The yellow light bulb above me twitches and blinks, plunging me into darkness. While the family upstairs settles for dinner, I get up to settle my light bill.

The metre! This silly timer has become a daily reminder of adulthood, changing my mood with its colours. Whether it is green, and I can spend another evening chopping, boiling, and stir-frying noodles with suya; yellow, and I roll my eyes, counting the days until my next paycheck; a static red, forcing me to choose between moving around with my phone’s torchlight and turning on the lightbulbs; or a blinking red, teasing me every second as the indicator flickers on and off.

It’s not just the metre, it’s the elegant wooden seat with an intricately carved back in the foyer. The living room, complete with a well-worn lavender couch and purple wool rug; the kitchen, replete with all the cookware and drapes I snuck out when my mother wasn’t looking; the bathroom, swamped with more body products than is necessary; and me, in a faded Marge Simpson tee, munching cornflakes in my house.

My house, with all my possessions.

I watched a lot of superhero movies and shows while growing up. The PowerPuff girls always left the city in disarray, Samurai Jack slayed his opponents long before Beyonce invented the art of slaying, and Hiro Nakamura often traveled through time. As I grew older, I never hesitated to choose time travel as my superpower when asked.

But, as I have learned, I don’t have to be Dr Strange or Hiro Nakamura to travel through time. I’m already human; I don’t need superpowers, only a moment, a sliver of time that takes me down memory lane. Everyone has these moments. A flicker, a smell, an old cartoon network animation, or a snack that, once encountered, gives us wings to time travel through our memories.

In the dark, I fondly recall learning to count to 50 on one of the many nights NEPA failed to provide electricity and our generator was back at Oga Ukpong’s mechanic shop. My mother had instructed me to count to ten, then twenty, then thirty, and ultimately until power was restored.

This counting has become a part of me. Counting, until the day ends and I can go to bed; counting, when I set a 30-minute alarm to get ready for work in the morning; counting the remaining spaghettis and mudus of rice before I have to restock the kitchen; counting the public holidays in a month; and, as a woman, counting the days until my next period.

In all of this counting lie anxiety, uncertainty, infinite negative and positive expectations for tomorrows, and heartwarming surprises.

One day, I’m boarding a plane and waving my family goodbye at the airport, and soon enough, I’m a little girl pointing to the sky with glee and telling my father that I want to be a pilot. With my arms open like a bird, I’d fly the plane like weeeeeee, increase the speed like vuuuuuuu, and land on the tarmac like doom!

One moment, I’m sitting in my fancy wooden chair in my backyard, watching the sunset, and the next minute, I am my father with a full after-dinner stomach, sitting in his backyard, staring at everything and nothing, talking about everything and anything.

Soon enough, it all made sense: mummy waking up before dawn to prepare us for school and still lingering on her bed afterward; daddy slowly sipping tea while I fretted in the corner, worried about being late to school; daddy and mummy returning from work with fewer words to say and deeper, tired voices to shout at our little mistakes; mummy and daddy speaking in hushed tones whenever a call came in about another dead relative; relatives with sad eyes and stooping shoulders showing up unexpectedly and living with us for months; neighbours watching me, watching other children in the yard and the unfamiliar strangers that lingered too close.

So, I am not just a time traveler, I am also a shapeshifter, morphing through emotions, memories, and experiences because I am human. What I mean is this: everything is starting to make sense now.

In all of these countings and triggered flashbacks lie the discovery of self and the acute awareness of my womanhood.

I was born a female and nurtured as a girl who would mature into a woman who was expected to be vain, to comfort, to love, to pray, to reproduce, to nurture, to endure, to take pride in doing these things, and, most importantly, to look pretty while doing all of them. And all of that was new to me at different points.

When I became a woman who did not want to do all that was expected of me, it was not surprising to witness the reception. 

Since I was taught to stay home until marriage, why was I surprised that landlords reluctantly leased their spaces when they learned I’d be the sole inhabitant? Since my period was a given every month, why couldn’t I stand the pain yet? Why am I still shocked at the bloating and acne and new bouts of premenstrual sickness? Since I was expected to date men who provided my needs, why did I get irritated when people attributed my work and self-care to some mysterious man behind the scenes?

Day by day, my acute awareness of being a woman is heightened by external desires to perceive and relate with me based on the person I’m expected to be.

Therefore, when I think that adulthood is largely about recollecting memories of myself at different ages and stages, loving, working, and paying bills, I find, yet again, that it is a continuum of self-observation. It is watching myself grow, collapse, get lost, find myself, melt, and morph into a person I want to beam at whenever I pass by a mirror. It is being an adult and a child in one body, except the adult has to nurture the child to safety, understanding, and peace.

It has been interesting discovering myself outside of the confines of home and authority figures. I prepare egusi soup the way my mother taught me, by frying it instead of boiling it, but now I use pumpkin leaves instead of bitter leaves because I want to and I can.

Yes, I used to sing along to Lucky Dube and Kenny Rogers with my father and siblings, but now I play Sade Adu when I return home from work, and Mama G, when I want to clean the house on Saturdays.

It’s being an adult. You wake up, and whether you stare at the ceiling or reach out to turn off your alarm, whether you groan before or after you stumble in the shower, you have no one but yourself. No one but you occupies your body.

And at the dinner table, on your bed bingeing Netflix, in a restaurant waiting for a date who will not show up until the waiter turns the lights off, alone at the hospital running your medicals, on your phone contemplating renewing your Netflix subscription or buying a new doll, in the shower singing out loud and dropping it hotter than Beyonce, in all the good and bad and not-so-bad places, you realise that all you have is yourself. You have to do everything by, with, and for yourself.

And that is comforting, just as it is daunting.

Sometimes it is like walking through a tunnel. There are many turns and an occasional misguided pathway, but the impulse to keep moving is a given. Somewhere, deep inside the tunnels, we meet people who make the journey worthwhile for brief or extended periods. These people could be business associates, lovers, friends, or women who ignite the flames of reliable sisterhood.

Once in a while, after a night out with my girls, adulting is not so bad. Under the influence of a few tequila shots and mimosas, life as an adult is in fact, wonderful. Simply mesmerising.

In a bizarre turn of events, adulting is also a countdown to madness. How many more late nights at work? How many more rejected job applications before I become a pious churchgoer? How many it is what it is do I have to say before I accept defeat? How many more well, that’s life can I muster before the yearning to return to the comfort of my parent’s home overwhelms me? Just how much more is enough to tip a person on the verge of madness?

As I’m learning, it’s the little things: my slippers cutting on my way to the market, an oily spoon slipping out of my palm, or my metre running out of electricity.

Instead of going crazy in the dark, I reach for my Bluetooth speaker—after ze Bluetooth dewise is connected uh successfully—and play John Lennon’s Imagine. 

The family upstairs has just begun to watch The Johnsons. I can hear Emu cajoling her husband for sporting a pot belly. I can hear the children pointing at Spiff and ascribing him to one another.

This one is you.

No, this one is you.

Tah! Shut up!

I reminisce evenings and days with my siblings, and my last fun night with my girlfriends in college, which ended with me scribbling on a piece of crumpled paper, a poem born from gratitude, contentment, and uncertainty, which you will now read below.

When We Come Alive

We will put on our dresses,

Our miniskirts and skinny jeans,

Wear the shiniest lipgloss

And, of course,

the highest heels.

No, we don’t have Chanel bags

But the suede vintage purse

From our mothers will do.

No, our necklaces are not made of rubies

But they shimmer just right in the best light.

No, we don’t have our cars

But a simple order

And one will be outside.

Yes, we’ll leave the room in a haze of marijuana

And the stench of vodka.

Yes, we’ll run downstairs clutching our half-open purses

And half-eaten samosas,

Spilling juice 

And hoping we don’t slip on our heels.

Of course, 

You’ll fix your lashes in the car

And I’ll apologize for keeping the driver waiting.

Maybe

We’ll make a video singing our favourite song

Before we get to our destination.

You already know

It’s a night of laughter and fun.

We’ll dance and make faces at the people staring.

Perhaps, give them a wink.

We’ll order almost everything on the menu,

And rush with drunken haste to take bathroom selfies.

We’ll talk about the boys who broke our hearts

The ones we can’t imagine living without

And the new boys who make us adjust our outfits

With charming nervousness.

We’ll play truth or dare and rap over a beat.

We might even have a near-death experience.

But it will all be worth it.

For the sun will rise in the morning

While we simmer in sleep,

Before and without us.

In the afternoon, while the sun burns,

We’ll walk around in a sleepy daze,

Bathing and eating in between sleep and consciousness.

In the evening, we’ll recollect the day before—

With tears in our eyes and laughter in our mouths—

At the men who wanted to take us home

And our terrible, terrible, blurry pictures,

At the funny incidents that our fuzzy brains did not comprehend,

And the wack lines we spit during our rap battle.

At night, when the sun is the moon,

We will go our separate ways.

Maybe you’ll return to your house,

And she’ll go to see her boyfriend,

And they’ll hurry to catch the bus,

And I’ll go home to remind my mother

That I am still her adorable little girl.

And we will all leave the apartment

Feeling rejuvenated—

With lightness and warmth in our chests,

Memories we will never forget,

And photos that will become hall-of-famers in our friendships.

We’ll leave

Wondering where the sun went,

How the day flew by,

And why we have to fall back into the routine

That is the reality of adulthood.