Returning...

“like a child passing through, never knowing the reason. I am home, I know the way. I am home, feeling oh, so far away.”


I slept non-stop through the flight from Newark to London. This was partially because I refused to sleep the night before, opting instead to fiddle with minute details at the last moment. I also washed, dried and curled my hair and spoke to Rico* via phone and webcam.

Rico was an easy choice as a final conversation. He’s easy to talk to and happens to be in my same position. Talking to Rico also meant I didn’t have to talk to my friends whom I was lamentably sorry to bid adieu. Rico meant I didn’t have to hear my best friends voice only a short ride away for the last time in a long time, or explain to my other bfbf why I’d been so unbearably distant lately.

Sleep is like my own personal morphine. In the comfort of one’s own personal abyss, sadness doesn’t exist except in dreams and even then it doesn’t seem real, but detached and floating. The night before, I always forcefully ensure I can achieve a blissfully unaware state of relaxation. On the first leg of any journey that I am apprehensive about, sleep is my security blanket, blotting out the anxiety, the dread and the uncertainty.

In the airport at Newark, while I passed my passport to the ticketing agent, my mother walked up behind me and placed a hand on my shoulder and another hand on my dad’s shoulder.

“Don’t look now,” she whispered, “But Phylicia Rashad is standing right there about to check in.”

Unfortunately, as soon as we heard ‘don’t look now’ my dad and I proceeded to crane our necks in her general direction. Sure enough, in a red sweater and blue jeans standing about 5’5”, there she was. Her face was paler than I remembered and surrounded by fluffy black hair. She smiled. She knew and so did we.

As I stood there, the ticketing agent next to me beckoned to her. There I was thinking about how quickly I could self-administer my sleep-morphine with Madame Rashad standing right next to me. Claire Huxtable would be so disappointed with my particular brand of cowardice.

Once I landed at Heathrow airport, (I awoke during the final descent and became cognizant just in time to hear the plane’s wheels hit the tarmac) I became expectant. Usually, at this point and juncture I get happy. Duty-free window-shopping is my last and final retail binge. Its’ a shameless free-for-all. This time I stock up on pharmacy lotion and liquid eyeliner. I also claw my way through the crowd to reach the much-sought-after Starbucks counter and order my last caramel macchiato (skim) and it was good. Fantastic.

What I did not expect to feel rolling over my tongue along with the espresso and caramel syrup was the same apprehension I nursed while placing my bags on the scale at the check in counter at Newark. Something about this trip was not like the others. I had a sense of excitement before, a constantly occurring new beginning, my chance to start over.

I stayed awake between London and Lagos. I had run out of sleep-morphine and like any addict going through withdrawl, I broke out in a cold sweat, had chills and forcibly stifled the urge to rock back and forth.

I ordered two glasses of wine during the meal which I did not eat. My father stared at me, his eyes inquiring. I quickly turned from him and up-ended the last of the house white into my mouth. There I held it and contemplated asking for more when I noticed the small old woman sitting beside me staring at my two already emptied glasses. I decided against another but pondered revisiting the first two for those last droplets that settle at the bottom, waiting.

Lagos was exactly how I remembered it, but that ‘home’ feeling was not-so-mysteriously absent. I wondered if it was my attitude, or my feeling toward what and who I’d left behind there, situations changed or dissolved, or if this place simply no longer welcomed me. For the first time since I moved here, I entered this city feeling like a stranger.