You still can’t believe that you have your passport to heaven and it has been stamped. A glance at the desperate faces waiting in a long line at the embassy makes you smile. Their fate is still in the hands of Americans. You pity these people. You are a hundred times better than them, especially the ones with oversize scarecrow suits hanging on their emaciated shoulders. Then there are the hopefuls with bend-bend black shoes covered in fine dust the colour of Ibadan rusted roofs. The ones who have been in the queue since 4am, eating only bread and akara washed down with bottles of warm coke or tap water wrapped in nylon bags. You shake your head. They all remind you of a column of ants marching towards a single grain of sugar.

The ocean has called me for as long as I can remember. Papa used to say I had salt water in my veins. I imagine I was born there, that Maame Aba squatted in the water and pushed me out and away from her. I imagine that the salty water filled my nose upon my first breath. It is only right for me to give my life back to it.

My mother had told me to look up her sister when I came to the District, that she’d take care of me. I didn’t know what she meant by “take care of.” Aunt Mary was a spinster. Her prized only son was seemingly immaculately conceived, and then gunned down at twenty-five in a way that made my mother shake her head and murmur about how Atlanta was right where she needed to be. When her son died there wasn’t much else for Aunt Mary to concentrate on besides her bid whist game and E&J, which she said was short for Ease & Jesus. She couldn’t cook; her culinary misadventures were fodder for stories my mother told to smooth over missing her sister.

Photo credit: Lola Flash

The Girl ambles along the chaotic trail worn into the sandy earth by the hundreds walking before her. Cold, cold, is all she thinks, as she pulls the frayed corners of the woven blanket tighter around her thin shoulders. She walks, not raising her head, instead letting herself be guided by the Old Woman several paces in front of her.