The airport is a kind of purgatory

where we learn to say goodbye

in languages we've never spoken—

the hand pressed against glass,

the backward glance that holds

everything and nothing.

My mother taught me

that leaving is an act of faith:

you trust the ground will catch you

when you land.

But what she never said

was how the body remembers—

how years later, the smell of jet fuel

can bring you to your knees.

Between Lagos and London

there is a country no one names—

a place made of telephone wires

and the static of bad connections,

of letters that arrive too late

with news already old.

I have lived there for years,

in the space between time zones,

learning to exist in two tenses at once:

here, it is morning.

There, someone I love

is already dreaming.

They say you can never go home again

but they're wrong—

you can go home a thousand times,

in the shape of a word your mother uses,

in the way the rain sounds different

falling on tropical leaves,

in the taste of pepper soup

in a London kitchen,

steam rising like memory

from the bowl.

Home is not a place

you leave behind.

It's the thing you carry—

the weight that keeps you upright

when the wind tries to take you

somewhere else.

The leaving never ends.

And neither does the arriving.