Obinze at dawn

I walk at five now. From the room by the stadium, down the Port Harcourt road while it is still empty, past the checkpoint where the soldiers are asleep in the truck, past the polytechnic gate, to Obinze, to the front of D10, to the mango tree. I do not go in. I stand under the tree for a minute and then I walk back. Eleven kilometres each way. It is the same distance I walked the afternoon of the door, and I did not plan that, and I noticed it in the second week.

At five the red earth is still cold. The light comes up grey then gold. The first okada starts somewhere behind the market. A woman sweeps a compound with a broom made of palm ribs and the sound is the sound of my whole childhood. By the time I am back at the stadium the loudspeakers have started and the city has opinions again, and I have already been alive for two hours without one.

A friend who walks with me sometimes says I should let him photograph it one day, the walk, the path by the old hotel, the sunglasses I wear so that the city cannot see where my eyes go. I have said not yet. I want to look, in the photograph, like a man going somewhere, and I am not sure yet that I am.

The walking is where the book gets written, I have realised. The typing is only the copying down.