In Lagos, Space For My Thoughts To Fly

Before I moved to Lagos, I hadn’t lived anywhere for five years. Kind of. I had a stint in Philadelphia. I lived first in my boyfriend’s home, an apartment he prepared for me carefully, buying pure cranberry juice before my arrival. We devolved. There were tears on a cracked sidewalk as cockroaches skittered by. I moved out. First onto a couch, and then to a dark blue room where I slept on a mattress on the floor. It was a study when I crashed there, but I have always been a nomad who carves homes out of emptiness.

I brush over this foray in America because it feels so disjointed from my life, but maybe it’s like all the other chapters: short, intense, lived with an eye to the ending, always halfway-elsewhere.

The home I count as my last before Lagos was in Port-au-Prince. The apartment was a storage space, but I begged my landlord to clear it for me. It was basically a foyer, round and windowless, with a table so squat I sat on the floor. I paid $250 a month for it and I mostly wasn’t there.

Between Port-au-Prince and Lagos, I cycled through reporting projects in Bihar, Achham, Guerrero, Nassau, Santo Domingo, Addis Ababa, Havana, and elsewhere. I rented rooms in a mud-brick farmhouse and a lakefront luxury hotel and a casa particular. In between, I would crash or sublet somewhere to write my stories: the Catskills or Chinatown or a bungalow by the Caribbean Sea. Can I live here? I would ask myself. The answer was no, no, no, no, no.

But I had a feeling about Lagos. Resonance: something rhythmic and energetic; something irretrievably interwoven with the physicality of the place, but other, supra-rational. “Cities are this, stone made suddenly alive by our emotions, by our desires,” Italian novelist Elena Ferrante has written. “We ought only to write about places we are in love with,” I have said. , I felt, as I held this warmth in my chest like a secret, like a