Money

I have started a second notebook, a small one, only numbers. What I earn from the work. What I give Mama. What I keep. It is not a lot of numbers.

I asked around, carefully, what it costs to leave. Not the real way, the visa way; that costs a passport, a bank statement with money in it for six months, a letter from an employer, and then a man in Lagos who looks at you and decides. The other way costs more and ends, sometimes, in a lorry, and I have heard those stories too. So the visa way, and the arithmetic says three years if nothing goes wrong, and something always goes wrong.

I do not want to leave. I want to write that plainly because one day I will have left and I will tell people I always wanted to, and it is not true. I want Obinze. I want Sunday. I want to walk the stadium road with E. and buy two Fantas. I want to not have a second notebook.

But the man with one shoe is still running, in my head, toward the Port Harcourt road, and every month I put a little more in the small notebook, and every month it is not enough.