If you ever doubt how magical this world is, one day you will decide to go to a World Cup watch party in Oakland that you found online to root for a country where you spent two years trying to coax English out of the mouths of Cape Verdean teenagers. 1/7
I'm bored of saying it, but any Yoruba person reading this should please remember that there will still be life after Tinubu.
His mission to turn you and Igbo people into enemies for the sake of his short-term political interest will only spoil your life for no reason.
I was standing on a bridge in Edinburgh at eleven-thirty at night with four pounds and some coins in my pocket, which when converted at the rate I had memorized the way you memorize a wound, was enough to buy some indomie in this country.
It had been three weeks since I left Accra, three weeks since my mother stood in the departure hall at Kotoka with her arms folded the way she folds them when she is holding herself together from the outside, and told me, "Make it make sense," which was the whole of her advice, the full inheritance, condensed into four words I had been turning over in my pockets ever since alongside the four pounds. I had a student ID, a coat I bought from a Peckham market for eight pounds that smelled faintly of someone else's winter, and a room in a shared flat off Leith Walk where the radiator made a sound at three in the morning like a man clearing his throat before bad news. I had been eating jollof made from a recipe I carried in my head from my auntie in Dzorwulu — tomatoes from Lidl, Maggi from the African shop on Easter Road, rice that cooked too fast in the flat pots here — and it was almost the thing but not the thing, the way a photocopy of a face is still recognizably a face.
That particular evening I had walked out with no plan, which was itself the plan, because sometimes the only way to make the anxiety stop is to put your body in motion and let the thinking tire itself out against the pavement, and I had walked from my flat down past the university buildings, past the tourists in their tartan scarves, past the pub noise spilling warm and golden onto the wet street, until I arrived at the bridge, and I stopped, and I looked out over the city, and the city was lit the way cities are lit when you are very far from everything you know — which is to say, completely, indifferently, beautifully, not for you and therefore somehow more beautiful — and I stood there in the coat that smelled of someone else's winter, and I thought: Herh, I am finally here.
Not *here* like a place. *Here* like an accumulation. Here like every form I filled out alone, every explanation I gave to an official who was already looking past me, every night I fell asleep calculating whether I had made a catastrophic mistake, and here I was anyway, upright, intact, on a bridge in Scotland, four pounds in my pocket, the whole city thrown open like a question I had somehow already answered by arriving.
I called my mother. She picked up on the second ring. "Make it make sense," I said, and she laughed, which was the first time since I left that I heard her laugh without effort.
The four pounds are still in my coat pocket. I have still not spent them.
Hello T Hadex.
We love your motivation to have a session at our studios, how about 5k Retweets on this tweet in 24 hours & you get a free live session at Glitchafrica👀🤗