When I first moved to Lagos, I didn't know what to expect. All I went with was a dream and an offer letter from a firm I had applied to online.
A few weeks into my stay there, I fell out with the firm. Everything I promised or wrote in my offer letter wasn't what I saw. I managed to work for a few months there, then I quit.
This time I didn't have anything to rely on. A squatter with nothing to her name. But I just believed that somehow everything would fall in place quickly. I had paid my dues already. Graduated with good grades, polished my CV until it shone, and upgraded my skills. All that was left was the universe to play its part. I had always believed that Lagos was supposed to reward my effort.
A few months after my resignation, life in Lagos nearly broke me.
Week after week, I took buses across the city for interviews that either ended in stiff rejection emails that arrived at night, just when I was about to sleep, or a polite smile with the line:
“We’ll get back to you.”
I never really looked forward to such calls because I had zeroed my mind that such polite words meant I wasn't getting the job. With time, I learned the cruel rhythm of disappointment and how to dance to its tunes. I learned to manage the hope that builds in my chest during the interview, only to collapse on the bus ride home.
My friend's flat, where I was squatting in Lagos, became both comfortable and a prison. Not like she didn't accept me anymore. She loved me more like her sister, but there was this heavy burden within me knowing that I wasn't in my own apartment, but inconveniencing another in hers. Questions started playing in my head louder than the honking of danfo buses:
What if Lagos isn’t for me?
It was in the middle of this struggle season of mine that I began to dream weird dreams of me standing in front of a tall glass building shining in the sun with my red handbag across my shoulder, the one I only used for “serious” outings.
Sometimes I'll enter the building like I had something important to do there. Other times I won't. I usually brushed it aside as the weight of my problems showed up even in my dreams. Not until this dream became recurrent. I recall sitting up in bed one night and scribbling some things I keep seeing in my dreams down in my journal:
“Glass building. Red handbag. Happy.”*
Weeks passed. I was almost considering moving back to my father's house in the east and leaving Lagos since it wasn't favoring me. Until I got an email in my inbox.
“Invitation to Interview." The subject read.
I almost didn't take it seriously. I thought, as usual, it would end with the polite line. But I spoke to my friend who I was squatting in her house. She encouraged me to go.
That interview morning, I dressed up and set off to the office address which was on Victoria Island. The bus dropped me near the address. I walked down the busy street, heart thumping.
Then I froze.
It was the building of my dream. The same tall glass front, shining under the sun. The exact same spot I stood on in my dream.
For a moment I couldn’t move. It felt like the world paused for me. Like a scene from a movie. I just couldn't believe it. I stood, whispering under my breath:
“My God, it's real.”
I gathered myself and walked into the building. A few minutes later I was in an office with my interviewer. Trust me, everything went smoothly. Unlike my other interviews, I sat there with such calmness. For once, I didn’t feel like I was begging for acceptance. I felt like I was already chosen.
Well, I got the same polite line. But it didn't really bother me. Maybe because I was already used to hearing such words.
A few days later, just two days before I gave up on Lagos and prepared to travel back to the east. I got an email from the same financial firm for my dream
“Congratulations, Miss Zerah, we’d like to offer you a position at our organization,” and the salary was mouth-watering.
I can still remember how I sat up on the bed and cried quietly, not from sadness but from relief.
That job became my anchor. My stepping stone to what I had so craved for. A life of independence. It wasn’t the perfect job but it was good. Yes, the workload stretched me. But it gave me stability, an experience of what a working-class life looked like. It gave me dignity, the dignity that came with being busy and contributing to something. And most of all, it proved to me that sometimes life moves according to a script I cannot see but only the universe knows about.
A script the universe had already written in the stars.