A November Reckoning

My body won't let me rest.

Inhales slowly.

This agitation clings to me like the red laterite that stains everything in this city, it seeps into cloth and skin until it becomes part of you. I find myself playing the old childhood game: pressing my palms against my closed eyelids until colors bloom in the darkness, then releasing to see if reality feels more vivid than the manufactured kaleidoscope. Reality wins, barely.

It is November in Ibadan. The time when the year dies without ceremony and the sun hammers down as if unaware that elsewhere, the world is cooling into reflection. The cashew trees stand unrepentant in their fullness. The leaves are thick and waxy. Looking at them, I imagine the weight of light they carry, how their branches must ache from holding so much brightness without wilting. I'm not quite sure this part of the world understands seasons as gentle transitions. We experience degrees of fire. Someone once said Nigerians should never have to go to hell, whoever you are, I owe you two cups of ice-cream. This is truly not the sun you make hay in. To be here mostly feels like serving a term you haven't been sentenced for or perhaps you were sentenced without your consent. If Nigeria is the bridge you are supposed to cross, please stay back. You are better off on the other side.

Tolu Owoeye for Shutterstock.

Something is loosening within me. I believe this is the right moment to stop hiding behind careful words. This is the right moment to name what I've been circling around. This is the right moment to meet myself as I'm actually becoming. This is the right moment to exist without apology. Perhaps.

The afternoon sun transforms the zinc roofs into mirrors of heat and bends the air above them into liquid waves. Even the shade beneath the breadfruit tree offers only the illusion of coolness. My neighbour's hibiscus explodes in violent scarlet. It is thriving, despite the neglect visible in the cracked soil around its roots. Where I once constructed elaborate justifications and rehearsed explanations for every choice, there now lives a stripped-down truth I'm teaching myself to inhabit. It scratches like new fabric, this nakedness before myself. But it refuses to let me look away.

My fingers still grip pen and phone, still type and gesture and create, so something in me must be intact. Even when my voice falters, my hands continue their work. There is testimony in the ordinary motions, a pattern emerging like the footpaths that appear in grassland from countless feet walking the same direction without coordination.

Exhales fully.

I think about who I was during the last rainy season and wonder if that version of me would understand the person sitting here now. I consider how we molt like snakes, how certain identities fit only for particular chapters before they become constraints. If I could somehow return to that earlier self, what would even be the point? That skin doesn't fit anymore. No, literally. I actually gained some weight.

Like the way heat here doesn't build to a peak but simply persists, transformation feels both extraordinary and tediously slow.

I tell myself I'm evolving. Months have accumulated since I began dismantling old patterns. The evidence emerges in fragments, small. I feel a flutter of pride, though I'm afraid to grip it too tightly. I've scrolled through enough social media to know what change is supposed to resemble. Sweeping declarations, clean narratives, photogenic proof. Then I examine my own days: they contain quiet mornings and conversations with myself, afternoons that blur together and split seconds that crack open with clarity. I could easily dismiss it all as delusion, as wishful thinking disguised as growth. Holds breath.

Honestly, what I'm cultivating is the ability to remain upright when everything in me wants to collapse. The shift is so subtle that I doubt anyone notices, and I can't quite articulate why I refuse to make grand announcements or document every stumble forward.

Beyond this quiet renovation of self, November's heat excavates buried things and demands I acknowledge them. My adolescent ghost haunts every corner of these streets. Whenever I pass through Agodi or Mokola, there comes at least one moment where I think, God, the distance between then and now.

I'm cutting through the crowd at Gbaagi. Hawkers weave between stalled traffic ahead of me like they're charting my course. I navigate around a woman selling waist beads, and another frying puff puff, the groundnut oil smoke writes temporary shapes in the air, and I glimpse myself in a shop's glass door. The way I move through space has changed, less apologetic, more deliberate. I notice how my shoulders no longer curve inward. I pause at the fabric sellers' stalls and watch women run their practiced hands across ankara prints to assess quality. They appear casual, but their eyes are sharp and actively calculating, as if the wrong choice might unravel something larger than a garment.

Questions surface without permission: "WHY does this city still hold me?" "WHAT exactly am I constructing from these days?" "WHO is this person I keep glimpsing in unguarded moments?" "HOW will I recognize myself when the becoming is done?" I hunt for answers solid enough to silence the uncertainty and simply surrender to the process, but I keep coming up empty. Takes long breath. I settle on "I'm in motion" though even this feels like a phrase I'm trying on rather than one I've earned.

Still, the hours unfold. When they do, I feel November's heat working on me like a blacksmith's fire, burning away the accumulated lies I've been telling myself about who I had to be. I'm not who I was, I realize.

January will arrive brutal and unforgiving, but now there's a softening at the edges, the right temperature for me to stop flinching from discomfort and actually examine it. I sense the transformation again in how I meet difficulty. It permeates everything and refuses to leave any corner of my life untouched. It sweeps through like recognition after years of misunderstanding, gathering the scattered pieces I'd written off as lost forever, arranging them into something I'm beginning to recognize. One truth lodges itself firmly beneath my ribs. I turn my attention inward and discover a steady flame there, one so faint I'd missed it until now. This knowing is patient, as though it's been waiting through years of noise for me to finally stop running, prepared to illuminate whatever comes next. It speaks clearly like a radio station finally tuned to the right frequency, but tenderly enough not to shatter this tentative new architecture of self. When I finally accept what's been taking root inside me, I let go.

This recognition is the most important thing happening to me, and I catch myself nearly smiling as it radiates through my chest. I measure how deeply my lungs can expand now. Twenty-four long years of breathing. Phew x24.

My stomach tightens when old versions of myself attempt a comeback: the voice insisting I'm fooling everyone, the urge to minimize my presence, to perform. I watch myself as if from outside my body, moving in slow motion as I choose differently this time, speaking truth instead of the palatable lie, staying present instead of retreating into fantasy, all of it deliberate, all of it building toward a way of existing I haven't fully mapped yet. The unfamiliarity of it destabilizes me. When the old self whispers its familiar poison, I meet it without flinching and say, "I hear you, I hear you."

The nights have transformed into something I anticipate rather than dread. My mind has stopped its relentless circling and learned to simply be. I position myself by the sliding window to witness what darkness makes visible. The sodium streetlights paint everything the colour of old photographs, throwing long shadows that emphasize the worn footpaths, the peeling paint on compound walls, the strange dignity in things that have survived.

The rains will intensify soon and turn the red earth to rivers of rust. Within a few months, the landscape will erupt in colours that seem impossible for this heat-beaten city. The sun will continue its interrogation and expose what's merely enduring and what has genuinely taken root. Only what's willing to be broken open will truly transform, their flowering will be unmistakable. But inevitably, the heat will return, and offer me another opportunity to decide who I'm becoming. This show must go on.