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Looking forward to a better future

dreaming a boat would come and take her away
dreaming a boat would come and take her away
She sits every morning on the pier.
This is the only pier accessible to anyone on Queensdrive, Ikoyi.
She is peering eastward over the water.
She is a women, whose age I could not tell,
Somewhere between 20 and 40 year old.
She sits on the pier with her backpack, her flip-flops and a white plastic bag lying behind her back.
Her legs leisurely hang above the water.
She contemplates the surface of the muddy water.
Recent rains have loaded the water of rivers from the hinterland with red soil.
The blue of the sky hardly reflects on that water.
She wears simple clothes, a black headscarf, a grey t-shirt and a purple skirt.
She seems to have time on her hand,
Nowhere to go, no-one to expect her at that particular moment
She peers into the horizon hoping for something good to crop-up.
Perhaps a boat could come and take her away
Her gaze caresses the shiny surface of the water.
Her ears listen to the distant bustle of traffic on the opposite shore.
Ozumba Mbadimbwe, Lekki Expressway where cars, trucks, okadas and buses choke together under the hot sun, fighting their way to and from the toll-gate.
More immediately soothing is the fresh sound of the water licking the pillars of the pier.
She is focusing on nothing in particular, emptying her brain,
Listening to her subconscious, forgetting about the past,
Forgetting about how she got there in the first place.
She allows her thoughts to ride unrestrained over the heaven-reflecting water.
She is holding the metal fence erected on one side of the pier.
She can lean her body against it while her mind flies.
The sound of an approaching okada engine comes as an unpleasant distraction,
A stern reminder that she is on Earth, sitting on a pier in Ikoyi,
The only pier that is accessible to anyone.
The okada drives past and the music of wind and water takes over.
Fortunately time passes, unfortunately her stomach is calling.
What to do with it? There are fishes in the lagoon.
If only a boat could come and take her faraway forever.

All this is a fiction that is possibly closely knit together with reality, in other words it is a friction between the two.
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