Nobody tells you about the suitcase.
Dimka Esther@estherdimka2506
10 days ago
Nobody tells you about the suitcase.
They tell you about the opportunity. The visa. The scholarship. The job offer. The better life. They say congratulations and you are so lucky and do not forget about us when you make it.
Nobody tells you about standing in your childhood bedroom at 3 AM, trying to fit your entire identity into 23 kilograms.
I packed and unpacked that suitcase four times the night before I left. Each time I took something out, it felt like I was choosing which piece of home I was willing to lose. The photograph of my grandparents made the cut. The wooden spoon my mother used to threaten me with that she said would bring me luck - that made the cut. Three of my father's old records that I had no way to play but could not leave behind.
I left my secondary school jersey. I left the blanket from my bed. I left the first poem I ever wrote, folded inside a textbook. I told myself I would come back for those things. I have not been back.
The airport was the hardest part. Not security, not the flight - the moment after you pass through the gate and you turn around and the people you love are behind glass. They are waving but you cannot hear them anymore. You are already in the country you are going to and they are already in the country you are leaving and the glass between you is not glass. It is the rest of your life.
The first month in the new country, I opened the suitcase and everything smelled like home. My mother's perfume on the shirts she folded. The faint smell of jollof from the container she packed that customs almost took. I sat on the floor of a room that was not mine and smelled those clothes and cried the kind of tears that do not make sound.
Five years later, nothing in my apartment smells like home anymore. I have new furniture and new clothes and a new accent that slips out without my permission. I am becoming someone my twelve-year-old self would not recognize. I do not know if that is success or loss.
Here is what I have learned about leaving: you never fully arrive. Part of you stays in the country you left, folded inside a textbook, waiting for you to come back. And part of the country you left stays in you - in the spoon, in the records, in the way you season food when nobody is watching.
If you have left home, you know this weight. It is not the suitcase. It is what you could not fit inside it.
#Notes #NircleStories #Diaspora #Immigration #HomeIsAPerson #AfricanDiaspora #LifeAbroad #Japa #RealTalk #NigerianStories
10 days ago