I managed to return to Nigeria several times during my college years, and I very clearly remember those gripping knots in the pit of my stomach before I arrived, afraid that my home would somehow be too different for me to recognize. That my years away would have taken my memories of home and romanticized them, and perhaps I would find things as they never were…that perhaps I would be dissatisfied upon returning, or that home–this idea I had clutched for comfort for too long–would have completely disappeared. My memories of home and the hope of returning are what sustained me through each long day that crept by in America. What would I do if I should find it gone?

As I poured over some old journals the other day, I tripped over two entries from my very first journey home. Reading through them, I found myself right back there, struggling in that too-familiar thick mud of fear.

Wednesday, May 14, 1997

I sit now in a blue chair that provides me no comfort, and my bare toes rest beneath me on a large bag filled with my memories and my offerings to a country I shall try to find again. I lost it the day this book began: almost a year ago. Nigeria cried for me then, and every day since I have shed my own tears for her. She needs the comfort of sweet rain, as do I…yet I could not be there to taste it. My heart has yearned for this moment: this moment when I would be seated above the now narrow earth, traveling over oceans through sky and cloud.

And yet my heart is lost…and my mind with it. This last year languished in rotting memories. It had been my chance to journey forward, to make my own way in this immensely large world, to learn, to take my future-imaginings and build on them and make them come to pass. But my attempts all failed and I found myself standing still, motionless, surrounded by dreams while they moved on without me.

They moved on.

Is that, then, why I make this journey now? To return to my past that has haunted me–to a country that still boils in my blood–that I may face it and say to myself, “See? The land has not waited for you, precious. You MUST move on.” Excitement to return has clouded me for a while now. I’ve been unable to learn to love the new people in my life. “I just want to go home,” I would say, paralyzed. But it wasn’t real until I lay awake listening to the clock downstairs in my grandparents’ New Jersey home, chiming 4 in its muffled song. The sun not yet risen, my thoughts wakened and screamed silently, “It will NOT be the same! You shall be devastated…”

What a strange dance, this mingling of fear with excitement… And they grow stronger as my journey creeps forward. I am wrestling fiercely now with these two as I sit, finally moving closer to native soil. To grass huts and tin roofs. To the smell of rain and the dusty red fog of Harmattan…“To tear your breath apart” the Twi say it means. And it does tear my breath, thinking on all these things. This breath leaves me now, along with my thoughts, as I find myself suddenly and unexpectedly content to wait in silence for my journey to end.

I turn to the window. The sky is wonderful tonight as I write. Dark clouds create a horizon where there is none, and as the sun leaves us behind, a thin, pale blue line bleeds to green and into black as the darkness descends upon us.

What now?

I notice there are no stars tonight.

Friday, May 16, 1997

A long, restless journey has left me here in a guesthouse in Kano, 6 a.m. I have watched the sun rise up behind a cracked cement wall with a rippled tin roof that sits outside my window. I drew the curtain an hour ago to watch it. I gaze at the leaves of a flame tree blowing with hot Kano breezes, and drink in the sounds of birds singing to me in these early morning hours. Wake up! They sing. You shall not sleep this day away! Not this day. First day home. Nigeria.

I recall the tears I shed yesterday as the plane touched down. I was unable to tear myself from that window, too, immersing my soul in the sight of that vast, dusty landscape approaching, nearer, nearer, endeavoring to reach right through as the thud under my feet told me we had landed.

My feet were joyful. It didn’t take long to gather luggage and join the line that was making it out the door and down the iron stairs to the hot tarmac below. I stood at the top of those stairs, as heat slapped me in the face, drawing sweat from every gland all at once, but I loved it. My heart skipped into my throat as we walked across the tarmac, waving excitedly to family up above the terminal as they reached through that familiar iron rail. Tears again as I walk, hurrying to the crowded, dark room where we stand in line, and men with uniforms check our passports. Time drips by, but at length I find myself walking through the door to the outside world, spying familiar faces in a crowded parking lot. Love.

I cannot describe to you relief; the relief of tasting a country I had once left so far behind, thinking my eyes would never again lay upon it. But they held it yesterday, and they hold it still today. They wouldn’t let me sleep and miss a second of it. And to my heart’s delight, nothing here has changed. Kano is still the same. We journey the long roads to Jos today, and although I am anxious, I grip the hope that my home has waited for me.