Steady Without Me

A woman in a deep orange boubou stands calm and grounded in the raw, unfinished interior of a concrete building, lit by daylight through an unglazed window opening, as bare columns recede into shadow behind her.

This room isn’t finished yet. I already am.

The walls around me aren’t finished. I am.

On September 14, 2026, the Youth Olympic flame — lit four days earlier at Athens’ Panathenaic Stadium — arrived in Senegal, escorted by one hundred Senegalese women in bright orange boubous to Place du Souvenir, where it lit a cauldron for the first Olympic event ever held on African soil. “All of Africa is watching Senegal with confidence,” President Bassirou Diomaye Diakhar Faye said, as the flame began a six-week relay through all fourteen of the country’s regions before the Games open on October 31.

Let the walls catch up. I already know exactly where I’m standing.