Home Is Within
The harmattan fog hugs the air as much as it does my skin, dust spins like figure skaters on ice. My silence rehearses with the leaves rustling outside. It's my third year in Abuja, my second Christmas away from home. The aloneness catches me in my sleep, the quiet in my wake. In a city where everyone disappears into their villages, I'm left with my TV and teddies, soft, pale witnesses to a holiday that never quite feels like mine.
Christmas in Port Harcourt was never explosive. We hung the tree, did a few decorations, and went to church on Christmas morning. It was never about stepping into cinnamon-crowded streets; but the gathering, the noise, the predictable warmth of everyone under one roof. Some memories are paragraphs you tire of reading; some die on their way to becoming ashes; some, extinct, still hold on to you like earth clinging to roots. But if things can be buried, they can be found again.
On my balcony, watching the trees prepare for harmattan fun, I think of my grandmother in her kitchen. Her fried rice and fisherman soup, she made in abundance, enough for neighbors and tenants— was our gospel of generosity. That was Christmas: children, grandchildren, grandparents, all of us tucked together like bees in hives. Only this year, like the last year, it will be without my grandfather. Home is whatever welcomes you, and home is people, The house only carries the scent of them.
But what I truly miss is, Okrika during Iria season, the camwood hallowed on girls' skin, ancient drawings like pathways to forgotten waterways, effulgent as night hushes the day. Iria, where girls stayed in the fattening room, fed tilapia pepper soup, taught the manners of womanhood, given goat milk as they prepared for adulthood.
On Iria day, the virgins emerged in dark blue George with light blue stripes, wrappers folded wide for dancing. Their hair dyed orange, coral beads ringing their necks, their bodies painted where cloth did not touch. Their breasts bare, gleaming with paint as they danced in a circle, smiling like something lifted toward heaven—purity, readiness, beauty, soft and thunderous at once.
Okrika glowed differently. The canoes, the masquerades, the water regatta, the rivers, the mangroves, even the ancestors felt awake. Drinks were as many as the people, and elders poured the first offering to the ground, inviting the ancestors to drink before them, their voices stretching into songs that sometimes morphed into dirges. I used to tease my uncle that the gods must be drunk by afternoon.
Now, wrapped in quiet, I realize Christmas is not the tree or the noise of masquerades. It is the people whose shadows shaped me. It is the memory of a grandfather no longer here, the women preparing Iria, the rivers and rituals that taught me what belonging feels like. And it is the ache of knowing that home is far away, but still inside me, stubborn and alive.