You cannot run from it.

You can only try.

I stared into the abyss today.

Not in that dramatic way. There was no trembling lip, no orchestral swell, no visible crack of emotion. Just caught in a soft, suspended moment. Somewhere between here and not-here. I just stared, still, hovering. Not quite asleep, not fully awake. That strange in-between where everywhere feels like it’s underwater and everything, the sounds, the smells, the thoughts, becomes painfully sharp.

The ceiling above me blurred, then sharpened. My eyes remained open, then slowly shut. My mind drifted far, past the chipped paint, past the rusted fan groaning like an old man in protest, past even the faint laughter of girls down the hall. I was still. Floating. The environment became a hum… and then it didn’t.

They say you only hear certain things when you stop listening. That’s what it felt like. As if the room had been speaking all along, and I’d only just tuned in.

I only moved into this hostel a few weeks ago, but it already feels like I’ve been here forever, or at least long enough to understand that this place isn’t just chaotic. It’s alive. Always moving, always shifting, always threatening to spill over. More than twenty of us squeezed into a room meant for twelve. People everywhere. Talking, moving, breathing, boiling water, searching endlessly for things they never seem to find. You’d think it would feel temporary, like something you can outwait, ignore, or even adjust to. But chaos doesn’t wait for you to adapt. It greets you at the door and stretches itself across every surface.

There is no quiet here. Even the silence has a sound.

The building itself is tired. It sags under the weight of its own neglect. The staircase is broken again. I watched someone fall yesterday, her body hitting the concrete with the kind of thud that silences a room. The cleaners haven’t shown up in weeks, so everything smells strongly of urine and something worse, like a memory that’s overstayed its welcome.

Last week, the transformer in front of the hostel caught fire. We flinched in the moment, and then we moved on, as if a fire hadn’t just happened. It’s a strange thing, the way humans adjust to chaos. You start to expect it. You stop being shocked.

Classes are irregular. It’s the seventh week of the semester, and nothing has taken shape. Everything is suggestion and maybe and wait-for-further-instruction. But exams will come, they always do. And they don’t care whether you’ve been taught or not. Whether you’ve shown up or not. Whether you understand or not. The exam hall will open, your name will be called, and you will answer, ready or not.

It has rained for days now. Not the soft, romantic kind of rain, but the angry kind, like Chukwu, is punishing the dibias for hoarding the secrets of the Gods. It pours endlessly, loud and insistent. And because our room has no window, the water comes in. It creeps across the floor like something alive, steady, unbothered by our panic. We scramble to save our bags, our books, our lives. There’s no time to sit at the edge of your bed and watch the raindrops race each other down the wall. No time to find poetry in the sound. We are too busy trying not to drown. But water doesn’t care. It seeps through the tiniest holes and takes what it wants. Just like life.

And life? It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t pause for your pain or pity your struggle. No matter what you’re going through, it keeps moving, cold, relentless, forward. It won’t wait for you to catch your breath. You either keep up, or it drags you.

The food situation is not worth repeating. Stale bread. Oil rice. Maggi water pretending to be soup. No kitchen. No dignity. Just tired bodies feeding tired stomachs, hoping something sticks. My appetite left days ago. Now I chew only to survive.

And in the thick of all of it, I think about how glad I am that I stepped away from work. Not because I didn’t want to keep going, but because I would’ve been forced to explain all of this, these absurd, constant interruptions of dignity, as if I were making them up. The noise, the fires, the floods. The unpredictability of it all. There’s no professional-sounding way to say, “Sorry, I couldn’t join the call; the room I sleep in is underwater.” Especially not in a place where they expected so much of me and gave me so little support. Where performance was praised but struggle was met with silence. I would’ve been explaining chaos to people who’ve never had to fight mosquitoes and madness just to send an email.

But the hardest part isn’t the hunger, or the noise, or the cold wet floor. It’s the ache that hums beneath it all. That feeling that I’m narrating my life without living it. That I am all language, no movement. All longing, no action. I talk and talk and talk, but nothing shifts. Or maybe I’m just blind to the little progress I’m making, too obsessed with the mountain to notice the inch I’ve climbed.

Still, in that liminal state, that soft, not-quite-here, I feel it. The small shifts. The invisible bruises. The deep fatigue that only surfaces when you’ve been carrying more than you realize. I feel things I didn’t even know I was allowed to feel. The heavy ones arrive without name or warning: anger, tenderness, guilt, desire, longing. That shapeless thing that lives between grief and nostalgia.

It’s in that floating space, with no clear edges, that I find awareness. Not peace, just awareness. Of how tired I am. Of how much I want to be better. Of how this room, this life, this moment presses itself into me, leaving marks I’ll carry long after I leave. I’ve come to realize: everything is louder when you’re tired.

Then, softly, like a ripple in still water, I heard it.

“Nana… Nana.”

Someone was calling my name. At first, it sounded like a memory. Then a whisper. Then a hand, gently tugging at my shoulder. My eyes fluttered open.

It was I.T., my grey-headed roommate. Her voice rough with concern, brows knit tight.

“You okay?” I nodded, before I even knew if it was true.

And just like that, the room snapped back into focus. The mildew. The clatter of buckets. Laughter echoing too loudly in the hallway. A mosquito humming close to my ear.

Because no matter how far you drift, no matter how soft the world becomes when you float, reality waits. And eventually, it finds you.

You can’t run from it forever.