds tried to acquire the taste of this foreign word. An undergraduate who should have been focusing on the Chomsky and his genius ideas in the world of linguists but was suddenly obsessed with somewhere halfway across the country. In truth, a place I had no business worrying about.
When graduation finally came I could not wait to leave this city I had grown up in. By this time, nearly two years after I had first conceived the idea of living in Lagos, I was well over living in Port Harcourt. It was a place I deeply believed could no longer harbor any beauty after all the devastating things that had happened to me in it. But Lagos was still out of reach, perhaps not as far as it had once been but much too far to touch.
Maybe a part of me hoped moving to a new city full of thousands of living, breathing bodies was like a magic trick. You could be on the outskirts of Ogun State and slowly make your way to Lagos as a driver and decide to be an actor instead. You could sit at a roadside bar with an empty Gulder bottle in front of as you wax tales of auditions and your big beak that never was. You’d find the bartender nodding in agreement as she takes your empty bottle away and another customer even murmuring how he knew your face was familiar. You could be anything, anyone when you enter a new city and not one person will discount your truth.
Magic tricks are always just that: magic tricks. There is always something to be given, a price to be paid and yet, what does it matter when you get magic in return?
If there is anything the cool kids are deciding on having in common it seems to be depression. Because that’s what cool kids do; they pick at a random nothing or occasionally a thing we only speak of in hushed voices and stick their badge on it. Now everyone wants one like it’s another designer label which just released another fancy pair of trainers.
I was five years old when it first happened. Then seventeen and eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. And now twenty-three. I used to believe that while that creature thirsty for happy thoughts and laughter slept, that if I sneaked away it would wake up and never be able to find me again.
Depression wasn’t the sole reason why I ended up in a few more cities before finally settling in Lagos but it certainly had something to do with my nomadic ways. Or so I like to believe.
I hadn’t been on a plane for years and I found that I did not miss this mode of transportation usually preferred by the people of more privileged classes. It was not that my parents could not afford to put me on a plane but rather, they knew little of my adventures when I was still a university student. Back then, half of the adventure was testing my ability to be discreet and the other half was found in buses as I rumbled on badly tarred roads. The red soil of Enugu this week, Benin that looked too much like Port Harcourt the next, wherever I went, I was always just happy to have the wind behind my back.
This time was different. I had boarded the first flight out of town that was heading to Abuja — a city I also do not care much for either — to make my way to the NYSC orientation camp at the outskirts of Kano. The minute the tires were off the runway I could almost imagine myself sitting on a wing and waving to the well-behaved inhabitants of the cabin.
I may not have been fully aware then, but that was the first step of many that took me closer to the danfo dominated city of Lagos.
It was almost three in the morning and I swayed as I walked while a voice called after me that it was a good idea to get in the car now. I’d had a few glasses of tequila with dinner at The Lagoon followed up with almost half a bottle of Ciroc. But all I could see was that I was on Lekki-Ikoyi link bridge and even in my hazy bubble made of alcohol, I couldn’t help admire it. I was here, in Lagos, the city my gypsy soul had yearned for.
I kept walking in my drunken state as I believed that finally on my twenty-second birthday I had rewarded myself with solitude on a bridge. For me that bridge had always been on screens but now, I was strutting on it.
Laughter poured out of my open mouth and my arms widened as if to hold close this birthday gift, this feeling of finality. I did eventually clamber back into the car and go back to my hotel bed to sleep. But I didn’t let the one memory I could recall while drunk slip away from me. I had come to far to forget how my wish had finally been granted.
I was lost. Not lost in the abyss of half formed daydreams or memories straying fro my grasp, but actually lost geographically. I had missed my bus stop where a taxi and its driver were impatiently waiting for me to meet him.
It was all planned: make phone call, stop at bus stop and enter taxi. It was really that straight forward but I missed my bus stop then the phone call and well, the taxi was very much far off from the incomplete equation. The only remedy was to stop at Berger, literally beside the highway teeming with activity of arrivals and departures to wait.
Tired, sweaty and nerves fraught with worry over things that could not be solved with anxiety had made me restless with impatience. Things turned out fine and I was soon put in a hired taxi that had been paid to take me to Abeokuta, a sleepy town that promises to pat you while you rest beneath a rusty roof.
The first time I was driven into the city, I hadn’t even realized I had been driven into it until I caught “Abeok-” written on a wall and had obviously failed to have been completed. It was enough to tell me that this was my new home now.
Eleven months later I briefly returned at Christmas to pack what was left of my meager belongings to take with me back to Lagos where I lived for a while. In between my huffing as I struggled to zip Ghana-must-go bags my lover watched me with eyes full of questions. Who was this woman? I don’t think I know the answer to that question but I don’t tell him that. I let my lips tell his skin that we are here and more alive, more lit up than we have ever known ourselves to be.
Hours later, I once again say farewell to Abeokuta, this time for real and we race towards traffic lying in ambush for us at Lagos-Ibadan expressway.
I’m moving now, as fast as my drug induced senses will allow, towards where the sidewalk ends and the dirt mixed with discarded food wrappers lie. I could count the cities and roads I’ve littered with my footsteps over the years but it’s the memories that elude me. Too many, I find them slipping through my outstretched fingers but I don’t pay it too much thought, my only desire is to be at the house gulping vodka down much too fast that the back of my throat itches.
Abeokuta
Abuja
Benin
Kano
Nsukka
Yola
Warri
They don’t tell you that when you set your foot upon a path it does not stop until one destination blurs into just another location you’ve visited. I used to think that I loved the road and that feeling of nothingness that sits on your shoulder as you move onward, forwards, never stopping. But maybe now, here — under a bridge surrounded by Yoruba sentences flung into the air — I realize that I was looking for home, searching, searching but never finding. Always failing and in despair returning to the place I lay my body down like the people around me demand I do.
The world does not understand people like me who tragedy befall and leads them to never really fit in their skin anymore, never really fall here or there.
So we set ourselves on the road in search of a place where our skin can fit us, where we can dance around a fire as we throw our limbs with reckless abandon, because here we fit in. Here we are whole.
Yet some of us give up the road and it’s mysteries to pin sticks to the ground and mumble “X marks the spot for me fellas!” because maybe a little part of us is tired of seeing roads of varying standards. Weary, we settle for here and now but do not be mistaken, I’m just bidding my time until I get to pack a rucksack and wave farewell.
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