The Port Harcourt road at dawn
The last walk to the mango tree, my mother's hands, the airport gate. Written in the air.
Written on the plane, on the phone, with the printout of a hundred and eighty pages in the bag under the seat in case the phone is taken, which it was not.
Five o'clock. The last walk. Stadium road, Port Harcourt road, the checkpoint with the soldiers asleep, the polytechnic gate, Obinze, D10, the mango tree. Charles was waiting under it. He did not say anything. He walked back with me to the road and stood there while the bus came, a man taller than me, with his hands in his pockets, and when the bus door opened he said, send for me, and I said I will, and I do not know if it is true and neither does he.
Mama did not come to the road. She had said she would not, in the kitchen, the night before, with her hands on my face for the third time: I have watched too many people get on buses in this land. I will stay in my kitchen and you will call me from there. So I called her from the airport gate, in the specific silence of the airport gate, where you are not yet gone and no longer home, and she said, have you eaten, and I said yes, and she said, then go.
Owerri, grey in the early harmattan, behind me. Nine years of notebooks in the bag. Undetectable. Twenty-eight. The woman under the umbrella gave me a Fanta for the plane and would not take the money. I am drinking it now, over the desert, and I am going to stop writing because I cannot see the screen.