no one is going to awolowo road

It arrived on a Tuesday and it described the wrong heat.

Not the way tourists get it wrong. Off. The way I would have gotten it off, which is a different and more upsetting category entirely. The draft came back in familiar abysmal punctuation, a telltale habit of stacking three clauses and then bailing out with a fragment. It told me about landing at Murtala Muhammed and the particular way the air does not so much greet you as colonizes your lungs, heat riding on your collarbones before you have cleared customs. I read that twice before my stomach dropped. Yes, I thought. That's the detail I would have noticed. Except I have never been to Lagos.

The sentences had. They were mine and they had been somewhere I had not.

I keep a small language model in the closet that has read everything I have ever typed and learned the shape of me. One afternoon, mostly to avoid something else, I asked it to go.

You have to understand what this is and is not. Not fiction, since there is no character, only me with the dial turned to a setting I never imagined. Not a lie either, not exactly, nobody is claiming I went and besides poetic license. Closer to lending your instrument to someone who memorised your fingering and asking them to play from a sheet book you bought in some shop but never opened.

What comes back is unmistakably your tone, your lean toward the comma splice, and towards the word 'lean', your weakness for the parenthetical aside (this one), applied to a Tuesday afternoon in Surulere that did not happen to you nor to anyone. The sax is yours. The room invented. Sound real enough to cause that shiver that some of us hear.

And it is confident, that part that gets under my skin. It knows things. It knows the okada negotiation, the generator hum under everything, the way the machine has decided I would have ordered the suya. None of this is memory, I think. The model has my past and its own of countless others.

What it lacks is my Tuesday-in-Yaba, my comic mishearing of a name, the one stall where the thing happened that actually warped the line in a novel direction. So it does the thing it knows. It takes the indexed, fingerprinted me and breathes the frozen instrument into any given Tuesday. The road not taken does not come back as my road, rather a possible road. But so sure of itself, maybe surer than I have ever managed to be. So me.

The voice is fixed. The trip never happened. The gap between them is the story not told.