MY LIFE IN AMERICA IS A ROUTINE THAT KILLS ME EACH DAY

By Nkeiru Izuogu

“I always felt [America] had no soul, no tenderness, and a sterility that made it undesirable to live in…”

July 2023. I have contemplated dying in America, but it is tough. Besides, dying in America, just as much as living, is expensive.

It is Day 70 of being broken up by my ex who out of the blue ended our six months relationship for nothing. He expects us to be friends, but I have realized that turning love into friendship is like slicing a tendon. I have gone through all the stages of grief, and now finally at acceptance, suicide seems appealing. If I do end up doing this, please bear in mind it was not done because of a break-up. I am not that broken. It is because I am raw, unshelled and left to dry out. I am expected to accept pain repeatedly, like someone expects their bowels to turn after swallowing a probiotic. I have no support system because the women in my life have been dead for seven/eight years now. 

“How can you, a Nigerian, die in America at your own will?”

My father back in Nigeria is remarried and calls me once every six months. I live in an old apartment that stated in the lease that it probably had mold and asbestos. Said apartment is centered in a much older city in the United States, wide with space and suffocated with thrifted possessions. Friends are an oxymoron. Love is a curse. I trust too quickly, and betrayal is quick to strike my back. I miss my mother so fiercely; I wake up by 3 a.m. and call her name. 

They said therapy would help but look at me back to who I was before therapy — torn apart and pulsating in the chest. 

My life is a routine that kills me each day: I wake up early but head to work late, where I sit behind a desk doing nothing but pretending to stare at my Google Search screen while I secretly watch Dateline on the Peacock app on my cell phone. Maybe I’m watching true-crime to bolster myself to do this act — I don’t know yet. I eat my homemade brunch by 2 p.m. after a morning of intermittent fasting because I bloat fast. Sometimes, I eat chocolate or blueberries submerged in Turkish yogurt. 

When it’s 5 p.m. I head to my car and drive straight home to watch the remaining episodes of any Korean drama on Netflix. This week, it's “King the Land.” I found it cheesy at first, then endearing. It is painful to see someone love another with so much trust, while I wallow in side-eying my phone, wishing my ex would text me and say something unbelievable like, he loves me and wants me back. When it’s 7 p.m., I head to bed and force myself to sleep.

The next morning, it begins again. Maybe this time, as I stand naked brushing my teeth with my Sonic electric toothbrush, its buzzing tickling my tongue, I cry. Then I contemplate taking my life all over again.

“I want this loneliness to dissolve.”

But it’s tough. It’s really tough. How can you, a Nigerian, die in America at your own will? Are you mad?

No, I do not want to die. I know this much. I watched people die from sickness, my mother inclusive, and it was the most traumatizing experience to taint your memory with. 

Keep it sterile. Death is so finite, so limiting, and I know I will meet it one day anyway, so why rush? 

But I want this loneliness to dissolve. I want this pain to wake up in the middle of the night to die instead, to cease harassing me with its strangulation at the jugular. I want something exciting to happen to me. I want the rush, not the stillness. I want redemption, not healing.

To understand my life better, how I arrived in this pit of hell, this life of all but nothing, let me begin from the start.

*

“I loved America like an uncommitted man in a long distant relationship.”

November 2023. America used to be great to me as a child. I visited California with my parents when I was a toddler, so my memory of that visit is faded, but I remember sunlight and mountains and funny-looking trees. 

My mother, who had visited earlier as a young single woman, loved California and would tell me later in life of her stint during the hippie movement. My father loved it for the work that brought him there and never really developed an affinity for the place because he had been racially profiled so many times in America due to his very dark complexion. I was too young to develop an opinion, and it would only take me decades of growing up in Nigeria to realize that I loved America like an uncommitted man in a long distant relationship. I regarded the country for its exploits in science and arts, but I always felt it had no soul, no tenderness and a sterility that made it undesirable to live in…for me, that is.

“The Nigerian passport is like a horrifying instrument to maneuver this world with...”

So now, as a fully grown woman, sometimes I wonder what really led me here, to live in this country. Perhaps it was the promise I made to my mother before she passed, to move to a place more affirming of the choices of women, as my country Nigeria was deficient in that regard. However, she died in 2017, three years before America’s Supreme Courts would scrap Roe v. Wade. If my mother had lived to witness what the country she had applauded so much for the upholding of women’s rights has become, she would have asked me to move somewhere else with a quickness, or better yet, stay home.

Home.

What really is home for me now? Each day I recognize slowly that home may not be here, even though I have fallen into a familiarity (which I am not proud of) with the routine/system. I learned how to drive and bought my first car here. I still don’t understand the atrocious benefits of growing credit scores. I figured out the insanity of paying taxes. I still do not trust plain American cuisine, and I am yet to step foot in a McDonalds, Burger King or IHop. I cherish my Igbo culture now more fiercely, and I speak my language to myself to refresh my words. When I am lonesome for dialogue in my language, I call my family and speak my dialect all through the phone call, or I attend an Igbo Catholic Mass (a blessing I have living in a very diverse part of the East Coast) where the Priest blesses us with the words, “Ihunanya Chukwu”, while I stand with tears of gratitude in my eyes. Grateful, because somewhere in the crevices of my memory, this was a life I had once wished for, this sense of wholeness, an independence that allows me the ability to live to the maximum. But home? A finality of abode, a place I could be my freest self, blessed with choices and finding fulfillment with the box I ticked? No, not yet. I am yet to find my home.

“If…you abolish capitalism from this country, you’d find out that America is pretty basic.”

But then again, I ask myself…where else would I go? The Nigerian passport is like a horrifying instrument to maneuver this world with, and God help you if, like in my case, it is the only one you have. Where else promises an artist’s freedom, a place of not just support but the success of my artistry? If it was home in Nigeria, I might have remained, accepting of the known and the unknown, delighted in the normal. But Nigeria long ceased to be home to me in 2017 once the earth closed over my mother’s grave. Now, even more, it is like a memory of treasures, a box of heirlooms left in safety, only awaiting to be reopened for the passing to future generations.

May 2024. 

If (I wish!) you abolish capitalism from this country, you’d find out that America is pretty basic. Life here could be pretty straightforward without all the morbid obsession for power and money. But of course, you cannot isolate the true, imperialistic foundation of this country from its personality, so that visual is most times skewered and almost impossible to imagine. However, I would say that despite the callousness, there are still people who care. I have lived in this country without being able to afford health insurance, but I have been able to visit the hospital for a mammogram and ultrasound when an emergency medical scare drifted to me in late 2022, all thanks to a free clinic I signed up for that paid the costs. 

“In all this madness, this isolation, this individualism that seeks to suck you into a vortex of loss of community, there are still fractions, albeit small, of its life that gives a communal feeling…”

I have attended residencies that supported my art financially and otherwise, and have been paid to do nothing but write – a luxury I did not have as a growing artist in Nigeria. Currently, I am in one, far away in rural Minnesota, tucked in the plains of the Midwest in a beautiful former farmhouse that must have been a rustic paradise in the 18th century, only now slightly blighted by modernism with the addition of a busy highway now running right next to it.

But perhaps, this visual is what America teaches me: that in all this madness, this isolation, this individualism that seeks to suck you into a vortex of loss of community, there are still fractions, albeit small, of its life that gives a communal feeling, a feeling of acceptance, a unifying of sorts, and a promise of a future that does not seem ambivalent to unionism. And those fractions could make this place home until it fades, or in most times, until it is cracked down.

Basically, this place could be home, until it ceases to be one. 

So until then, I would be content with it, until the third option; the final dream, a rustic bungalow nestled somewhere near the white sands by the turquoise waters of any of the African islands, seasoned with tropical fruit trees and thistle bushes, materializes itself from the canvas of my expectations into a possible reality. 

Until then, I will hope.

Nkeiru Izuogu is a Nigerian artist and writer living in the U.S.