From Tolu Daniel’s “Notes of a Nonresident Alien” to Kemi Falodun’s stirring piece, “Some Seasons I Have known,” check out our top ten most popular essays of this year.

Heartwood | Justine Payton

“It was my deeply held conviction that magic and magical beings were real that brought me to lie in the grass with Emma on that cool summer morning, when twilight turned to dawn and colors painted the sky cerulean and blushing pink. Mourning doves began their symphonic cooing as harbingers of the coming day. A passing Metra train rattled the earth beneath us as I held Emma’s hand. I turned to her with a grin, ‘Giants!'”

Notes of a Nonresident Alien | Tolu Daniel

“When I return to St Louis, I arrive healthy. But my nights are still terrorized by the things I saw at the hostel in Seattle. Soon I am coughing, and my nose is murky. Days after, I am burning up as if my body is an incinerator. I think I have contracted the virus. But seven tests later, it turns out that I just have a cold. “You are breathing patiently, it is a beautiful sound,” Oliver writes, but my breath is loud still, and it hurts. I am back in my room in St Louis, on my soft bed, under my fluffy blanket, with my beloved, and listening to The Shire by Howard Shore, nothing feels the same.”

‘Ebrohimie Road’ Review: Memorials to the Man Who Lives | IfeOluwa Nihinlola

“That Túbọ̀sún attempts to offer views of Ṣóyínká’s life from places of rest rather than liminal spaces of movement may be justified by the fact that solitude is central to the formation of Soyinka as an artist, but it presents a logistical and philosophical conundrum for a project that attempts to pay tribute to his work. Unless Soyinka is ready to offer a glimpse into his seclusions, what we know of him and his work is best understood on the road.”

Faint Lines | Nwanne Agwu

“You think of your mother seated with all these people, making jokes. They say she danced so much, so well when she was still young, alive and strong. Your mother was the okoso of her troupe, the feet that did magic on the ground, a body that swam and flew, that broke the limits of flexibility. Some would say that she was the life of the party and others would say she was a pot of music, dancing, singing, and using the instruments like she had left the womb holding them in her hands; destiny.”

This is How I Think of You | Ezioma Kalu

“This is how I think of you: like God. Growing up, when I thought of God, I imagined you, in all your glory and majesty. You were my god in human form. I thought you were immortal, but my perception of you has been flawed since you died. You were mortal like every other human, and you were capable of dying.”

Womb and Period Hu(r)ts | Muti’ah Badruddeen

“When my daughter, at all of fourteen, asked me why I chose to have kids, my response was rueful in the way of the belatedly self-aware. I do not know that it was a conscious choice, much as that’s what was expected of people like us. In my pre-pandemic era, cosplaying as Well-adjusted Superwoman, I would never have admitted that. Because a “good woman”, the woman I tried to aspire to for an embarrassing majority of my life, does not rock the boat – even when that boat is so obviously sinking. But hysterectomy proved to be, unknown to me at the time, the beginning of the end of that sad costume party.”

Diary of the Woebegone | Audrey Obuobisa-Darko

“I am not my body, I realise, because I leave it. The fog, it pushes me out. It dawns on me that I am not what I thought I was. I observe it all from a distance, not very far off. Far enough that I know I am severed from my vessel, but close enough to know I am still associated with it in some form. I observe my body, observe my surroundings, all the surreal, made-up things riddling it.”

Feel My Love | Haidar

“She knows, and now she doesn’t talk about my wedding with the usual excitement. Now it is with a loud, lingering plea, a reminder that come what may, it is my destiny to marry a woman, to save her from being ostracized from society and the company of her fellow women. It breaks my heart to think of what would become of my mother, the day she comes to know of who I truly am, this inextinguishable part of me. She would break; she is that fragile. But not being who I am, to avoid her breaking, would be choosing to die a second at a time. To shrink for her to bloom on the grounds of societal expectations.”

Some Seasons I Have Known | Kemi Falodun

“Traditions demand our attention. They need time to become and remain a thing. The last time I saw Sister Bisi, she expressed how proud she was of my writing and my journey. She died suddenly in February 2018 and the carol died with her. A thing falls apart to reveal whose labour pillared it.”

When The Knife Cuts | Paul Chuks

“My smile was awkward. My bent incisor showed at any slight lifting of my upper lip and it cracked people up. I learned to keep my face scrunched. It disfigured my pictures and videos. Cameras exaggerated the slant of my nose and the half of my upper lip. Once, a friend commented that I stopped taking selfies due to how much the cleft palate disfigured them. He advised me to take more portraits or appear in group pictures instead. I cried to my mother asking how come my case was natural. Why I had to be born with something that had cost me my self-love.”