I woke up to birds.
This was new. My entire life I had woken up to the sounds of a city, Lagos pressing itself against every window with its noise and its energy and its complete indifference to the hour, the generators and the traffic and the specific human density of a place that never entirely went quiet. Paris had been different but still urban, still the particular texture of a city conducting its business, the bells and the traffic and the morning deliveries.
This was birds.
Several of them, apparently engaged in something urgent, conducting it in the trees outside the window with the focused, committed volume of creatures for whom morning was not a gradual event but an immediate one, a beginning that required full participation from the first moment.
I lay still and listened.
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