Introducing: The Fog

If you have been here for a while, you know that HPC has always been, at its core, about documenting life through the lens of womanhood: the choices we make, the worlds we build, the selves we are still becoming. While I have branched out once in a while, this ethos has lived in my essays and other non-fiction pieces: Long-form, researched, analytical. And I love that work deeply.

But there is something I have wanted to do for a long time, and I have finally decided to stop waiting until I feel ready enough to do it.

The Fog is my first public work of fiction, and I am sharing it here, with you, as it develops. It follows Nimisola(“Nimi”) a young Nigerian woman whose life, on the surface, is beginning to look exactly like what she worked for. Underneath that surface is a more complicated story and through a series of posts, I will let her tell it.

Writing fiction is newer territory for me and I will not pretend otherwise. But HPC has always been a space where I think out loud, take up space, and try things. This feels like another way of asking the questions I care about, just through a different door and I hope you’ll come along for it.

New chapters will be posted here as the story unfolds, I hope you stick around.

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Prologue/Chapter 1

“Hi Nimisola, it’s Sewa from Einheit-Institut, just checking in to see how far you’ve gotten with the workshop framework. I’ll need it to approve the first round of funding, you know how we are about documentation here. Anyway, hope you’re settling in nicely. By the way, Theo loooved your ideas; you made quite an impression! Let me know when the framework’s in my inbox. Bye.”

Nimisola replayed the voice message on her phone again, hoping it would jolt her into action and pull her out of the fog she was in. It didn’t. Then she remembered: she had a virtual appointment with Dr. Okenwa. She scrambled to open the Zoom link on her laptop. She was already nine minutes late. What if he was annoyed? What if he said something about it? She couldn’t even make an appointment on time. When would she ever get th —

“Hello, Miss Clark. How are you doing today?”

The older man on her screen had interrupted her thoughts before she could finish them. “I’m…..yes, thank you. So sorry for the delay.”

“I’m glad you could make it. I understand from your email that you’re currently in Ouidah for a conference, is that correct?”

“A retreat, actually. I’m facilitating a session.”

“That’s wonderful! Well done.”

“…Yes.”

Nimisola wished she could stop fidgeting with her sweaty palms, but doctors made her nervous. “You said this would only take thirty minutes?”

“That’s right! It’s just a quick chat really. I was curious about some of your responses in the questionnaire. It took courage to be that open. Can you tell me when you first noticed this? As far back as you can remember.”

Silence.

“Miss Nimisola?”

“Nimi is fine.”

“Nimi.” He softened his tone slightly.

“Anything you share here is completely confidential and won’t be passed to Ona. Please be rest assured that we’re an independent advocacy and support organisation.”

She gave a quick, tight smile at her screen, pursing her lips, her eyes moving around the hotel room. She was trying to mask her nervousness, and she knew she wasn’t doing a particularly good job of it. She found herself wondering how she had gotten here. Not the beautifully decorated hotel room that suddenly felt steamy and uncomfortable, but here: inside this fog of confusion, carrying equal parts determination and paralysis. It was almost like a video glitching, unable to advance to the next frame despite knowing exactly what came next.

It was, she realised, a very familiar feeling.

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Nimi’s earliest memories of the fog were from university.

As a sociology undergraduate, she had often struggled to keep up with class notes and had a tendency to drift mid-lecture. While secondary school had provided enough external structure to keep her mostly afloat, her progression into university meant a removal of rigid routines, school bells and teachers who noticed subtle changes. Without any scaffolding in form of support from others, the fog thickened and she found herself waking up to missed classes, reading through photocopied notes borrowed from friends, or rushing to get ready for a lecture that had already been going for thirty minutes. She learnt to develop some workarounds: slipping into class through a side door, getting friends to sign attendance registers on her behalf, watching recorded videos of missed classes. And most of the time, they worked. Sometimes however, they didn’t. A lecturer would announce an impromptu test on a day she had arrived late. A seminar group she was part of would be asked to present on a topic, and she would have no slides, no notes, nothing prepared, just herself standing in front of the class and speaking into the air.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t engaged with the material: she could spend hours on YouTube or down a Wikipedia rabbit hole on a topic, genuinely absorbed. But organising those thoughts into a structured and submittable document was a different kind of task entirely. One that either arrived in a last-minute rush or not at all.

There was however something that she enjoyed doing when the pressure was too much, the fog so intense in her mind that she could barely eat or take a shower:
Nimi loved to draw.

She had fallen into drawing illustrations by accident. It was her first year, and she had been on her way to a Friday afternoon lecture when a text from her friend stopped her: don’t sneak in, someone just got caught and they’re being sent to the dean. She was already inside the building — a newly constructed block shared by the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Arts — so she did the next logical thing and made her way to the art library, reasoning that she was unlikely to run into any of her own lecturers there. It was in the general reading section that she stumbled on a small group gathering around two art students who had decided to run a paid illustration class and were offering the first session for free.

What began out of mild curiosity became six weekends(they eventually moved the classes to Sundays) filled with something she hadn’t expected: clarity. Two hours, once a week, of focus and clear skies.

After that, whenever anxiety crept in during sociology lectures, Nimi would take out her pencil and the sketchbook she’d bought specifically for this purpose, and draw. Fogs. Clouds. Spider webs. Tangled cables. Whatever shape the feeling took that day, she put it on the page. And as she drew, there were moments where she would feel the fog lifted and absorbed into the pages of her drawing book. It felt so magical that Nimi wouldn’t even know when class ended until she heard chairs scraping and voices rising around her.

But the lightness never held and the fog always found its way back to her.

As the years passed, what had once arrived occasionally, began to occur cyclically and with more frequency. It stopped feeling like a response to something and started to feel like a constant weather condition she lived inside of.