Living

The morning gathers around me. Birds stitching the sky together. A rooster who seems personally offended by the idea of silence. The low murmur of voices drifting in before I’m fully awake. The rhythmic sweep of a broom across packed earth. 

The daylight finds its way into my heartbeat, and I follow.

Some days that means climbing onto a moto to Sankofa, the routine no longer new, yet never entirely ordinary. 

At the centre, I slip into the work more easily now. What once required concentration now feels instinctive. The sifting. The sorting. My hands remember before I have to think. It feels less like learning and more like tuning. 

Conversations move around me as I work, drifting between football, current events, an idea that might work if we just try it. Sometimes Kabiosi tells stories while we scrape the black soldier fly eggs onto a sheet of paper. You know you’re in for a ride, you just don’t know where you’ll land. His stories about Benin, about growing up, stay with me the longest. I don’t always know what I’ll learn, but I always listen closely. 

By late afternoon, the morning sits at a distance, as if it belongs to another day. The sun lingers heavily overhead, the light bending slightly under its own weight.  

When I return home, the work doesn’t quite end; it just changes shape. 

It’s there before dinner, in the way plans are revisited and adjusted. In the way conversations pick up threads that were left hanging earlier. In the pause before a phone call is answered — a small exhale, a glance exchanged — and then the decision to pick up anyway. 

The steadiness is chosen. Again and again. 

Most nights, tea time is when the day lowers its voice. The kettle hums softly from the counter, the familiar theme of EastEnders drifting through the room. Mugs rest warm in our hands. 

Sometimes the episode is background noise, the characters arguing softly while we talk through plans or answer emails. Other nights it takes our full attention. We lean forward. We laugh. We weigh in on decisions as if these people are close personal friends. If Kabiosi is back from the Sankofa centre, he joins us in the living room — half watching, half working. 

The quiet isn’t always silent. It’s not the absence of noise, just the absence of urgency. 

When Sunday comes around, that absence lingers. 

I wake more slowly. The house feels unhurried. By the time I come downstairs, the smell of egg and bread has already reached the stairs. The morning doesn’t press. 

It brings back memories of summer mornings when I was young. Still groggy, toddling into the kitchen where I was greeted by chocolate chip pancakes on the stove, sunlight pooling across the floor. That same sense of the day stretching wide ahead, untouched.

Here, the details are different. The feeling isn’t.

Later, I go up to the terrace with a bottle of water. I turn the key in the door, then slide open the burglarproof, the small creak echoing as I push the metal gate to the side. Sometimes I bring my notebook, sketching out ideas while the birds settle and resettle in the trees. Other times I roll out a yoga mat and let my body soften into itself, easing sore muscles, stretching into the quiet until time feels wider. 

Sometimes I stop moving entirely. Flat on my back, the sea breeze shifting through the leaves overhead, I let the moment exist without sculpting it. For a few minutes, I am not reaching for what comes next. 

As I rise to my feet again, the day comes back into focus. I roll up the mat, slide the gate back into place, turn the key. 

Back inside, sun-warmed water runs over my shoulders, and the rhythm resumes. If it’s still early, I retreat to my room for a while. Not to escape, just to reset before heading back downstairs. 

When I do wander down the steps, I find myself back in the familiar flow of it all. Spices waft from the kitchen. The television hums on. Keyboards clack. Half a phone conversation drifts through the hallway.

I sit on the sofa where I always do. The cat, Spike, curls into my lap. Tomorrow morning, the birds will gather again.