It always begins without warning.

One moment, the room is filled with the low hum of electricity — the fan turning, the refrigerator breathing quietly in the corner — and the next, everything stops. The air thickens. The silence arrives first, then the heat.

In Abuja, people do not look up when the lights go out. No one is surprised. Someone nearby might mutter “NEPA,” half in resignation, half in habit. A generator coughs to life a few houses away. Then another. The city, briefly interrupted, resumes in fragments.

This is not a story about power cuts. Not exactly.

It is about what continues when things stop working.

The first time it happened to me, I reached for my phone — instinctively, almost defensively — as if information could restore control. But here, control is not something you assume. It is something negotiated, daily, quietly, without announcement.

Later that evening, I stepped outside. The street was darker than I expected, but not still. People were talking. A woman was cooking over a small flame. A group of young men sat on plastic chairs, sharing something I couldn’t see, laughing as if nothing had changed.

Maybe nothing had.

In places where systems are unreliable, people become the system. Not in theory, but in practice. They anticipate failure. They prepare alternatives. They move around in absence as if it were part of the design.

I come from a place where electricity is invisible — not because it is absent, but because it rarely fails. Here, it is visible precisely because it does.

What does it mean to live in a place where interruption is normal?

I don’t have an answer yet. But I am beginning to see that what looks like disorder from the outside often has its own logic — one that is slower, more human, and far less dependent on the idea that things should always work.

Tonight, the lights will probably go out again.

And when they do, life will not pause. It will simply continue, in another form.