This is a work of fiction inspired by recurring themes in today's news. All characters, names, and events are invented and do not depict real people or organisations.
Tobi had rehearsed the airport goodbye so many times in his imagination that the actual one felt almost anticlimactic, his mother's tears smaller than he'd braced for, his father's handshake firmer and briefer than the emotional send-off he'd pictured.
"Call when you land," his mother said, the same instruction every departing child in the family had received for two generations, worn smooth from repetition.
He'd built an entire version of his new life before he'd even boarded the flight: the salary that would finally make sense of years of study, the flat he'd furnish exactly to his taste, the version of himself that walked through a foreign city with the particular ease he associated, somehow, with simply having left.
The reality, when it arrived, came slowly, in pieces that didn't match the picture.
The salary was real, but so were deductions and costs he hadn't fully budgeted for, a currency that stretched differently than he'd calculated from a distance. The flat was small, shared, and colder than he'd anticipated in ways that had nothing to do with temperature. The ease he'd imagined turned out to require its own kind of labour, learning unspoken rules nobody back home could have taught him, because nobody back home had needed to learn them.
"How is it?" his friend Dapo asked over a video call, six months in, the connection slightly delayed, making their sentences occasionally overlap.
"It's good," Tobi said, and meant it, mostly. "It's just not exactly the good I was picturing."
"What's different?"
He considered the question honestly, for the first time saying some of it aloud rather than only turning it over privately. "I pictured arriving and immediately becoming a finished version of myself. Instead I arrived and had to keep becoming someone, the same slow way I would have had to back home, just in a colder city, further from people who already understood me without explanation."
"Do you regret it?"
"No. I don't think it's regret. I think I packed a version of the dream that was never going to survive contact with an actual Tuesday here, and I'm still figuring out what to do with the gap between the two."
Dapo, still at home, still considering his own eventual departure, sat with that longer than either of them expected. "That's not really the story people tell, though. Everyone posts the arrival. Nobody posts the gap."
"I know. I almost didn't tell you either."
Tobi looked out at the unfamiliar street below his window, neither disillusioned nor triumphant, simply further along in an adjustment that had turned out to be less a single dramatic leap and more a long, ongoing negotiation between the life he'd imagined and the one he was actually, patiently, building.
"I'm glad you told me the real version," Dapo said finally. "I think I needed to hear it before I packed my own bag."
End of fiction. For today's actual headlines, see the link to today's headline post and video
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