When the inside of you is too loud, you go outside. You walk. You wander. You let the city hold your brokenness for a while.
Lagos at night is a different kind of beast.
It doesn't sleep. It doesn't soften. It just sheds its mask. In the day, Lagos lies—suits, offices, bleached faces smiling through disappointment. But at night, it tells the truth.
That was why I left my room. No plan. No purse. No destination. Just my scarf, my slippers, and a fire in my chest that wouldn't go out. I walked past locked kiosks and dark alleys, past boys gathered under broken streetlights, eyes like secrets, past a couple arguing near a yellow bus, past a mother selling roasted corn with her baby strapped to her back, sleeping through smoke and thunder. At Ojuelegba roundabout, I paused.
There was something about that place—the chaos, the rhythm, the layers of hunger and hustle—that felt familiar. It looked like how I felt: too full of nothing. A man with no shoes was singing. Loudly. Badly. But confidently.
"Problem no dey finish o. Make you try dey enjoy!" A few passersby tossed him notes. Some laughed. Some ignored him. I just stared. He caught my eye, mid-verse, and winked, i looked away quickly.
"Fine girl, you dey vex?" I almost said yes.
I almost said, I'm not fine, and I'm not a girl, I'm a woman carrying dead dreams in her lungs, trying not to drown in her own disappointment, but instead, I walked.
Eventually, I found a bench near a shuttered pharmacy, I sat down letting the night wrap around me, that was when I saw him—a boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen, barefoot and wiry, dragging a tray of bottled water across the street. He stopped near me. "Aunty, you go buy?" I shook my head. He sighed and sat on the ground beside the bench, uninvited but not unwelcome. He took a bottle from the tray and drank from it—his own stock. Business was over, I guessed. He looked at me.
"You no go house?"
"I am home," I said quietly.
He laughed. "For street?"
I shrugged.
He studied me. "You look like person wey sabi book."
"I used to," I said.
He nodded, like he understood. "I suppose go house," he said. "My mama go worry."
But he didn't move. Instead, he looked at the sky and said, "You ever just feel like this whole thing na scam?"
I blinked. "You mean life?"
He nodded. "Life. God. The hustle. All of am."
I stared at him. This boy with cracked lips and dry feet. And I thought: even children are tired. He stood up, adjusted his tray. "Goodnight, Aunty."
I nodded. "Goodnight."
And then he added, softly, "E go better. Even if na lie." Then he walked off.
I sat there a while longer. Not because anything changed, but because, somehow, "even if na lie" sounded like hope. And that was more than I'd had all day.