Some mornings the distance sits on my chest like a stone. I wake up in a city with foreign seasons, surrounded by accents nothing like my mother’s, and the first thing I grab is my phone—scanning for a message that…
Author: Harold Little
There’s a question I hear all the time, usually served with a smile that’s trying to be kind but ends up somewhere closer to curious museum mode: “So, where are you really from?” I used to keep a tidy answer…
Some moments don’t really end. I keep finding myself back in my grandmother’s kitchen in Lagos, watching her hands work the stone, grinding peppers with a rhythm that felt older than both of us. She was humming something slow, something…
Growing up, I thought cultural identity was something you could file away inside a tidy box. A box with a neat sticker: “Nigerian” or “British” or, if you were feeling generous, “Nigerian-British.” I’d tick it on forms, wear it like…
I can still feel the moment the two halves of myself started to split. I was 22, fresh out of school, perched in a glass-walled conference room in a city I hadn’t decided to like yet. The job offer was…
Sometimes someone asks, “Where are you from?” and the question lands like a stone dropped into still water. The ripples spread before I can find my voice. I know what they want: a dot on a map, a tidy border,…
On the Complicated Love Between Immigrant Parents and Their Children By Ziona Debisi I was twelve when it hit me that my mother’s love had a built-in goodbye. Not the affection itself—that was always there, fierce and constant—but the nearness…
Most mornings, before the world turns its volume up, there’s a sliver of quiet I’ve come to expect. I’m on the edge of the bed, still half-dreaming, and the first thought almost always lands like a question I forgot I…
I used to fold myself into the smallest version of me I could manage. I’d slide into chairs at meetings already whispering sorry before my body had even settled. I’d angle my shoulders inward on crowded sidewalks, as if my…
Some mornings I wake with a psalm humming somewhere behind my ribs. Other mornings, the only prayer I can manage is a long exhale while I stare at the ceiling. I’ve learned both count. Faith, for me, isn’t a clean…