4
Was it the gleam?
Or perhaps the fog?
But I stared into the lagoon and searched for the depth.
I lost my eyes,
Then my heart followed,
Slowly my legs slipped and I fell in love with this city, surrounded by the shimmering Lagoon.
Lagos was a nightmare. Money disappeared faster than you got them. Everything was so expensive. When Collins first got to Lagos, he had been seduced by the lagoon and the seas that one’s eyes got lost in. He promised himself that he was going to build a house close to the sea and take in the view whenever he woke up.
He slept in the park the first day. The second day, he started a hunt for an affordable home. Before dusk, he realized that he was a poor man in this big city. His money was only big enough to afford a studio apartment in a place called Ajegunle or a ghetto in Mushin. He had gone to a property estate company in VGC and asked for the price of their lowest apartment. The prize shook his spirit and left him crippled for a few seconds. When his spirit found him, he was already lost in the labyrinth of how to raise thousands of naira for an apartment with a view to the sea.
And so, Collins accepted his loss and settled for the less that he ran away from. He had no degree and he had no training. Shame held him back from crawling back to his father.
‘I will go back and prove to them that it was a mistake sending me away’ he swore.
But it seemed like things were getting worse for no reason. His money was disappearing faster than he had calculated. So, he took a bold step and started to reduce his pleasures. He stopped visiting brothels and eating breakfast. But still it failed to work. His job hunt was a futile exercise. Everyone was asking for experience. Lagos was a growing city and the illiterate and the men without connection were being left behind. Collins noticed this and graduated to the car park to work as a conductor for the bus drivers. He swallowed insults, spittle and body odor to make a little over a thousand naira every day.