On the day the train first started running from Kaduna to Abuja, Ibrahim was the one who said, “Dan uwa na, let’s sneak on and ride the train to the promised land.” We had been living together in a nook under the bridge for the last year and a half. His parents had passed like my own, and the home the government had put him in, just like mine, used to strip the skin of his back with a cane if he made even the smallest mistake. The streets were better. 

On the day the train first started running, we hadn’t eaten in two days. We had heard Abuja is the place where all your worries melt away. Abuja is the promised land. Abuja is the place where boys make a living with just a little smarts. Still, I was afraid. The throng of bodies at the train station, waiting to board the train seemed intimidating. What if we got caught? What if they disciplined us? Ibrahim was the one who took me by the hand and tugged me towards our future. We snuck into one of the brand-new carriages and wedged ourselves in the first bathroom we stumbled on. When the train pulled away, I almost screamed at the cranking motion under my feet. Throughout the trip, we stood face to face, our bodies pressed together in the tiny stall, giggling at the views outside the barred window and the noises from the carriage beyond us. When we arrived, Ibrahim was the one who scouted a new bridge for us to lie under for the night while we gathered ourselves for a new life.

That is why it is so strange being here without him. This was always his dream, his imagining, his ambition. But five months into our stay, when things were not working out as we planned, when it turned out Abuja was no promised land, there was no gold to be found on the streets, there was only labor and hunger, the same way there had been in Kaduna, he wanted to ride the new train from Abuja to Kano—he had heard there was a new life to be had there. I had just gotten a job as wheelbarrow pusher in the market. I didn’t want to start over in a new place of dreams.

“If you won’t come with me, I will go on my own,” he threatened. I didn’t think he actually would. But when I came back from work that evening, he was gone; there was just silence in his place. I sobbed in the emptiness of our room. I tried to imagine him in another train bathroom, alone.