i am finally leaving akwa ibom. i can't say that i'm ready to go, only that i need to go, have reached that place where i've gone as far as i can along a particular path and must find another road. to be perfectly honest, i never quite got over the nuns of my previous post. writers are very fragile people and my inner child ran very far away (i'm still trying to coax her back).

regardless, i have gone a lot further than i thought i would have by now. going back through my pictures i see trips to my mother's old school, to her village, to ikot ekpene to visit the old cardinal's house (he is late, my mother took us to meet him when we were girls). i can't imagine what i've been doing here all this time. the audacity of trying to wrap my arms around the history of a place, a time, a person. i also can't imagine what took me so long to get here.

i have loved and lost; found my voice; my dreadlocks have grown; and i've added not less than five pounds of fried plaintain weight. it will probably take me a while to process all this, but i would like to thank sister mildred, sister ekerete, mrs. usanga, justice philomena, uncle adam, aunty valerie, uncle felix, aunty nyong, my cousins and friends, my driver ekemini, my grandmother, my grandfather (may he rest in perfect peace), and my mother (may she rest in perfect peace). i am forgetting too many; please forgive me. lagos is waiting. --AL.

Update: I had a dream last night that I won a prestigious writers' residency. Wish me luck. :)