Here is what I remember: the room was small. I know this because when we arrived in Ohio and I saw the bedroom my father had prepared for me, I thought it was approximately the same size, and that room felt enormous.
Lagos first. The bed was pushed against the wall on the left side, which meant you entered the room and the bed was the first thing you encountered. Above it, my mother had hung a calendar from Eko Hotels that was two years out of date. The month showing was March. I do not remember which March. The calendar stayed because it had a photograph of the hotel's swimming pool, blue and improbable, and I found it calming in a way I could not have explained then and will not try to explain now.
The window faced east. This was relevant because in Lagos in July the morning light was not gentle. You did not sleep past six if you wanted to. What I did not know then was that I would spend the next several years in Ohio fighting to get light like that back, a fight you cannot win against a Cleveland winter.
There was a shelf my father had built himself, which is to say it was level on one end. On it I kept the things I had decided were important: a metal tin that had once held biscuits and now held nothing in particular, a cassette of King Sunny Ade that belonged to my uncle and that I had never returned, three books in varying stages of being read, and a painted wooden figure my grandfather had given me that was supposed to be a warrior but looked, to be specific, like a man who had just heard surprising news.
The floor was tile. Cold in the harmattan months, cool in the hot ones. I developed the habit of keeping my slippers directly beside the bed because I had learned, at age six, that you did not want to put your feet directly on that tile in the morning. This was a lesson you only needed once.
The walls were a white that had been white some years ago. There was a brown water stain in the upper right corner that my mother had been asking my father to address since before I was born, or so it seemed. He did not address it. It became part of the room. By the time I was eight I no longer saw it, the way you stop hearing a sound that is always there.
What I kept under the bed is more interesting. A notebook, not for school, which I was writing a story about a boy who discovers his compound contains a door to another city. I did not finish this story. I also kept a tennis ball I had found, still useful. A pair of sandals that no longer fit. A rolled-up poster of the Super Eagles squad from 1994, the World Cup team, which I had taken down from the wall when I decided I was too old for posters and too principled to simply leave it up.
This was my reasoning at eight.
The room had a smell. All rooms do. This one was woodsmoke from the kitchen below, something floral from whatever my mother put in her wardrobe, and the specific dry-dust smell of a city that does not worry much about rain until rain arrives. I cannot smell woodsmoke now without a second of involuntary relocation. You do not choose what your body holds onto.
When we moved to Ohio, I was allowed to bring one bag of things that were not clothes. I took the King Sunny Ade cassette, the wooden figure, the unfinished notebook, and, at the last moment, the tennis ball. The calendar I left. The shelf stayed, obviously. The stain stayed.
What I left behind, which I didn't understand until much later, was not any of those objects. It was the version of myself that knew how to be in that room. How to hear the compound at night, how to sleep through certain noises and wake for others, how to be a person in that specific place. That knowledge does not transfer. You arrive somewhere new and you have to build it again from scratch.
Some people find this sad.
I have come to think of it as one of the first things I ever learned to do.
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