Bodies pressed against yours as you plugged your carry-on luggage into the overhead carriage. An arm went up beside you. You neither ducked nor frowned at the frowsty mix of sweat and deodorant. The last six months had hit you with too many unpleasantries for some mild body odor on a plane to matter. You simply held your breath and turned away. 

You beheld your aisle seat. The past you were leaving behind was framed in the small window. The seat and the window did something sweet to your heart. A young man with an athletic build in the seat next to yours did something sweeter, something only messages on your WhatsApp did lately.

“You’re beautiful,” he said. 

How sweet, these reminders. They had invaded the darkness you bore within you like rays of light breaching the edges of a closed window. 

Nothing in Hassan’s neglect betrayed how he begged you to come over from Nigeria. Nothing in his coldness suggested that he promised to love you and be all the family you needed. You bet he didn’t remember either, that you’d said that if he didn’t like you enough, you would make it easy for him and leave.

Well, he forgot all his promises, and his reality became an amnesia you somehow started to share. But now as you prepared to dive into these new waters, his reality was the clothes you were stripping off. When he returned piss-drunk from his late night, your absence would loom large. When he turned and reached for you in his sleep, your space in his Ottoman double-bed would be empty and cold. 

You remembered how he laughed once when you were behind the kitchen door, listening to his friends warn that you might leave him. 

“She’s not completely stupid,” he had said. “Nobody leaves America for a shithole like Nigeria.” 

He was wrong. You were that stupid and Nigeria was more home than shithole. Nobody leaves…? Good for ‘Nobody’. Living in America was no heaven. You did not mind the hell it was in the beginning, but after that first smack in the kitchen that had your eye black for days, you were convinced you were in the wrong place. 

Since his words had become divorced from his gaze, how could he have noticed anything? Not when you started making up and smiling again, or how long you sat by the wall socket pressing your phone. Your chat sessions on WhatsApp slowly became your alternative to him, and not once did he notice. Not even the tiger-striped boxes you bought and stashed in the guest room, or when your things began to leave their different spots in the house to fill the boxes. At that rate, even if you had actually said goodbye, he would perhaps have heard the word without really registering its meaning. What a loser.

A flight attendant stood before the closed curtain. She asked passengers to switch their devices off. You would obey her, but first you had to dive in and see what you had waiting. 

A WhatsApp message said: “Hey beautiful.” Another reminder of all the love you were returning to in Nigeria. You remembered all the silly squabbles you had with your dad over Hassan in the first place, how you accused him of over-psychoanalyzing your lover in a bid to stop you from coming to America. Funny how he readily became your personal shrink over the last couple of weeks, helping you find your way back to recognizing yourself with the same skills you berated him for. You knew you’d never take his love as a father or his job as a psychologist for granted ever again. 

As you typed a response, your smile shone brighter than the evening sun in the airplane window. You took a picture of the smile and the sun in the airplane window. A parting gift for Hassan. Not the expression he would expect from someone throwing her opportunity for the green card away. Maybe you had always been about much more than the goddamned papers. 

Well, he would see that now, and too late, because your flight was already among the clouds.

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Ibrahim Babátúndé Ibrahim grew up on his grandmother’s storytelling of African folklore and thus fell in love with stories, and by extension, literature. After he was forcibly sent to science class in high school, it took Ibrahim twenty years to find his way back to his passion, in 2019, when he left a ten-year career in media & entertainment to become a writer. In that time, his work has been published in Typehouse Magazine, JMWW, Ake Review, Zone 3, Brittle Paper, Landlocked Magazine, Popula, and more. 

Ibrahim won the Quramo Writers’ Prize (2022), and was a runner-up for the Jessica George Bursary (2023), the Goge Africa Writing Contest (2020), and Ibua Journal’s Pack Light series (2020). He was a finalist for the Miles Morland Writing Scholarship (2022), and twice for the Moon City Short Fiction Award (2022/2023). He has also been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (2022), the Laura Kinsella Fellowship (2022), and the Dzanc Diverse Voices Prize (2021). He has multiple nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. 

Ibrahim’s work explores the human experience from an African perspective. He’s @heemthewriter on Twitter and Facebook, and @writtenbyheem on Instagram and Threads. More information about Ibrahim can be found on https://heemthewriter.com/ and https://linktr.ee/heemthewriter.