Dark at four
Nobody warned me about the light. On the first English winter, the radiator, and what freedom looks like as paperwork.
It is dark at four in the afternoon. Nobody told me. In Owerri the sun is a clock, six to six, every day of my life, and here it comes up grey at eight and gives up at four, and I sit in the room with the radiator I have finally understood and the window I have stopped looking out of because there is nothing in it but other windows.
I want to write the true things about the first winter, because when I am on the phone to Owerri I tell the other true things, the ones that are easier to hear. So: I have gone a week without a conversation. I have been in a shop and had a man from Imo State recognise my face and watch it change on his. I have stood in a queue at an office with a number and understood that the freedom I crossed the world for arrives as a form, and then another form, and then a letter that says wait.
And also: on Thursday, on the high street, in the dark at four, two men walked past me holding hands, and nobody looked. Nobody. I stopped on the pavement and watched them to the corner and I had to lean on a wall.
Mama on the phone every Sunday, from the kitchen; I can hear the knife. Charles on WhatsApp, sending photographs of the mango tree as if it might have moved. The line: a British number now, on the site, my phone, which is never off. Pill at nine. Took it. It is dark at four and I am not hiding from anyone, and I did not know those two things could be true at the same time.