I do not want to return home, I want to be at home.
In Basel, everyone was well behaved, the trains were clean and well maintained, everything moved with a precision I had not experienced in France, especially Paris. I hadn’t stayed in Basel, I attended a friend’s show in Baden, a small town an hour away, quieter and more orderly. It was not for this reason that I cried on the train home. It was not because I missed my friend, or that I had begun to fall apart in France. It was because I had left a part of me in Baden. It was a familiar feeling that came after leaving every place I had visited or lived in, but it was the first time I could name it. It was an irrational grief, a fear of abandonment that emerged from little migrations.
My earliest memory of myself was of my sister, my mom and I arriving into a small one bedroom flat, after my mom moved us out of Jos, a city in central Nigeria, to take on a new job elsewhere. It was our makeshift home till she found a place.
It was a strange thing because we moved out on the same day she got the confirmation letter. We hurried through everything, packing our clothes, saying goodbye to my grandma and rushing to a car that was already waiting outside. Later, we moved out of the space to a bigger and nicer home. It was a large compound with three identical bungalows. Here, I formed memories of my early childhood. I had two friends, Aisha, and a boy whose name I can’t remember.
The three families did not have much in common, but they agreed on one thing: that we wouldn’t go through a public islamic education system. So we had a Mallam come to the house a few times a week, to teach us, gently, without the assault that was familiar with Tsangayas. When we weren’t learning arabic alphabets, watching arabsat or doing homework, we were climbing the trees that lined the compound, and eating unripe mangoes. Other times I was swallowing needles or earrings and ending up in the ER. Fun times!
But the fun did not last long. My mom died a few years later and my dad moved my sister and I back to Jos, where we stayed in the family house. My dad was constantly travelling for work.
Jos had its transitions as well. Shortly after the 2001 crisis, we moved from the family house into the federal housing estate, then I left home to attend boarding school close to the town we had moved away from after the crisis.
I eventually left Jos again, to go to university in my mother’s hometown, a small state school that gave me my first boyfriend and my first heartbreak. I largely hated the four years I spent there; it was not a ranked school, I didn’t like my course of study and I was confused about whether it was a state school or an islamic school. There were a lot of restrictions on boys and girls mixing outside of formal spaces, there were at least 7 mosques within the compound (it’s a really small school), and a large central mosque for Friday prayers. We had a lecturer who organized the seating arrangements in his class by gender and a classmate who believed her husband’s investment in her education was a waste. I was counting down till the end of the madness.
Before my last semester in school, my dad passed away. I completed the final semester and quickly moved back to Jos. But living there became unbearable, every man that walked around in a kaftan reminded me of my father. Also, it was a sleepy city that held no space for the things I wanted to pursue.
I decided to move to Abuja and here, I built a new life, completely different from what I used to have. I shed my former self and took on something more effective. I decided this would be home, I had some family already living here, I started building a network, and made friends who are now the centre of my world.
I never planned to leave, anytime someone proposed emigration, I would bring up the popular anti-emigration pep talk ‘If we all leave, who will fix the country?’ After the #EndSARS protests in 2020, this resolve changed, not because I was mercilessly beaten by policemen, and my friend had her skull fractured but because it felt like that was the right thing to do.
I found myself in France in the Autumn of 2022, surrounded by a strange newness. While in the back of the Uber that drove me from CDG to Gare de Lyon, I remember thinking some of the bridges looked exactly like the ones I had left back home. For a moment, it felt like I was back in Abuja, sitting in an Uber taking me to my Wuse apartment or to my friend’s home in Guzape.
My first year in France was spent in Business school in Dijon, I did three things; go to school, then home and every now and then, the grocery store. Oh, there was a 4th place, the Cité Internationale de la Gastronomie et du Vin, a gourmet market with a lot of bistros, fine dining and a wine cellar with over 3000 labels. I’d go round and sample vendors, like I wasn’t the complete opposite of a trust-fund baby. The financial recklessness was exhilarating.
I was often reminded that I was at a good place to travel the world without visa hassles. I understood the enthusiasm but I never felt it. I was on a call with a friend once, and he mentioned that Dijon was just two hours away from Geneva and I could take a day trip. I was hesitant. He sent me some money later that day, as he thought my hesitance was due to a fiscal crunch. I invested that money into my exploration of the Cité and touring cafes in Dijon. Another time a schoolmate wanted to go on a trip to the same location and I had a good excuse to decline this time. I was her love interest, but she wasn’t mine. I told her it was a really bad time and I had a lot going on. I simply was not interested. She was so excited about seeing the UN building, I almost felt bad.
I had always thought I loved to travel, but when I moved to Europe, where I was surrounded with no one but myself, a lot of truths emerged. I realized saying I loved travel was an inherited desire, something I said to sound cool and ‘open-minded’, or maybe it was simply because it wasn’t accessible to me then that I yearned for it.
I came to see that there were desires that I inherited and now claimed as mine, but travel was not one of them. Surely, I was curious about the world but in other ways, reading books for instance.
The pain of losing my books is another migratory hazard that almost physically hurts. Apart from avoiding the expense of paying for extra luggage, I have no permanent place to keep the mountain of books I have acquired over the years. So every time I move out of a city, I leave my books with family or friends, and tell them to look after it till I am able to ask them to send it over.
In May of 2023, I moved from Dijon to Metz, a border city between France and Luxembourg to begin an end of study work experience program. I was going to be a frontailer; working in one country and living in another. I have been in Metz for two years now but almost every day of these two years, I have existed in a state of limbo, an anxious readiness for my next destination. Anxious because I do not know where that place will be or what I will be doing there.
I am untethered, consistently overwhelmed by the mental logistics of wondering if the clothes in my wardrobe will fit into two boxes. Whether I can drag them to the train station or if I’ll just order an uber. I also have to manage the books I have now acquired here. These transitions have caused the idea of traveling, of becoming familiar with a place to be a thorn at my side. I do not look forward to exploring new places, to receiving their poetry, and slowly watching as the taste of that music leaves my mouth.
I understand some will argue that this is the way it is supposed to be, that we are supposed to leave some parts of ourselves and carry some parts of the places we visit in us, that this is the entire point. I do not disagree, it probably is.
But I have come to another realization, it is not simply about the emotional drain, or missing my friends, or a lack of interest, it’s because I am more interested in the idea of being at home, than returning home. That I am exasperated from the feeling that my body is moving luggage. Going on a short term or long term journey is the same to me. The sense of loss is almost unbearable, it reminds me that I do not belong, but I want to belong. It reminds me that I am a long way from home, but that there is also no home to return to. I have become acutely aware of death, of the fact that when I leave a city there’s almost a 100% chance that’d be the last time I’ll ever be there and it is a shallow, terrifying feeling.
Maybe one day when I sit in a place where my books are stacked on a shelf, after I’ve gathered them from every home they’ve occupied, when I’ve placed my boxes in a closet and I’m not mentally mapping my next move, when everything that belongs to me and to those I love find their place, I won’t be so afraid. Maybe then, I will be ready to pack my bags. I’d be enthusiastic about seeing the UN building, Mount Kilimanjaro, The Pyramids, Victoria Lake and all of the undeniable beauties that exist in this world. But for now, I want to build mine and live in it.