Tolu Daniel is a Nigerian essayist. He graduated with an MFA in creative writing from Washington University in St Louis and attended Kansas State University, where he graduated with an MA in English. His essays and short stories have appeared in Catapult, Isele Magazine, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Blue Mesa Review, Olongo Africa, The Nasiona magazine, Lolwe, Prachya Review, Elsewhere literary journal, and a few other places. His debut collection of essays will be published in spring 2027 by Cavan Kerry Press. He was recently awarded the 2025 Isele Nonfiction Prize, and he won the 2022 Creative Nonfiction Award in the annual Graduate Creative Writing Award at Kansas State University. He is currently a PhD Student in comparative literature at Washington University in St Louis.
Snow fell with the confidence of something that knew it would be felt. Streets emptied. Sound dulled. The city became a held breath between east and west, a place where movement slowed because it had to. There was nothing especially dramatic about this at first. Just cold. Just accumulation.
Heritage is collective, aesthetic, and performative. It is something you inherit. Whereas history, on the other hand, is authored, linear, personal. It is something you produce. Museums often allow Africans the former but not the latter. Our art is heritage; European art is history. Our works are culture; theirs are achievements.
Scrolling through social media, I am reminded that today marks the fifth anniversary of the #EndSARS protests in Nigeria. And suddenly, I realize that the heaviness I felt upon waking is not only fatigue. It is anxiety, not the kind that anticipates the future, but the kind induced by the knowledge of a past that refuses to stay past.
How do we fall in love with the countries we ran from? What is the strange alchemy that turns distance into longing, and absence into affection? Distance is not impartial. It decides what to soften and what to sharpen. For some, absence polishes memory into a shining gem; for others, it preserves the edge of the blade.
For a moment, I caught myself thinking: this dancefloor is the happiest place on earth. Not in the saccharine way Disney markets happiness, but in the way fugitive joy exists—imperfect, defiant, and fleeting. The kind of happiness that knows how precarious it is and yet insists on itself anyway.