An excerpt from a book with (presently) no name (and probably no future)

This is a chapter from a 'book'* I was working on last year; so many 'books' have found (permanent) residences - that should really be temporary camps - on my laptop:

*Warning: there might/probably will be typos.

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LA had been nice; the sunshine and the macarons from the small shop on the corner of Atlantic Boulevard he and Suzie were addicted to had been nice, heartwarming, shielding, pacifying. He had not necessarily wanted to leave America or her, but he had always known – and he doesn’t know how he knew or where the knowing came from – that he wanted to move back to Nigeria after school.

He had felt superior back then, thirteen months ago, freshly back; superior to the writers he met at Jazz Club Ikoyi and Lagos Writers’ Forum and all the other small gatherings of people with foreign accents and masks for lives Ejike dragged him to. He felt superior to the writers who had never been abroad, writers who taught themselves how many inches to indent from the margin when introducing a new character to a scene, writers who were originally housewives and accountants and lawyers and engineers and students and had left all they knew and had plunged head first into the lake of the daunting ‘literary world’.

            He knew now, however, after over a year back, that Lagos was no small joke, and that Nigeria intended to choke the life out of you right from Murtala Mohammed Airport. He was counting the duration of his time back in months; he never counted anything, had never really kept track of anything, but now he was counting months, weeks. When people asked him, “How long have you been back?” he said, “Thirteen months” and that always drew funny looks or laughter from the person he was talking to, like that black American woman he met at Ejike’s sister’s house warming party a few months ago, who giggled and said, “Why don’t you just say a year?”

            She was pretty, the black American woman. She had a narrow face and her head was covered with brown and blonde bursts of thick, curly hair. She spoke a lot about her hair, her ‘transitioning’, her regiment, how she missed some products she could only get in Chicago – no, not the rest of America, just Chicago – because the woman who made them had only just started her line of natural hair and beauty products and everything was homemade and fairly expensive. She missed the coconut oil and the Shea butter and the hair milk and the moisturizer, which she especially needed because the bleached parts of her hair were prone to dryness especially in this African humidity. As she spoke, she occasionally touched her hair and ran her thumb and index finger through a handful of locks, dragged it down to her shoulder and then released it, let it bounce back into place. She and Folarin sat in the kitchen for much of the party and she spoke about her parents in Chicago and her son and her Nigerian best friend, Anwulika, and her Nigerian fiancé, Nathan, whom she had met at school in Loyola College, and Folarin listened. Her name was Yolanda.

            Thirteen months. He had been back thirteen months and each morning that came after the dark nights, and he sat at his computer and tried to read, write, work, he regretted moving back home. He regretted leaving Suzie. He regretted leaving Los Angeles in so much haste, clouded by what he now saw as foolish optimism.

            “You should be here,” Suzie had told him one night over Skype. Her straight jet black hair fell past her shoulders, covering parts of her bare breasts, breasts which were paler than the rest of the skin on her body, breasts he could barely see, because the internet was slow and the image was blurry and kept freezing. He had wanted to tell her that he could not see her clearly, but he did not. He had instead said, “You look sexy, babe,” when she had asked if he liked what he saw.

You should be here. She hadn’t meant it in a sexual way; it hadn’t been about her nakedness. She had meant it in a commonsense way, that he should be in America rather than in Nigeria; in a country where life was easier and things actually worked the way they ought to, as opposed to one where power wasn’t constant and roads were potholed and hospitals might as well be mortuaries and everyone was angry at the government but could do nothing about it.

Twitter was a depressing place to be in the mornings, and he made himself promise not to go on Twitter before noon, because that was when traffic had died down, Third Mainland Bridge was once again accessible and the respectable people who – when stuck in traffic would turn to Twitter to air their frustrations about the country, mentioning topics unrelated to the traffic that was imprisoning them, like the missing 20 billion naira and the procured armored vehicles – were finally safe at work. Twitter was the third largest political party in Nigeria, and it was the weakest.

After thirteen months of working on projects and not getting paid immediately and then ending up getting paid only a fraction of what was initially agreed on, supplemented by flimsy excuses, Folarin concluded that he and his talent, his passion for film and his MFA from LA Film School were as ordinary and as disposable as the next guy’s qualifications. It was a bitter pill to swallow. After thirteen months of being stifled, of registering a company which only had ten thousand naira to its name, of getting links to ‘industry big shots’ who in the end treated him like an intern and offered to pay chicken change for documents he had spent sleepless nights slaving over, after thirteen months of what Suzie called “first grade bullshit”, Folarin understood that he was, in the end, nothing. After endless weeks of watching his optimism go down the drain, his vision blur and his happiness dwindle, Folarin settled into a life in his self-contained room in Surulere which consisted of writing, hoping, Indomie and porn. It was nothing, it was fleeting, all of it, but even then, it was all that he had.