My name is Itua, and once upon a time in Lagos, my fingers were more powerful than a presidential pardon. I ran a salon behind Computer Village in Ikeja, nestled between a crooked phone repair guy who could unlock any device on earth but couldn’t look you in the eye, and a mama selling amala who believed in Jesus and jedi-jedi in equal measure. 

Inside my little kingdom? Heaven. My throne was a black leather swivel chair with a slight tear on the armrest that I covered with an Ankara fabric. My altar? A wall of braiding attachments in every color imaginable: wine red that caught the light, blonde 613 that shimmered like gold dust, blue-black deep as midnight, chocolate brown warm as cocoa, green for December madness when Lagos girls wanted to outshine Christmas lights, and the classic color 1—darker than secrets.

Women came from every corner of Lagos. Ajah babes would fight traffic for hours, their faces glistening with sweat and determination when they finally pushed through my salon door. Island big girls with expensive lace wigs would remove them with reverence and whisper, “Do small Ghana weaving for me. Abeg no tight am,” while sliding extra naira notes into my palm. Even ministers’ wives with their hushed voices and designer sunglasses all found their way to me, security details waiting by gleaming SUVs outside.

Babes, I was the goddess of Ghana weaving. I could do invisible knotless braids with my eyes closed, my fingers dancing across scalps. I could do Bohemian locs, butterfly braids, feed-ins that blended so seamlessly you’d think they grew from scalps, goddess twists that framed faces, two-step cornrows neat as mathematics—styles that lasted through Lagos humidity and turned heads at weddings and funerals alike. You knew an Itua braid by its neatness. By the way the edges lay flat without a hint of tension. By the compliments that followed it to parties and baby showers.

I lived in a crisp white duplex in Ikeja GRA with bougainvillea climbing the fence and a gateman who called me “Madam CEO.” I drove a black BMW X4 with red leather seats that sighed when you sat on them and a vanity plate that read “BRAIDBOSS.” I had staff—three girls I’d trained myself who worshipped my techniques and a PA who managed the chaos of my calendar.

I had bookings for three months straight, a waiting list longer than JAMB registration lines. My phone rang nonstop. Influencers tagged me in posts that went viral. Men asked for my hand at weddings, in my DMs, through mutual friends. But I wasn’t looking. My fingers were too busy building an empire to reach for love.

I had peace. I had it all.

Until Joe happened.

Joe, with a voice deep as a well and flattery smooth as shea butter. Painfully handsome Joe with cornrows and pink lips.

Joe, the African American from Atlanta, who slid into my DMs after I posted a client’s goddess braids. He said my smile was “like a sunrise over the Sahara,” and I could almost hear the rehearsed quality to it. I rolled my eyes but replied, “Thanks.” The smallest crumb of attention, and yet that plain ‘thanks’ turned into a year of long-distance calls that stretched into the night, voice notes I’d play repeatedly just to hear that accent, and video chats where I’d find myself putting on lipstick before answering.

Joe had that irresistible R&B slickness, that smooth American twang that made “how you doing, baby” sound like poetry. He called daily from multiple places—Starbucks where baristas knew his order, Panera Bread where he’d show me pastries I’d never tasted, co-working spaces with glass walls and sleek furniture, and even a Barnes & Noble once where he walked me through aisles of books, as if giving me a tour of his mind. He wore clean shirts with brands I recognized from music videos and said things like “Black love is revolutionary” with the confidence of a man who believed his own words.

I was his African queen, he said, rolling the “r” in “African,” making me blush despite my reservations. His foreign woman to complete his long-lost roots. “I love my Nigerian queens,” he’d say, his eyes softening through the screen. “They loyal, hardworking, soft in the right places, strong in the others.” His exes were too independent, too mouthy, too “Americanized.”

The red flag was fluttering in the breeze, abi? Not to Itua, starry-eyed, mumu Itua, who believed in an illusion painted in broad, romantic strokes across the Atlantic.

When he offered to sponsor a K-1 visa for me to come as his fiancée, I hesitated. Not because I didn’t like him, but because I was afraid of the vastness between fantasy and reality. My salon smelled of coconut oil and success. America was a fragrance I’d never inhaled.

“I want a wife,” he’d say, his face serious in the blue light of midnight video calls. “I want to build something real. Come here. Let’s build an empire.” His voice would drop to a whisper, intimate as a prayer. “You and me, baby. Hair empire from Atlanta to Lagos.”

I’d built a kingdom with my bare hands, brick by careful brick. My salon wasn’t just a business—it was my identity. My independence. My pride wrapped in every perfect braid. And to leave that behind for a man I’d never shared oxygen with? Never felt the actual weight of his hand in mine? Madness. The kind of madness Lagos gossips would feast on for months.

But then he’d say things like, “Baby, can’t you see us taking over? I’ll get you your own salon. I’ll buy you anything you need. You’ll be my queen in this cold, dry land.” And he’d show me pictures of Black women with successful hair businesses in Atlanta, their Instagram pages gleaming with celebrity clients and expansion announcements.

Despite my hesitations, in my weaker moments—usually at 2 AM when Lagos was quiet except for distant generator hums and my loneliness felt as vast as the ocean between us—I believed him. Believed in the possibility of us. Believed that perhaps love could be both a beginning and a continuation of my dreams.

The night before I left Lagos, my heart wouldn’t stay still. It twisted in my chest like a wrung towel, dripping anxiety into my bloodstream. I stood in the middle of my empty salon, smelling the lingering scents of hair sprays, shampoos, and the toasted power banks from next door that had become as familiar as my own perfume.

Toke, Karis, and Ujunwa came over, my girls since secondary school, who knew every layer of my life story. We sat cross-legged on the floor, drinking zobo that stained our lips crimson, eating suya with fingers that burned from the pepper, and pretending it was a celebration when it felt more like a wake. They asked questions I didn’t want to answer, their eyes full of concern, they tried to mask with excitement.

“So, what’s Joe really like? Beyond the video calls and the sweet talk?” Toke asked.

“He’s amazing,” I said, grinning, ignoring the flutter of uncertainty in my stomach. “He’s kind. Ambitious. He understands me.”

“His place is nice, shey? You’ve seen it, right? Virtual tour?” Karis asked.

“Yup. Very modern. Joe na big boy,” I replied, not admitting I’d only seen carefully angled glimpses—his living room couch, a kitchen counter, never a full panoramic view. I didn’t know what his bathroom even looked like, whether his toilet seat had cracks, or if his shower had good pressure—details that suddenly seemed vital.

“You ready for this, babe? America is not like the films o,” Ujunwa said.

“I’ve never been more ready,” I said with a smile as flighty as a wig in high wind. My friends nodded, wanting to believe me as much as I wanted to believe myself.

“Oya na. American wedding, here we come!” Toke said, and we all clinked half-empty zobo glasses.

Later that night, after they’d left with tight hugs and promises to visit soon, my mother came in holding a bowl of ofada rice, the kind she made only for special occasions, with ayamase stew so green it resembled liquified money. She placed it in front of me gently, like I was going to war and this was my last meal on Nigerian soil.

“You don think am finish?” she asked, her eyes searching mine for the truth she already suspected wasn’t there.

“I have, Mama,” I lied again, the words bitter on my tongue.

She nodded slowly, her wisdom settling around us like evening dust. “Just remember say not every man wey say love, dey mean light.” She touched my cheek, her palm rough from years of washing our clothes by hand. “Sometimes dem mean fire. And fire no be only for cooking. E fit burn house down too.”

Atlanta met me with a cold wind that sliced through my puffer jacket. Joe’s beaming smile at Hartsfield-Jackson seemed genuine enough, his teeth white against his skin, arms open wide. He wore grey joggers with a small stain near the knee and a puffer jacket that had seen better winters. His car—a beat-up Dodge Caravan with a dented rear bumper—coughed and sputtered when he turned the key, like an old man waking from deep sleep. The seats smelled of sweat and artificial pine air freshener, battling it out, neither winning.

I tried to smile. Tried to believe this was just a humble beginning. Tried not to compare the car to my BMW sitting idly in my mother’s compound in Lagos. Tried not to weep both from jetlag and unnamed emotion.

But when we pulled into his apartment complex at Thomasville Heights and I saw the sagging roofs, broken windows with cardboard patches, and bullet-hole-riddled stop signs that looked like metallic Swiss cheese, my stomach sank to the floor of the car.

“Welcome home, baby,” he said, squeezing my thigh in a way that was meant to be reassuring but felt like pressure.

His apartment? A one-bedroom dump on the ground floor with cracked tiles that caught the edges of my slippers, a mattress on the floor with sheets that didn’t smell freshly washed, and a pile of unopened bills on a coffee table that wobbled when I set my handbag down. No internet. No cable. Just a TV showing static and a PlayStation controller missing buttons. He didn’t own any games for it, just the console—a metaphor I was too jet-lagged to fully appreciate.

Within the first week, the baby mamas arrived, one by dramatic one.

The first—tall with micro braids and eyes that held no warmth—dropped off a child without warning, a boy about four who looked at me with Joe’s exact eyes, then left with only, “I’ll be back on Sunday.” Another came banging on the door at 7 AM on a Tuesday, her voice carrying through the thin walls: “Joe, I need that money! Don’t play with me! I know you in there!”

He tried to laugh it off, rubbing the back of his neck. “You know how these women are. They crazy. American women, man. No respect.”

But I wasn’t laughing. I was counting. And listening. And piecing together a puzzle whose picture was becoming clearer by the day.

Five children. Five women. One Joe with no actual job. No plan. No empire in sight—not even a foundation.

He was working part-time at a Waffle House on Buford Highway, smelling of grease when he came home, and occasionally cleaned rooms at a shady motel in Decatur where he sometimes “crashed with friends” when a shift ran late. His “business” was a dream as vaporous as morning fog. And I? I was trapped in a nightmare I’d walked into voluntarily, my visa and heart stamped with an expiration date.

With the K-1 visa, I couldn’t work legally. Couldn’t earn a dollar without risking deportation. I had 90 days to either marry him or leave the country. My passport, tucked in the inner pocket of my suitcase, started to feel like both a threat and a promise in my bag. Freedom and shame wrapped in a small green booklet.

He stopped calling me queen after the third week. Stopped talking about building an empire. Now, he asked if I could buy groceries with the money I’d brought from Nigeria. Asked to use my card for gas. Asked if I could help pay for his car note because “this month is tight, but next month we eating good, I promise.”

One night, I came home from braiding a friend-of-a-friend’s hair for free in hopes of referrals, my fingertips sore and back aching from hunching over in a too-small chair, and he had the audacity to look up from his phone and ask, “You didn’t bring back food? I’m starving.”

I stared at him across the room that suddenly seemed vast as the Atlantic and saw a man who never meant to love me. Just wanted to use me. He specifically scouted out women like me. Strong, successful women. Women who had all to lose and more to give. He wanted me because he believed in our desperation to stay in America. And Nigerian women? We were hardworking. We stayed. We endured. We carried families on backs already bent with our own dreams.

Not this time. Not Itua.

I didn’t come to endure. I didn’t cross an ocean to become smaller. I came to build—even if I now had to build from rubble.

I moved out without telling him, leaving when he went to a “business meeting” that I knew was just him playing video games at his friend’s apartment. Found a tiny room in Norcross rented out by Lucia, a Dominican woman with three cats named after saints and strict rules posted on the refrigerator. No boys. No noise after 10 PM. Pay on time or leave—no excuses, no sob stories.

I started from scratch. Opened a Facebook page with photos of braiding styles I’d done back home. Posted in African grocery store WhatsApp groups. Offered home service for half what I’d charged in Lagos. I carried my braiding stool across bus routes, sometimes waiting an hour in the cold for connections. Sometimes, two-hour journeys one way to reach a client who’d haggle down my already low prices. I braided in kitchens with bad lighting, in garages that smelled of motor oil, in backyards when the weather permitted. Got underpaid. Got ghosted by women who promised to recommend me but never did.

I worked nights at a warehouse in Doraville, packing boxes with women who barely spoke English but understood pain in any language. We used hand gestures and tired eyes to communicate across shifts that stretched from dusk till dawn. My hands bled through cheap gloves. My back ached with knots as tight as my best braids. But I kept going, because going back wasn’t an option.

Not yet. Not like this.

My 90 days were ticking down like a bomb in a movie, but I was both the hero and the villain in this story. Immigration notices came with increasing frequency, the language shifting from bureaucratic to threatening. Joe tried to contact me multiple times, his messages shifting from anger to apology to claims that he missed me. He didn’t. He missed the help, the extra income, the woman who had believed his lies long enough to cross an ocean.

I started dating, too. Desperate, searching. Swiping on Bumble and Tinder with photos that showed me smiling wider than I felt. Smiling at men in grocery stores who looked like they might have papers. Laughing too loudly at jokes that weren’t funny over coffee dates. I met one who asked me within the first hour if I “needed papers,” his eyes calculating the cost of my desperation. Another who offered to marry me if I got him a car and let him live rent-free for the duration of our contract. 

I felt myself shrinking. Physically, I was losing weight, my cheekbones stood stark against my skin. Spiritually, my prayers were becoming shorter, more transactional. I lost sleep. I lost my accent, softening it to be understood on phone calls.

I lost myself, piece by piece, like beads falling from a broken necklace.

Immigration letters kept arriving at Lucia’s address, each more urgent than the last. “You have 20 days to adjust your status or depart voluntarily.” The “voluntarily” part always made me laugh—a bitter sound in an empty room.

As if my choices hadn’t narrowed to a pinpoint.

My heart pounded through every warehouse shift, jumping at sounds that resembled knocking. I worked more. Braided faster. Took extra hours at the cleaning job in Buckhead, where rich women watched me scrub their floors while talking on phones about vacations I’d never take. Sometimes I’d braid until 2 AM and report to a warehouse by 5, the world blurring into a smear of commutes and commerce.

One afternoon, while I sat on a park bench eating a meat pie that tasted nothing like home, Ujunwa called me on WhatsApp. The moment I heard her voice—warm and familiar as my mother’s living room—everything I’d buried burst through the soil of my pretense.

I broke. I cried. No—sobbed. Deep, raw, full-bodied grief that bent me double on that bench, scaring pigeons and passing joggers alike. I cried for my salon. For my BMW. For my reputation. For the dreams I’d packed so carefully, only to have them shatter in transit.

“I lied,” I told her between gasps that felt like drowning. “I lied to all of you. Joe was a fraud. I was stupid. I left everything. And now I’m here… hustling like a ghost with no face. No identity. Just hands that work and a body that moves from place to place.”

She listened. She didn’t interrupt or offer empty comfort. Then she said, her voice steady as a heartbeat, “You’re still you, Itua. Your hands still remember what they were made to do. Your fire’s still in there, even if it’s just embers now. Just bend. Don’t break.”

After that call, I pushed harder. Go hard or go home, right? But I’m not going back. Can’t go back. Go back to what? And say what? Face the people who warned me? My mother, whose eyes would fill with a sadness worse than any scolding? People. Eh. The way they would laugh at me behind their hands and call me another japa casualty? God forbid.

So, despite the immigration people on my neck, I didn’t book that return ticket. Not yet.

I hired an immigration lawyer with money I didn’t have, paying in installments that stretched my budget to a snap. Took a gamble on deferred action. Applied for an extension. Begged the system in sterile offices to let me stay just long enough to make something of the pain, to transform it into purpose.

For a few months, I lived on hope, grit, and sheer adrenaline. I braided until my hands went numb, the sensation returning as pins and needles in the night. Packaged stuff in freezing or overheated warehouses. Cleaned until my knees ached from scrubbing other people’s dirt. I fought to belong in a place that never promised me belonging, but had become a battlefield I wasn’t ready to surrender. I gave it everything—my health, my sleep, my dignity on days when clients treated me like a servant rather than an artist.

But when the final letter came—denial, no more extensions, the legal equivalent of a door slamming—I packed in silence. No fanfare. No farewell party. No dramatic goodbyes. I knew the decision had been made for me long before I’d ever stepped foot on American soil.

I bought my ticket back home.

At the Greyhound station, I waited for the airport shuttle with my suitcase—lighter now without the weight of false hopes—and a numbness I couldn’t describe. A moving body with a soul that had long fled, a spirit taking flight. Leaving me to go through the mechanical process of returning.

 Atlanta had given me pain, hollowed me out like a gourd, but also filled that space with clarity.

I was not weak.

I was not foolish.

I was a woman who loved, who hoped, who trusted, and when betrayed, still found the strength to stand.

A child nearby dropped an ice cream cone, the pink scoop splattered on the concrete like dreams on impact. His mother rushed to comfort him, wiping his tears and promising him another. I wondered who would promise me another chance at my dreams.

The shuttle arrived, belching exhaust into the spring air. As I boarded, I realized something profound: I wasn’t running home.

I was returning whole.

To Lagos, with its chaos and possibilities.

To myself, the woman who once built something from nothing.

To the girl with magic in her fingers and the fire to rise again, this time with wisdom tempered in American disappointment.

I didn’t go home in defeat—I went home in defiance. Defiance of the statistics that say women like me break. Defiance of the narrative that says America is the only place where dreams mature.

Watch me build again.

Watch me.

Dear reader,
I hope you felt this story as deeply as I did.
Should Itua have stayed and fought harder?
 Could she have managed Joe until she got her papers?
 Or should she have fled to one of the sanctuary states,
living the rest of her life as an undocumented resident?
Share your thoughts in the comments.
 Someone might find it tremendously helpful.
Yours always, Timi Waters