Walking

A friend with a real camera walked with me this morning, the five o'clock walk, and on the paved path by the old hotel he said stop, and I did not stop, and he took it anyway: a man in black, sunglasses, a small bag across the chest, mid-stride, looking down at his phone. Black and white. Trees behind. The paving stones cracked the way every paving stone in Owerri is cracked.

I have looked at it fifty times. It is the picture of me I would choose if I were only allowed one. Not because I look good in it, though the coat is doing its work. Because I look like a man who is going somewhere and has not arrived, and that is the truest thing anyone has ever said about me with a camera.

The lawyer in Lagos says the paper is close. Spring, maybe summer. I have stopped believing in seasons. But the bag is still under the bed and the manuscript is now three manuscripts, because once the first one had a shape the others came out behind it like children, and I have a plan for them that involves a country where a book with my name on it is only a book.

Pill at nine. Took it. Three thousand four hundred nights, roughly. I stopped counting the nights when the line started, because the line gave me something else to count.