A Collection of Longing

I am sitting in a concrete grey bench in a place called the Upper Lea park. The clouds are angry, and it looks like they want to throw down the rains. There is also the Lower park, but I love upper things more. The park stares at the high-rise buildings at downtown and where there is a white cross on the mountain. All the summer, I was always there, reading or just listening to music from my phone. It takes me fifteen minutes to walk from my apartment to the park, a water bottle in my hand and Sabrina Claudio’s newest album in my air pods. I liked to see the way people walked in there, in groups or coupled, watching the city, zooming their cameras to take pictures of the Weststar logo that has just turned to rainbow from Pride Month. I loved how a tall woman that walked as though she was running brought her huge dog to the park, letting the dog sit, stand, stroll and sit again. I am sitting there now, in this same grey concrete bench that could sit two lovers, but I am taking all the space and reading a tiny book I have fallen in love with because I am loving myself all this week. I am sitting legs crossed and watching El Paso High School and thinking of the first time I was in this city. It was the same feeling you would have when you are coming into a new place. My feeling was not different, but it’s over a year now, and nostalgia has poured on me. It is struggling with the nostalgia I have when I remember Nigeria and my family and friends. My younger brother has just moved to the UK to start graduate studies and in our numerous facetimes, I see his face, with the same nostalgia of “leaving home”, but I am done with that “leaving home” nostalgia, I am now struggling with the nostalgia of my first week in America.

I am remembering the day I jumped into the plane in Lagos, my family dropping me at the airport, filling two Toyota cars, waving and smiling, but I did not stare at them for too long, I did not wave back, because I didn’t want the tears to come, but they still came while I got into the plane and covered my head with a large cardigan I had brought with me. My mother handed it to me a month before, holding it at the crook of her arm in front of my bedroom, under the half current because transformer has blown, and she said: Here, there is too much cold in America. I wish she knew what I would meet as soon as I landed at the airport in Chicago. They waved until I joined the long queue and until the queue let me disappear into the plane. The woman who sat beside me was eating everything that passed, bread, noodles, rice, juice, cake, chicken. I was too tired, but food wasn’t my problem. I wanted the plane to just keep moving, nonstop. The woman asked me: do you eat at all? Hunger has not found you yet? I smiled and said no, I am fine. Before the plane had flown out of Lagos, she had been on calls with several of her relatives who teased her, who called her back when the network tripped off, who showered her with text messages before we flew away.

“Where in America are you going to? Which State?” She asked me, pushing her hair backwards, reducing the air conditioner vent above her head. “These people don’t know there is cold in the sky” She said

“I am going to Texas” I said

“Ah, where for Texas? I know Texas very well. My husband was living inside Midland; do you know the place? Midland. It’s like a village. It is not like the real America sef” She said

“No, I am going to El Paso” I said

“Wow, I know the place, too much rocks and too much mountains and good people, so many good people, also desert and Spanish, it is a good place” She said. When she said it was a good place, it came with this huge certainty in her voice, that glaring assurance, like she has lived there for years, like her review was going to help me or it was like air that I needed to breathe, like if she told me it was not good- I could turn back and cancel my trip.

After the plane had finished flying over those beautiful skyscrapers and that wide river in Chicago, bending as though it was going to land in water, we arrived in the morning when 10am had a scorching sun, too early for that sort of a sun to appear. It was hotter than Lagos. I knew about summer, although we didn’t have summer in Nigeria, but I never imagined that was the version of sun that America owned in the summer. Northern Nigeria was known for too much sun, sun that darkened your skin or caused you meningitis, but I was sure this sun was more than Northern Nigeria. My chocolate was melted, the bottled water in my bag had become undrinkable, tasting like medicine, my face was warm when I touched it, the cold I felt in the plane had become far away from my body. Heat and sun had taken over my entire life. The cardigan that my mother gave me was in my bag. It was not really for American cold, like she had thought. But the cardigan saved me in all the airports I passed, spreading it like a shawl over my shoulders and running up and down, making sure the zip of my small box was never open so that I will not tell another story on top of this one that I am telling now.

I was in an Airbnb while I searched for an apartment, it was a small, pretty bungalow with an air conditioner that chilled you till you froze like anything in the freezer. Juan was the owner of the Airbnb and was too kind, his house full of plants, his backyard, a garden of orange and blue and yellow flowers. I was scared that darkness did not come until 9pm. It felt like this was not the world I belonged in. Why would it be 8pm and the sun was still preparing to leave? Africa did not have that. Nigeria didn’t behave that way. In my small room, a big television in front of me, a cargo train passing once or twice a day behind me, I slept with Nigerian time and still woke up with the Nigerian time although the time over me was different. The clock in Juan’s living room was the reality. Nigeria was seven hours ahead of me. Everything was too new, too different, even air. At the graduate orientation, some of the snacks were too sugary that I wondered how it was like to make a meal in America without pouring sugar. The banana bread that Efe bought me from Walmart a day before was sugar bread and not banana bread. If that was the version of banana bread that was sold in Nigeria, the bakers and their companies and the markets will go empty and hungry because mothers will fear the sugar will melt their children’s teeth. It seemed everyone loved pies, pumpkin pie, apple pie, pie and pie. Everyone asked what my height was, what my age was, questions we did not ask in Nigeria, questions that were nothing but conversation starters, sometimes questions that were not too necessary for even conversation starting.

For some months, I lived in this large shared apartment full of international students from Africa and just one American man, J. J was too kind and usually placed a box of snacks or fruits in the general kitchen with a note that wanted anyone to eat. Sometimes we ate, sometimes we didn’t eat. It was at a place called Sunset Heights, a neighborhood that felt close to home, with those old buildings that lined up like human beings, like someone carefully placed them one after the other. Cats peeped from windows, American flags stuck at verandah railings, Beto’s poster plastered on car windscreens parked on streets, lights littered in front of the grasses in people’s houses. Juan and his wife, the couple I lived in their Airbnb had visited me with two pots of indoor plants. They said they liked how we talked the week I was in their house, and how they thought I would love plants. One of the plants is atop my shelf now and I water it once in two weeks and it flourishes in a way I never expected. It drools and encroaches. It spreads over the pile of books in my shelf like a clothe covering a body. It pours down each day and crawls majestically and I love when they appear in my photos. I left the same type of plants in our house in Lagos before coming to America. It would follow me to the next location I would be at. In the shared house, my bedroom was too large. It would contain two persons. My window faced Mexico. When I zoom my camera, there is a mountain and there are trees and there is a bridge, and then there is Mexico. I am reminded of Trump’s wall, we heard the news in Nigeria, a wall that was just politically separating lands and marking absent boundaries but could not separate identities and cultures and humanities. A boy from Juarez would have his mother in El Paso Texas, his father in Juarez, and his other sibling in El Paso Texas, and his work would be in El Paso Texas every day. The walls do not really stop humanity from happening. I was going to miss the view when I would move out of the location.

Now I am sitting in the large living room of my new apartment, the second place I am living since I came here, a big wall painting of a beach in California over me, then another wall painting of a faceless black girl in front of me, facing the kitchen but her body tilted towards me like she was looking at me even when she had no face of her own, another dark abstract painting on the dining room hall that I had taken from the Baptist International Student’s fellowship, the place that allowed international students take essential things that they would need for free.

I am remembering Lagos and the sound of aero planes that suffocate our ears in our house that sat close to the military base. The military base was behind the estate, and once I tried to visit there on a Sunday evening, staring at the small bungalows as though it was another Africa. Each bungalow had the wife of a soldier and their kids in front of their verandah, playing or picking beans or pouring their eyes onto a phone screen that showed a video. The petrol station and the church and the hospital in the base made it seem like the houses I saw in my dream, like a movie location.

Over one year away from Nigeria, away from family, from friends I had made in years, writing about this West Texas city that its mountains have captured me. I am writing this essay in my apartment on Cutler’s Street, where the mountains look over downtown. I am teaching two first year writing classes this semester and it has been so interesting and such a coincidence how me and my students have seamlessly talked about how powerful words can be and how a new location ushers in a new form of beauty for you. My students are freshmen and are in our university for the first time. In as much as they are feeling so clingy to high school, they are also experiencing new ways, new styles, new methods of existing and performing in a university, new forms of academic beauty. I use music before and after class and a student walked in and asked: Sir, is this the writing class? I said yes and he smiled. Comfort and calmness hung on his face.

I am eating pizza, and I can say the best places to get pizza, to get steak, to get cocktail, to get coffee, to hike, to read. That is what happens when you find beauty in a city that is not your own. Each time I am out of here, and in Maryland or Arizona or New Mexico or Atlanta, the only places I have visited so far, I say I am going back to El Paso in a way people say they are going home. My home is in Nigeria, but I say I am going back to my base, like my base is where the people on the Street call me by my name and wave at me and smile. When I was coming to this city for graduate school, I did not think it would become a mountain beauty because it is best to see than to hear.