The Long Way Home.
The road to Oguta was not on any app. Chiamaka had checked twice Google Maps drew a clean blue line along the expressway, the kind of road you took when you were in a hurry and did not want to see anything,but her uncle Godwin had never once taken the expressway, not in forty years of driving this route, and he was not about to start because she was visiting from Lagos.
Her uncle Godwin had never taken the expressway not in forty years of driving this route, He wasn't about to start just because she was visiting from Lagos.
Godwin :
"This road you are asking about it feeds twelve villages. If people like us stop using it, the road dies. You understand?"
She did not understand, not exactly. She was thirty-one and worked in fintech, and the thing she knew best was how to make friction disappear. She had spent three years building systems that got people from want to transaction in under four seconds. Friction, in her world, was the enemy.
She watched her uncle turn off the expressway onto a laterite path the colour of dried blood, and she gripped the door handle.
The bush was close on both sides. There were Neem trees, Cashew trees and a flame tree that was bright orange.
The road was bumpy and slow. The old Peugeot car groaned through mud that hadn't dried from the rain.
Her uncle drove with one elbow out the window humming a song she half-knew from church.
Thirty minutes later they stopped at a roadside stall. A woman sat behind a clay pot of groundnuts with a sleeping child tied to her back.
Uncle Godwin turned off the engine.
Godwin asked,
"Mama Ada, how is business?"
Mama Ada replied,
"Slow today.. God is there."
She started scooping groundnuts into a newspaper cone.
"Your daughter is with you?"
Godwin said,
"Niece. Chiamaka. She lives in Lagos."
The woman looked at Chiamaka and said,
"You look tired. Lagos is doing that to you."
Chiamaka almost laughed, She almost said she was fine like she always did.
Instead she took the cone of groundnuts her uncle passed to her and Said nothing.
They drove on, the road went up a hill and showed a view of the lake, which was flat and silver in the afternoon light surrounded by palms.
Chiamaka said,
"I didn't know it was this beautiful."
Godwin said,
"You never know what's on a road you haven't walked."
He glanced at her.
"That is why you walk it."
She turned the cone in her hands.
She was thinking, oddly, about the product she had shipped last quarter the one that removed every confirmation step, every pause, every moment a user might reconsider, her team had called it seamless, she had called it seamless, the metric that came back was engagement, not satisfaction.
Not arrival, Just movement. Just forward.
The Peugeot went over the hill. The lake disappeared behind the trees.
The road got narrower. A boy drove a herd of goats across it, they waited, with the engine idling.
One goat stared at the car with a mild contempt like it had never heard of making things faster.
Chiamaka asked,
"Uncle do you ever wish you had taken the expressway? Once?"
He was quiet for a long time and she thought he might not answer.
Godwin then said,
"The expressway takes you there, This road takes you through."
He shrugged.
"I prefer to know where I have been."
The last goat cleared the road, They drove on into the afternoon past a school painted blue and yellow past women with buckets on their heads moving toward water.
Chiamaka ate the groundnuts one at a time. Didn't open her phone.
When they finally arrived at her grandmothers compound the old woman was already, at the gate calling her name.
She realised she couldn't say how long the journey had taken.
Only that it had been enough.
Image gotten from Chatgpt
Aikay👾