THE DISTANCE OF WATER

Before Distance Learned Its Name

Before Canada became a wound they learned not to touch, before time zones turned love into arithmetic, Lamide met Felix in a place that smelled like dust, old books, and restrained ambition.

The British Council library.

It was a quiet that demanded manners. The kind where chairs scraped apologetically and sneezes were swallowed whole. Lamide had come for the air-conditioning and the illusion of discipline. Her acting tutor had insisted she read more real literature, not just scripts and half-written poems on her phone.

She was flipping through a collection of plays she didn’t yet understand when Felix asked, softly, “Are you using that seat?”

His voice startled her. Not because it was loud but because it carried patience. She looked up to see a man holding two architecture textbooks and a notebook thick with sketches. His glasses sat too low on his nose, as if they’d slid down while thinking.

“No,” she said quickly, moving her bag. “Go ahead.”

He smiled. It was small. Careful. Like he didn’t want to take up too much space in her day.

They did not speak again for almost an hour.

Lamide tried to read but kept noticing him instead,the way he paused mid-sentence to stare into nothing, the way his pencil moved with confidence, erasing only when absolutely necessary. She wondered what it was like to be certain about a future you could draw.

Felix, on his part, noticed the way she mouthed dialogue under her breath, the subtle shifts in her expression as if she were auditioning for an invisible audience. He wondered who she became when no one was watching.

It was the faulty air-conditioning that broke the silence.

The unit sputtered, sighed, and gave up entirely, leaving behind a heavy warmth that clung to skin. Someone groaned. Another person laughed. Felix leaned back in his chair and muttered, “Lagos never misses an opportunity.”

Lamide laughed. It surprised her how easily it came.

“That’s how you know you’re home,” she replied.

He turned to her then, properly this time. “I’m Felix.”

“Lamide.”

They shook hands, briefly, awkwardly. Electricity flickered.

They started meeting after that.

Not intentionally at first. Just coincidence dressed up as routine. Tuesdays and Thursdays. Same corner. Same quiet. Then conversations that stretched beyond books into lives.

Felix was interning at a small architecture firm in Surulere, learning how dreams were compromised before they were approved. He talked about buildings the way some people talked about love, with reverence and frustration intertwined.

“Space matters,” he told her once, tapping his pencil against the table. “The way people move through a place can change how they feel. A good building doesn’t just stand. It listens.”

Lamide liked that. She stored it away like a line she might use someday.

She told him about acting school,about learning how to cry on command, how to inhabit someone else’s pain without losing her own. About auditions where she was told she was too soft, too quiet, too much of something unnamed.

“They want volume,” she said. “But I don’t think emotion always shouts.”

Felix nodded. “It doesn’t. It lingers.”

Their relationship unfolded quietly, as if they were trying not to disturb the city. No grand gestures. No declarations carved into walls. Just shared playlists, late walks after class, roadside shawarma eaten with fingers that brushed accidentally on purpose.

They learned each other slowly.

Felix discovered Lamide’s habit of disappearing into herself when overwhelmed, her love for old Nollywood films, her fear that she was running out of time without knowing what she was meant to arrive at.

Lamide learned that Felix prayed every morning without drama, that he wrote letters to his mother he rarely sent, that he carried guilt about wanting more than Lagos seemed willing to offer.

They did not call what they were love at first. Lagos relationships were cautious like that. Names gave things expectations.

But love has a way of naming itself.

It happened one evening when rain trapped them under the awning of a closed shop in Yaba. Thunder rolled overhead, unapologetic. Felix took off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders without asking.

“You’ll catch cold,” he said.

“So will you.”

“I’m sturdier.”

She looked at him then, really looked, rainwater threading through the space between them. “That’s not how it works.”

He smiled, soft and sincere. “I know.”

Something settled between them. Unspoken, but undeniable.

When the scholarship email arrived, Felix stared at his phone for a full minute before telling anyone.

Fully funded. Prestigious. Canada.

His hands shook from the weight of possibility. This was the kind of opportunity his father had prayed into existence before he died. The kind his mother would call God’s favour with tears in her eyes.

When he told Lamide, she smiled immediately.

“That’s amazing,” she said, and meant it.

Then, much later, alone in her room, she cried.

Their goodbye was too small for what it carried.

They sat on the edge of her bed, hands intertwined, surrounded by half-packed bags and unfinished sentences.

“We’ll make it work,” Felix said, pressing his forehead to hers. “We’re not like other people.”

Lamide nodded, because hope is convincing when it’s spoken aloud.

But distance, she would later learn, was a stubborn country.

And love sometimes required visas no embassy could stamp.