The Most Cringe Flight of My Life Started With “Ivie? Ivie From Yaba?”

I had exactly nineteen minutes to spare when I got to the Murtala Muhammed International Wing, which, for anyone who has ever tried to check in for a Kenya Airways flight during the Sallah rush, is basically a miracle.

My suitcase wheel had chosen that morning to die somewhere on the Third Mainland Bridge, so I dragged it the last two hundred meters like a stubborn goat, sweating through the blazer I’d ironed at 5 a.m. for absolutely no reason, since nobody irons anything that survives Lagos traffic.

My name is Ivie, I’m twenty-nine, and I was flying to Nairobi for my cousin’s wedding with a carry-on full of aso-ebi fabric and a heart full of relief that I was, for once, not running late for anything that mattered.

The relief lasted until boarding.

I found 14A, shoved my bag into the overhead bin, and dropped into my window seat already reaching for my earphones, the international signal for do not talk to me, when a voice from the aisle said, Ivie? Ivie from Yaba?

I looked up and my stomach did the kind of drop you feel when the danfo brakes too late at Ojuelegba.

It was Tobenna.

Not just any Tobenna. The Tobenna I had matched with on a dating app eight months earlier, gone on exactly one lovely date with at a small bukka near Freedom Park, laughed with until my ribs hurt, and then never spoken to again.

Not because anything went wrong. Nothing went wrong. That was the problem. It went right, and something about it going right made me panic and simply stop replying. Three unanswered messages. A voice note I listened to twice and never responded to. Then silence, the kind you tell yourself will be forgotten by both parties within a week.

It had not, apparently, been forgotten.

Small world, he said, sliding into 14C like the universe hadn’t just handed me the worst possible seating chart in the history of Kenya Airways.

Small world, I repeated, because my brain had apparently deleted every other sentence in the English language.

For the first twenty minutes of that flight I studied the safety card with the focus of a woman preparing for a final exam. I knew exactly how many life jackets were under each seat. I knew the emergency exits were located over the wings.

Tobenna, to his credit, didn’t say anything else. He put in his earphones and opened a book, and I told myself this was fine, this was survivable, we would land in Nairobi and go our separate ways and I would never have to explain myself.

Then the flight attendant came by with the drinks trolley, and because the universe has a sense of humor that borders on cruelty, there was only one meal option left by the time she reached our row, and it happened to be the one neither of us liked, so we both ended up passing our trays back and forth trying to negotiate with a total stranger over jollof rice versus a dry chicken wrap, and somewhere in that ridiculous exchange, Tobenna laughed, actually laughed, the same laugh from the bukka in Yaba, and it cracked something open in me.

Can I just say something, he said, once the trolley had rattled past.

You don’t have to, I said quickly, already regretting every choice that had led me to 14A.

I know I don’t have to, he said. I want to. You disappeared. That’s fine, people disappear, Lagos will do that to you. But I spent actual money on that suya we shared, and I think I deserve at least a theory.

I laughed despite myself, a short, undignified snort that made the woman across the aisle glance over.

It wasn’t you, I said, and immediately heard how much that sounded like the opening line of every bad excuse ever given on earth. I mean it. I liked you. That’s exactly why I ran. Every time somebody is actually nice to me and it feels easy, some part of my brain decides that’s dangerous and hits delete before anything can go wrong.

So you weren’t ghosting me, he said slowly. You were ghosting the possibility of things going well.

When you say it like that it sounds insane.

It is a little insane, he said, and there was no malice in it, just the dry amusement of a man who had clearly had eight months to think about this. But at least now I have my theory.

We didn’t fall into each other’s arms over Sudan airspace. This isn’t that kind of story. What happened instead was smaller and somehow more mortifying: we talked, properly, for the rest of the flight, about the wedding I was attending and the work conference that had brought him to Nairobi, about his sister who still lived off Herbert Macaulay Way and my mother who kept asking when I would bring home a man worth introducing, and every so often we’d catch ourselves laughing too loudly and remember, with fresh horror, that we were still strangers who had shared a silence for eight months and were now sharing a middle armrest.

By the time the plane began its descent into Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, my ears popping over the low, green sprawl of the city, something had shifted from unbearable to almost tender.

I’m not going to ask for your number again, he said, as we waited for the seatbelt sign to switch off, that particular Kenya Airways ritual where two hundred people stand up in unison and then wait for ten more minutes anyway. I already gave it to you once. If you want it, you know where to find me. Yaba isn’t going anywhere.

I wanted to say something clever back, something that matched his composure, but what came out instead was, I’m sorry about the suya money, which made him laugh so hard the man in 14B gave us both a dirty look.

We parted at the baggage carousel, him toward a driver holding a sign with his company’s logo, me toward my cousin’s fiancé, who was waving both arms like he was landing a plane rather than just picking up a wedding guest. I didn’t look back immediately. I made myself walk a full ten steps before I turned.

He wasn’t looking either. That, somehow, made it worse and better at the same time.

That night, dancing barefoot at my cousin’s rehearsal dinner with red Kenyan dust on the hem of my aso-ebi, I took out my phone and typed a message before I could talk myself out of it again: Still owe you for the suya. Dinner in Lagos, my treat, no ghosting this time, I promise.

He replied within a minute. Fourteen C to Lagos. I like it. Let’s not test whether promises survive Lagos traffic though.

I laughed alone in a hotel bathroom in Nairobi, phone light on my face, feeling like an idiot and, for the first time in eight months, not minding it at all.

Some people meet the one that got away in a coffee shop, or at a mutual friend’s party, or through a well-timed text years later. I met mine again in seat 14C, forty thousand feet over Sudan, over a chicken wrap neither of us wanted, and learned that the universe doesn’t do subtle when it’s decided you’ve been running long enough.