I don't know how to be single in Lagos.

and I'm not afraid to admit it anymore......

The canopy of leaves covering me are shimmering in the afternoon breeze. I love this weather. It’s the middle of July and the rains have paused, but the coolness, the cover of clouds and the breeze, so so delicious, continue to bless us. I’m wearing a dress in my favourite colour; deep brown full of the same warmth radiating from my own skin.The gold cross my mother just gifted me sits at the base of my neck and I love the weight of it there. I’m at La Tarvena waiting for my cousin, Obi, to come have lunch with me. I am as always so taken by the red walls, and the pale green paint, the golden light bulbs swinging above us, all the leaves and all the trees creating this aura of tranquility that I just cannot get enough of. Every time I enter this little slice of Lagos, I laugh and laugh and laugh, something in the air loosening me into a freer version of myself. That is Lagos for me, as a whole. Lagos is the place where my shoulders rest. I breathe out, all the way out. I relax into a version of myself that is not trying to perform anything, that does not curl her tongue to speak a certain way, that laughs unafraid.

I’m leafing through my copy of Rilke’s poems when Obi finally walks in and I rise to hug him, pleased to be around family, to be witnessed by people who have known me my whole life. This is the gift of home to me: being seen, truly seen by people whose eyes are familiar with me. We start with pleasantries, congratulations for graduation, a brief commentary on how expensive things are, and after a little while, Obi leans back and says to me;

‘You have this aura about you, like you have matured. Not in an aging way. In an assured way. You look at peace.’

I smile. He is not the first person to say this to me.

‘It’s God o!’, laughter spilling from my mouth. With a quiet smile, I go on; ‘It really is God. Iowa completely transformed my relationship with God. My faith became mine in Iowa. It was a wilderness where I had to do nothing else but be by myself and be with my God.’ He nods. He does not quite believe the way I do, but he nods, a look of admiration flashing across his face; ‘that’s really good, I’m happy for you. It looks good on you.’

I’m so pleased by his observations, and I munch on the calamari he ordered for starters so my pleasure is not too obvious. We continue to gist, about my recent breakup, about the relationship he last saw me in, with a man that I so deeply loved, and declared that love publicly, my voice belting from every tweet, Instagram post, family outing. As I am talking, he interrupts me with a question that slices me straight to my heart:

‘Why do you always have a boyfriend?’

I laugh to mask the hurt that lurches in my chest. That pain is because he has struck a nerve. His question is true. The core of his question is one my friends, my sister and most recently my own spirit has been asking me, repeatedly and with force: why do you find it so hard to be by yourself?

In a way, I have been exploring this question since I started working on my book last year. I am someone who loves to interrogate desire. I am obsessed with my heart; with its needs, its shape, its contours, its deepest corners. I like to think I know what my heart wants, and why. And when I cannot figure out the why of my desires, I sit with them long enough to figure out. This is essentially how I came to writing. With this unrelenting need to reach the core of my feelings. From the heartwork I have been doing for the past year and half, I answer Obi;

‘Well, when you grow up hating yourself and hating your body, the first time a guy likes you, you kind of become addicted to that feeling. Or at least I know, I did. Being chosen is like a high, and I chased it. I chased it far and near, and every time I caught it, I felt the euphoria underneath my tongue, bursting with flavour. I just love the taste of a boyfriend’

I’m surprised by how truthful I’m being. But abeg, who has time to lie? Of what use is it to avoid the truth? The heart does not lie. It does not deal in deceit, and to be in touch with your heart is to be in touch with the truth. I know what I am saying is true because I have written more than twenty thousand words about desire in adolescence, about my first boyfriend in secondary school (random fact: my first ever piece of writing is about my first boyfriend, and if you want to laugh at me (or actually read some really sweet words), you can find it here.). Even in that tiny essay, you can see just how much of me was formed by the first time a guy decided he liked me. Self-loathing is such a dangerous game for girls to play, because its costs only reveal themselves more and more as you become. Since that first boyfriend at 15, I do not think I have gone more than a year, without some kind of entanglement with a man. Maybe not a full blown relationship, but there is always an object of my affection. Somebody to tweet about. Someone to text when I wake up in the morning. Someone to send my selfies to.

This is the first time in my adult life that there is nobody at all.

And it is kicking my ass.

I ended my last relationship two days before my 26th birthday. I was in Los Angeles for a writer’s conference and deep in my heart, I just knew that if I continued being with this person, not only would I be deeply unhappy but they would completely destroy how I saw myself. And that is a robbery too great for me to take a chance on. It is one thing for someone to treat you poorly. It is another thing entirely for them to damage the inner workings of your heart and mind so much so that you cannot see yourself clearly. There was a prayer I prayed sometime last year;

‘God please never let me become a stranger to myself. Let nothing, no one make me into a person i cannot recognise when i look into the mirror. Preserve my person. My wholeness. Lord guard my intricacies. Let nothing disappear me.’

And that breakup was the answer to this prayer.

I love belonging to a God that loves foreshadow. It is also one of my favourite literary techniques. When you receive signals about the future, when you can feel something even before it happens. I ended that relationship and felt immense relief. Rightfully so, because I started seeing that person, only ONE DAY after I ended a three-year long relationship with a man I had hoped to marry. (WE LISTEN WE DON’T JUDGE!) Before that relationship, I was obsessed with some guy during the pandemic, keeping a roster, talking to every Tom, Dick and Shalewa on the streets of Lagos. I always claimed that I did this because I was bored, or because I wanted entertainment. But deeper than that, that seed has always been there; that need to be desired, to be wanted, to be chosen.

In the beginning of my celibacy journey, I struggled IMMENSELY. Not being sexually desired anymore (or well not being able to act on that desire), fiercely attacked my sense of self. But with time and divine grace, I have been able to navigate that much better. What is proving more difficult, is dealing with the need to be emotionally chosen. What is proving more difficult is learning how to satisfy my own emotional needs by myself. It has been kicking my ass so bad, especially since I came home after graduation. In Iowa, I knew how to be myself because I did not really have a choice. And my solitude in Iowa was beautiful. Long walks by the trail next to my apartment. Cotton candy skies, sunrises and sunsets so beautiful they stole my breath. Car rides by myself listening to Omah Lay and singing at the top of my lungs. I knew how to be alone in Iowa because my life was built for that solitude and it was a season of my life where I did not have a choice. Moreover, I was in long distance relationships for most of my time there so in a way my emotional needs were still being met.

When I arrived in Lagos at the end of May, there was no man anywhere. No potential man anywhere. It was the first time ever for me. There are bareeeee men in this town. All I had to do was send a ‘Hey big head’ text to someone and I’d be on a date by the weekend. But to what end? I have grown too much in God and in wisdom to randomly entertain men because I am bored. I have come to the time of my life now where I have to sit in this solitude, in this emotional desert and you know what? I AM LOOKING FORWARD TO IT!

Enough is actually enough. Aspiring to male partnership is part and parcel of how we are raised here, a core part of our indoctrination. If you now sprinkle a history of low-self esteem, you have just created a time bomb of epic proportions. On top of that now add the marriage-craze that comes with your mid twenties. When every single aunty or uncle is asking you ‘so how are the guys!’. Almost every single prayer or congratulatory message I got after graduation involved a prayer for husband. To resist all of this, the first thing I have had to do is reject every thought that tries to suggest that I am not ‘complete’ if there is not some guy somewhere. It can be so easy to think that you are above these kinds of thinking but what constant self-reflection does is that it forces you to look at places where there is a discrepancy between your intellect and your emotional reality. Sometimes, what comes out of our mouths are far from what is simmering in our hearts. I have decided to close the gap, and face the truth.

---

The beautiful thing about being a crier is that you become fluent in the language of your tears; you can feel them prickling the sides of your eyes, tingling your ears, forming at the back of your throat. I knew these tears were coming from the moment the book club ended and I saw Tunrayo and her boyfriend packing up the chairs and I was the only one in the room with them. I knew these tears were coming when I felt an ache of loneliness and longing surge through me as I watched them laugh and tease each other, as their eyes went back and forth weaving paragraphs of desire I could not read. I knew these tears were coming when I made up a bullshit excuse and ran right out of the room because I felt suffocated by their love, or more precisely by my lack of that sacred and sexy thing simmering between them. So I parked my car on the side of the road, and I let my tears fall. Slowly and then gushing, my chest heaving, snot running down my nose and before I know it, I see droplets of water on my windscreen and I smile. Mehn, I love this city. I am crying and Lagos is crying with me, the skies are pouring themselves out for me so I can see that all water is cleansing, and my tears are no different too. I plug in my aux and play the Arya Star and Magixx Love Don’t Cost A Thing refix nonstop straight from Dolphin Estate to Gbagada.

I’m alone in the car and I feel my heart settle into this kind of aloneness. Letting myself cry, letting myself mourn the longing, hell even letting myself write these words, eased my heart. I am not hiding from myself. I am not hiding from my pain. I may not know how to be single in Lagos, but there was a time I did not know to drive, a time I did not know how to flat twist my hair, a time I did not know how to exist without a man pulsing inside of me. But here I am, carried by the ever evolving internal landscape of my one wild, beating heart. I can learn anything, I can do anything. This will be no different. I will ripen into a version of myself that wades through this, bruised and breathing. I will cry when I need to cry. I will laugh when my heart opens for laughter. Obi said to me just as we were finishing lunch;

‘Date yourself. Take yourself out. All that emotion, all that effort, all that presence of mind that you pack and give to men, give it to yourself’

I promised him I would try. I promised him I would be by myself for a while. I know I will have to sit in the discomfort, in the longing but I welcome the ache. I welcome the invitation to sit quietly with my own spirit. To stare in the mirror long enough to truly see my own self; my beauty, my scars, my dreams, my fears. I embrace everything. I remain for myself. With my blessed hands, weathered from reaching always for another, I turn them towards myself and I choose me.

Last week Sunday, I went out by myself. Went to see a really cool art exhibition. Grabbed a bottle of my favourite beer and wrote a poem. Went to see some cool Afro-fusion live music after. a 10/10 day I spent with myself. Shall to being a fast learner.

---

Thank you for reading my first ever substack! I’ll be writing about my life, my writing, my emotions, and whatever else on here! They’ll come once a month (or maybe twice if I’m jiggy with it). I’ll always leave a link for something I think you should read, that somehow bears resonance to what I have just written about. I love this essay in The Paris Review about an open marriage, and desire and what it looks like to know what you want (or don’t want).

See you very soon!

Love,

M.O.