Jide wished the moment she turned from the window and asked the question, that he had kept his mouth shut.

“Where are you going?”

Simple question. Four words. He lived in Birmingham, he was going to Birmingham, that was true and available and he could say it. But the question, the way she had asked it, directly, openly, with the same guileless attention she gave everything, had landed somewhere underneath the simple answer and found the other question, the one he had been sitting with since the lift in Lekki Phase 1.

Where are you going?

He did not know. He had three weeks of leave and he had used three days out of them but what he had found in those three days was that the future he had been going toward did not exist, had perhaps never existed, and the question of what came after, was one he had not yet begun to answer.

He looked at her.

“I’m going back home,” he said. “I live in Birmingham.”

She nodded, taking it in.

“I’m a software engineer,” he added, because something in the silence seemed to want filling, or because he needed to locate himself in something factual, something that was still true.

She nodded again, and looked at him with a directness that was completely without self-consciousness and said: “Who is a software engineer?”

He opened his mouth.

Before he could answer, she said: “I know engineer. Mechanical engineer, road engineer, building engineer, all of these I know. But software, I don’t know that one.”

Something dissolved in his chest. The tightness that had been there since he found himself on the hotel floor. Something in the specific texture of that question, asked without embarrassment, with the straightforward curiosity of someone who would rather know than pretend. Something in all of that dissolved the pain in his chest, slightly, like the first loosening of something that had been knotted.

“Software,” he said. “Like computer. Internet. The programs that make things work.”

“Oh.” She absorbed this, her face open, unmanaged. “Oh wow. So you make the internet work?”

“More or less, for my company’s specific product.”

“Wow.” She shook her head slowly, with genuine admiration, the kind that had not been taught to perform itself. “You must be very brilliant.”

He laughed. He had not planned to laugh. It arrived without warning, from somewhere that had not been available to him in the last twenty-four hours. “I think so. I mean, I hope so.”

“A kind man who is also brilliant.” She said it the way she said everything, simply, as a statement of fact, the way you note the weather. “What a beautiful combination.”

He looked at her.

He genuinely did not know what to do with her. He had been in England for six years and he had learned, gradually and without noticing, the particular social grammar of a place where what you mean and what you say are managed carefully, where directness is considered a form of aggression, where compliments are deployed strategically or not at all. He had learned this grammar and now he was sitting next to someone who had not learned it and was saying what a beautiful combination about a man she had met two hours ago with the complete sincerity of someone who has not yet understood that sincerity is supposed to be managed.

It was, he thought, the most refreshing thing he had encountered in a very long time.

“So what do you do?” he asked.

“I am a tailor.” she said, then paused. “Sorry, not tailor. Fashion designer.” Then she paused again. “Okay, I think I am both. I am a fashion designer and I am a tailor. Sometimes people bring their style to me and I make it for them like that. Other times, if they trust me, and most times they trust me, I help them draw something original and sew it. That is my work.”

“Nice,” he said. “What’s your Instagram? Let me see your designs.”

The embarrassment arrived on her face before she could stop it. He saw the exact moment it came, the slight change in her color, the shift in her expression. He felt immediately that he had done something wrong without knowing what.

“I don’t have Instagram,” she said.

“Oh.” He heard himself and stopped. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“No, it is fine.” She said it quickly, with the briskness of someone moving past something. “My madam actually said it. That I need social media. I just, it has been a busy year but now that you have asked, I will open it. Maybe it will help me to charge more for my work.”

He was still recalibrating, the Instagram, the embarrassment, when he caught on the ‘my madam’ phrase. “Your madam? You have a boss?”

She sighed, the sigh of someone deciding how much of a long story to tell. “There was a family I was working for before. I lived with them, just helping them, doing house things, managing the house.” She paused. “Anyway, that is the madam. They left Nigeria, traveled to England, and I started my fashion business. But we are still close. In fact, that is where I am going. To visit them.”

“Hmm,” he said. Because what he wanted to say was more than he had permission to say, so instead hee said: “That is nice.”

“Yes,” she said.

And then she turned back to her window, because she was not the kind of person who needed a conversation to keep going, who filled silence because silence made her uncomfortable. She simply sat with the window and whatever she was thinking, leaving him to do the same.

He reached for his phone and swiped to the Bible app.

——————————————————————————————————

He opened it, and went straight to Proverbs 3. He read it again:  trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding, in all your ways acknowledge him and he will direct your paths, then he sat with it the way you sit with something that is still working on you.

He stood up. He needed to not be in the seat for this.

He moved to the back of the plane. The cabin was dim, the lights lowered, most passengers in the half-sleep of long flights. He found a corner in the galley and he stood in it and he bowed his head.

“Lord.” He stopped. Started again. “Lord, I am not going to be entitled about this. I am not going to stand here and tell You that You led me wrong, because I know now that You did not. I know that You answered my prayer and I answered my own prayer on top of Yours and then called the whole thing Yours.”

He paused.

“I chased what I wanted and I called it what You wanted. And every time You tried to show me something, I looked elsewhere because I had already decided, and deciding felt safer than seeking. I am sorry. Not because Elizabeth hurt me. I am apologizing because I made You into the author of my own decisions. That is not who You are, and I knew better.”

He let the apology be complete, not rushed, or performed, not the kind of sorry that is really a request for things to be better. Just the apology itself, given without condition.

“Lord, I am done. I am not going to pursue anything until You are so clear with me that there is no room for my own interpretation.”

He meant it. He meant it fully, in the way you mean something when you have just seen clearly what the alternative costs.

Into the silence that followed came the verse again, quiet and unhurried:

In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will direct your paths.

He paused.

He already knew. He had just made a vow about the foreseeable future without asking God about the foreseeable future. He had decided, again. He had wrapped his own conclusion in the language of surrender and called it consecration.

“I’m doing it again,” he said. Out loud, quietly, in the dark galley. A crew member glanced at him. He did not care. “I am literally doing it again. Lord, I am sorry. Whatever You have, whatever You want me to do, I will do it. You lead me. Just lead me, give me clarity.”

He stood for a moment more.

Then, from somewhere in his memory, his mother’s voice on a Sunday afternoon in Ibadan, her Bible open on her lap, the veranda, the smell of jollof rice from inside, came a different passage. Not Proverbs this time, but The Psalms.

He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul.

He stood in the galley and let it move through him. He leads. He restores. The shepherd does the leading. The sheep does the following.

“Lead me beside still waters,” he said. “Please. Just lead me.”

He straightened, took a breath, and made his way back up the aisle toward 23C.

———————————————————————————————————————

She was asleep.

She had turned toward the window, her head resting against the plastic of the seat, her hands folded in her lap, completely, simply asleep in the way of someone who had been running on prayer and adrenaline, and had finally arrived at the moment the body takes what it needs. She looked younger asleep. She looked exactly like what she was, a woman on her first flight, going to a country she had never been to, carrying more than what was in her bag.

His seat, 23C, had the remains of the water he had knocked over before going to the back, the cup tipping and soaking into the fabric. He had not thought about it when he stood up. He thought about it now, looking at the wet seat and at her sleeping on the window side and the empty middle seat, 23B, between them.

He sat in 23B.

He told himself it was because of the wet seat. This was true. He told himself this clearly and then he opened his Bible app and went back to the Psalms because the Psalms were where he needed to be, not in the noticing of how a person’s face looked in sleep.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul.

He read it slowly, the way his mother had taught him, not for information but for contact, not to get through it but to let it get through you.

He was reading it for the second time when he felt the slight weight on his shoulder.

He looked down.

Her head had dropped, sleep doing what sleep does, and she was resting against him with the complete unconsciousness of someone who did not know she was doing it, who had no idea, who was simply asleep the way a child falls asleep in a car and ends up wherever the car goes.

He did not move.

He sat very still, looked at the seat in front of him and felt something he had not felt in a long time, something he was not going to name yet, that he was going to hold quietly without naming because the naming of things was what had gotten him into Flat 4B.

What he felt was this: the instinct to not let anything harm the person sleeping on his shoulder. Not protection in the way of romance, not that, not anywhere near that. The older instinct, the more fundamental one. The one that says this person is resting and nothing should disturb them. He felt it arrive like a reflex, before his mind had participated, and he sat with it and let her sleep.

He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

The plane moved through the dark air above the earth. Outside the window, beyond her sleeping head, the sky was the deep blue of altitude, the stars visible in a way they never were from the ground. Below them somewhere was the Mediterranean, Europe beginning. Birmingham was perhaps two hours away. He did not reach for his watch to check.

He said, internally, quietly: Okay. Lead me. I am following. I don’t know where we are going but I am following.

———————————————————————————————————————

She woke without drama.

One moment she was asleep and the next she was present, not gradually, not with confusion, but simply awake. Her eyes opened. She felt the weight of her head and where it was. She sat up slowly, looked at him and her face did the thing it did.

“I’m sorry.” The apology was immediate and genuine, no performance of embarrassment. “I didn’t know I had slept.”

“It’s fine,” he said.

She looked at the window. At whatever the sky was doing outside and then she laughed.

It was not a polite laugh, not the managed sound that keeps things moving. It was a real laugh, short, bright, slightly surprised at itself, the laugh of someone who has found something genuinely funny and cannot help it.

Something moved in him again as she sang.

There shall be showers of blessings. The hymn his grandmother used to sing on Sunday mornings in Ibadan, her voice thin and certain. This is the promise of God. He had not thought of that hymn in years but he thought of it now, with her laughter still in the air of the cabin, and he understood something. He needed to know her more.

He was not going to rush it. He was going to take it slowly and with full acknowledgement of God in every step. He was going to follow this lead, and not decide that getting to know her was for anything. But before this plane landed, he needed her number.

Not because he was certain of the reason. Not because he was ready for any new thing with any woman, no matter how special. He was a man whose soul was in the early stages of being restored and who had learned, at some cost, that certainty was not the thing God required of him. Acknowledgement was. The ongoing seeking. The continued asking. The ‘lead me, and I will follow.’

She had turned back to the window. Outside, the world was lightening, the sky changing at the edge, the suggestion of the English morning beginning somewhere beyond the horizon. Birmingham was close now. He could feel the slight change in the plane’s altitude, the subtle forward lean of descent beginning.

He looked at her profile against the lightning window. He thought about the almost six hours they had been together here. The bag at the check-in desk. The seatbelt. The well done said to a crew member who needed to hear it. The thank you Jesus said to no one. The way she had moved through the whole of this, thoroughly and without self-consciousness, simply being who she was.

He had a knowing in his spirit that sitting beside this woman had not been random. He could not name what it was and he was not going to name it, because he had learned what happened when he named things too quickly. But the knowing was there, quiet, present, the way still water is present, not announcing itself, simply being.

He picked up his phone, then looked at her.

He almost did not ask again. He sat for a moment with the full weight of the last three days and what they had cost him and what it meant to trust his own noticing again, even quietly, even carefully, even with both hands open and nothing decided. He sat with all of it.

Then he asked.

“Can I have your number?” he said. “I would like to keep in touch.”

She looked at him with that face. The direct, unmanaged, open face. And then she said: “Okay.”

Just that. No performance of being asked. No calculation. She said okay the way she said everything, simply, because it was what she meant.

She collected his phone, typed her number and handed it back.

He typed in her name when she told him: Yetunde.

“I’m Jide,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “You told me.”

He had not remembered telling her. He must have, at the beginning, in the first exchange. She had held it all this time without making anything of it, without using it, just holding it.

The plane began its final descent. Below them, through the windows on both sides, England was appearing, green and grey and overcast, the particular English sky that was not dramatic about itself. Fields. Roads. The geometry of a country that had been organizing itself for a long time.

She was looking at it. He could see it on her face, the first sight of it, the landing into a thing that had been abstract and was now real, the ground coming up to meet the life she had been building toward without knowing what it looked like.

The wheels found the runway. The plane shook itself into landing, the engines reversing, the speed slowing, everything solid again after the hours of air. She closed her eyes for a moment and her lips moved, the brief prayer of someone who had prayed for the flight and was now thanking God for the landing, specifically, as a separate grace from the taking off.

“Thank you, Jesus,” she said. Quietly. For no one but God.

He looked out through the window at the Birmingham tarmac, grey and wet with English rain, and thought about still waters.

Lead me Lord.

———————————————————————————————————————