Miss You, Love -- Maria Mena

I’ll miss walking around downtown at 2 in the morning and not feeling the least bit threatened.
I’ll miss going to concerts and hanging out with rockstars thereafter. (Okay, that only happened the one time, but damn was it fun!)
I’ll miss advanced movie screenings of small-budget movies that will likely never get a huge theatrical release.
I’ll miss New York
I’ll miss my winter coat, hats and scarves, even though I never thought those words would escape my lips. I’ll miss how snow makes everything beautiful.
Good God, how I’ll miss my friends.
I’ll miss hopping on the train and arriving where I need to be twenty minutes later.
I’ll miss steady, constant, fast Internet, not to mention steady and constant electricity.
I’ll miss Friday Night Lights, The Office and 30 Rock.
I’ll miss my siblings.
I’ll miss my independence.
I’ll miss Macy’s, and shopping in general.
I’ll miss not being able to wear that sexy-ass trench coat I bought two months ago in anticipation of the fall.

I will NOT miss not having a job, not having any money, being depressed all the time, not having a dog, being plan-less and purposeless., being a guest in what feels like home.

So I suppose there’s always trade-offs.

Homeward Bound -- Simon and Garfunkel

I made the decision to return to Nigeria last Tuesday. I was sitting on a couch with my brother-in-law in Brooklyn and he asked me a simple question I couldn’t answer. “What are you doing here?” Simple as that. “What are you doing here?” You’re allowed to be uncertain about a lot of things in life but I’m fairly confident that your reason for being shouldn’t be one of them.

I’ll give you some background. America, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the most sensible basis upon which to award work visas was a lottery. And as with every other lottery I’ve ever entered into, my name was conspicuously absent from the shortlist when all was said and done. I hung around the US for a year after that hoping for – I dunno – a visa to fall out the sky or something. I worked a couple of odd jobs here and there and got by on my swiftly diminishing savings and the kindness of strangers. Finally, that afternoon on the couch, I was forced to own up to the fact that I was killing myself to stay in a country that, by all appearances, no longer wanted me. It had given me no job. It had given me no money. It had given me no joy. I was in a relationship that was well past its sell-by date. In fact, I was no longer in a relationship; I was in a relation-shit and it was time to end it.

So, it was with this understanding that I made the decision to go back home. I use this term ‘home’ loosely because we are talking about a place that I haven’t been to, or really wanted to go to in seven years. I’ve done all my growing up in Washington DC; went on my first date, went to my first concert, got my first job, bought my first home. Sure, Lagos was where I was born, but how would I fit in there as a fully-formed, incredibly opinionated woman? How would I live in a city where you have to drive everywhere when I’ve spent the last seven years living in one with a subway stop on every corner? How would I live in a city where a good day means you got two hours of constant electricity instead of one?

They say you can never go home again? Well, for my sake, let’s hope that’s not true.