She is beautiful

She is patient

She taught me to feel but not to dwell in the vortex of it

To love but hardly how to hold enough for myself

The paradox of my being

Her heart, as big as the Caspian Sea; her love knows no bounds

One of the strongest people I know

There is no one like you.

He’s like the mind,

A buzz of silence

He’s sharp, assertive, harsh and indifferent

He taught me to live in the Lord, and to reach for as little of the world that makes me content

He is not the one to whom you cry on a good day, but on days where you feel a stormy mess

I am my own person; drawn out of who he is

The luckiest man I know

There is no one like you.

She is graceful,

Her presence like a warm shawl

She sees every shade and hue, her mind as rich as loam, her hands are tangled vines

She taught me to see the good in this abyss, to show up even when no one else will

I cling to her for hope

An epitome of humanity

There is no one like you.

He is a clover,

He grows close to the ground

He makes time settle; days don’t stretch or shrink

He is a mosaic of all the beautiful songs I’ve heard

He taught me to be one thing and everything all at once

I ache to be as profound as he is

There is no one like you.

She is a force,

Light as dew, heavy as a ton, and wild as a galloping steed

She moves with a heart untamed

She taught me to stay; to ground myself in places I walk

To know her is to chortle without end

She is everything I could ever wish to be

There is no one like you.

This was inspired by how uniquely I see the people I love and how much of them I carry with me as I figure out life for myself. Also, a chance to try a genre and writing style I do not usually write in :)

Her friend’s face filled the screen, somewhere in her own room, in a different time zone, getting ready for a party

“Hey what do you think about this dress?”

“Turn around, ouuuu, that looks good, I think you should wear this for suree”

Her friend smiles, zips up the dress, sits on her sofa and props her phone against a pillow

“How was your day today my lo...”

She chirps, “...okay so I need to tell you something and pleaseeeee DO NOT make it weird.”

“I’m already making it weird, but go on, fire away.”

“I’m bullet proooofff, nothing to loooooossssseee, fire awayyyy fire awayyyy, richoch...”

“Umm...I thought you needed to tell me something...?”

She laughed, pulled the blanket up an inch higher, “There’s this guy.”

“Oh God! of course there’s a guy” she rolls her eye

“No but this one — ...”

“This one what?”

“You know how you know someone and they flicker in your mind sometimes and you’re like, oh, he’s fine, and then it just goes?”

“Girl, what are you even talking about? no I don’t”

“Okay so I’ve known him for a while, he wasn’t like a friend you know I just know him and thought he was really cute, that’s all. I don’t even remember ever seeing him laugh, maybe I’ve seen his mouth open and close a few times and I’ve seen him walk a lot of times too so...something like a silhouette of him...I mean I wasn’t even trying to find out more about him or anything”

screen freezes

“Hellloooo can you hear meeee?”

“I think I lost you there for a sec, I can hear you now, okay so what happened.”

“Oops okay, we finally spoke.”

She groaned into the pillow, dragged it halfway over her face before pulling it back down. “And it was so easy. It wasn’t some big oh my God I’ve been admiring you moment. It was just — easy. Talking to him was easy and I wanted to keep doing it.”

“Okay but describe him. I need a face.”

“He’s not okay”

“Whatchu mean he’s not okay?”

They both laugh

“Handsome is not even the word. His mustache sits perfectly over his philtrum on his upper lip, he’s got this gap in his teeth, he has a really cute no teeth smile, whenever he does that, his eyes go thin and he doesn...”

“You’re doing the thing with your voice.”

“What thing?” she pouts

“Your voice is getting all soft”

She giggles “...can I at least continue?”

“Go on”

“He doesn’t wear jewelry. Just a watch and somehow that’s hotter than a whole jewlry collection would be on anyone else.”

“Oh so Jeremy ain’t hot no more?”

“Who mentioned Jeremy?”

both laughs

“He listens to me. Like actually listens. You know I don’t like giving my opinion on issues to people because I always think I’m gonna hate their reaction and get irritated. With him I just talk. I’m able to tell him the darndest things, and it’s so calm, like ocean breeze calm...”

“Ocean Breeze Air Refreshener calm?”

“Stop thaaaatttttt”

“I want to know why he thinks what he thinks.”

She shifted, pulled her knees up under the blanket, thinking. “He loves his sister, you can hear it when he talks about her. He loves music. He has very strong opinions about food well MY choice of food, he likes kenkey and egg stew *she laughs* he’ll be fuming if he hears me say this. He has a great sense of style. He likes the color green. He’s never without an earpiece in. Oh, and he plays chess.”

“Oh so a nerd?.”

“A hot nerd.”

Her friend laughed. “Ma’am you’re way off script, I just asked how he looked”

“Well my bad” She raises her hands in the air

Her friend chuckles “Okay and how do we feel about him”

She was quiet for a second, and the lamp buzzed faintly in the background. She lit up, “I like him…a lot. He makes me Happy. Like, giddy, stupid giddy, cheeks-hurt-from-smiling giddy. Nervous” She goes quiet again

“Hello, are you there? Don’t tell me you are day dreaming about him already girll”

“I used to think he was too cool for me...

“Errmm, hellooo??? because???”

“No wait, relaxxxx”

“It’s not because I think something’s wrong with me, its just, I’d never met anyone like him. It’s easy to confuse I don’t know this with I could never have this.”

“But?”

“But it feels as though he sees me, like he notices me, what I post, he remembers things I say. He asks. He pushes me to be better without ever making me feel like I’m not enough already.”

“that’s actually really sweet.”

“It scares me though.”

“Why?”

She pulled the blanket up higher, voice dropping. “Because I’ve spent so long feeling temporary in people’s lives. Like everyone likes the idea of me, not the actual me that is worth staying for. And now the coolest guy I know likes me and I don’t know what to do with that.”

Her friend went quiet for a moment. “Do everything with it, the way you talk about him, he seems to be a great guy, hell, it looks as if you want to ask him to marry you already”

“I meeaaannn, can I?”

They both laugh

“I like his name, I say it to myself sometimes, just to feel like he’s right by me. Am I insane?”

Her friend chuckles, “Oh you surely are”

She smiled at the ceiling, phone still propped against the plushie, she pulled the blanket up over half her face, just her eyes and the small smile above the fabric visible now.

“You’re really far gone”

she sighs, “I just think about him more than I mean to, I adore him, like, a stupid, embarrassing amount. I haven’t even told you the half of it.”

“There’s more?”

“Uhhh...He asked me to be his girlfriend”

A car honks in the background

“WHATTTTT???? WHY ARE YOU NOW TELLING ME THIS” She throws a scarf at her screen in an attempt to hit her friend.

She laughs

“SPILL. NOW!”

“I’ll save it for when you are back from the party, you look so good, have fun, and send photos”

“I will!” She laughed, and somewhere across the screen, her friend was already shaking her head, smiling.

“Go to sleep before you start shopping for rings.”

They both laugh

“I’ll try my best, no promises”

“Goshhh, what am I gonna do with you?”

“Uh huh nice way to say I love you.”

“Well I do, Goodnightt, I’ll call you immediately I get back.”

“okay, Goodnight, love you, bye”

The call ended, and the room went quiet again, just the lamp and her own small smile still sitting there in the dark.

Should I make this a FaceTime Call series?

I never really thought of what could be on the other end of having someone who will show me the kind of affection that I wanted. I didn’t learn the idea of love through an Adele song but rather Kwabena Kwabena; there’s something about a Twi love song that does it for me.

There have been times when I’ve reminisced over a hug and a kiss on the hand for over a month, walked with a boy to my house and back to his more than thrice, why? Because I loved how I felt gooey inside knowing that this guy that I had a crush on liked me just as much, and we both wanted to just talk, hold hands, and walk till we couldn’t feel our legs anymore.

When I thought of love, I thought of myself swinging, you’d try to catch me, I’d fall, and we’d hug on the floor and laugh, you’d touch the tip of my nose with your finger, like something Kwabena Kwabena will have in his music video, of course.

When I thought of quarrels between two people in love with each other, I thought of those cute romantic ones where you get upset, your partner calls you “baby,” you look at him and resist a smile, he kisses you on the forehead, you tumble over and kiss him on the lip, and everyone is happy.

This was me and my version of love.

This is what I have always looked for.

As I age and build adult relationships, things begin to get a little too real, and I am ready to turn the knob on the door because that is not what it is supposed to be… but I can’t keep running, can I?

Then came the rude awakening, that we have romanticized love or maybe I had romanticized it.

Even when I couldn’t hold onto the romanticised version of it, it somehow moved past everything it could represent and became more of a sexual desire.

Then there’s also the version nobody guides you through, the one where love stops being a shelter and becomes a weapon instead. I’ve seen love used as a manipulation tactic, just because someone gave themselves away, opened up, let their guard down. I’ve seen people use love to humiliate others, to make them small, to remind them exactly how much power they handed over the moment they trusted them. That’s not love, but it wears love’s clothes well enough, and by the time you realise it stopped being love, you’re already too far in to walk away clean.

Love is cruel, Love is disappointing, Love is pain, Love is embarrassing, Love is difficult, Love is bizarre, except in the midst of its bizarreness, it’s beautiful, and no words can describe it, no matter how hard we try to put words to qualify it.

While I was thinking about this piece, I thought about “The Colour of God,” a poem by V. B. Aakye.

I was asking myself;

Who ever painted love red and gave it the “heart shape”?

What if to that person, red represented the bleeding of the heart? The pain love brings?

What if the heart shape represented confinement? confinement into a shape? a place made to feel small?

I want to say, “love is none of that”, but I’m afraid it is all of that, except it is not a place for you to feel small. That is theirs…

I asked a couple of people to share “What love meant to them? What they think about when they hear the word ‘love’”, and this is what they had to say:

(A) It makes me think about choosing someone repeatedly, even when it’s not exactly convenient, but not just making blind sacrifices. More like willing to invest in their growth, happiness, and their general well-being. So it’s more than just a feeling, but more of a choice that needs continuous reaffirmation. So if someone tells me that I’d look for evidence, not out of doubt, but because it’s something you do as much as something you feel

(B) Love is basically just picking your favourite person to endure the absurdity of existing with. To me, love is the person you want to tell the weirdest, most hyper-specific thought you have at 2 AM, knowing they won’t call you crazy (or if they do, they’ll laugh while they say it). It’s the high-stakes gamble that being vulnerable, even when it feels like walking onto a stage with no pants on, is actually the safest place you can be. Love to me is sharing the last bite of your food with someone, even though you’re sooooo hungry. seeing someone’s weirdest, most annoying habits and deciding that those are actually endearing quirks rather than dealbreakers, as we’d put it.

(C) Love means you’re choosing me on your difficult days or your good days. That I make you feel safe. That it’s me you want, regardless of my flaws. That you will always be there for me. That if there is a problem, you would want to talk it out with me for us to both see eye to eye. That’s my general definition of love.

(D) I guess friendship-wise it makes me know that I’m doing something right😭, and I also learned to tell people that I love them often because I lost a friend and I would give everything to tell her for the last time. In my relationship, hearing “I love you” calms me down because life gets very hectic sometimes, and it’s like some reassurance.

(E) I always ask what do you mean … This phrase, “I love you”, to me feels like something people say to appease each other without real weight or when they just want to say something without really thinking about it … you love me ??? But when I need you to show up …. Nope …. When I need you to understand me … we fight …. Well, all in all, it’s a scam that’s lost its real weight and has become a quick fix if you don’t want to go deep into the rationale for certain actions. I did it cause I love you..lol scam

(F) I asked my friend, and she said love means sacrifice, someone who will be there for you and you can talk to about any and everything. Someone who cares deeply about you and wouldn’t hurt you, and respects you, and I think love is what you make it. I don’t have a description for it, but when there’s someone that reflects you in a different form, not that you’re the same person, but you complement each other, and you can see yourself being them and them being you

(G) Oh, it brings a sense of connection and care for the person I’m in love with, comfort, excitement, sometimes anger when he pisses me off, but it’s love through and through

Reading these, A and E are almost answering different questions. A talks about love as evidence, something proven over time through choice, reaffirmed again and again. E calls it a scam. Same three words, completely different inheritance of what those words might have cost them or the people around them or what their expectations are of love. We’re all reaching for different languages to describe something we collectively feel.

Love is all of this and more; it’s the romanticised version of it and even the version that makes you want to bawl your eyes out, and of course, some of it does trigger sexual desire for the person you love.

I’m 22 and just like the younger version of myself, nothing has changed; I want love, I like love, I love love, except there are moments when I see that my enthusiasm for love has been watered down and reduced to something only I can feel.

I have experienced love, yes, maybe some of it, different from what I am used to, but it all allows me to realise how people understand it and show it in the ways that they do.

Also, this: “There are more fish in the sea.” I mean, yes, there are, and there’s a 1 out of 20,000 chance that you would find a red fish instead of a shark, so yes, of course, there are more fish, but I say adore your fish when they are trying so hard to stay above water for you.

We all want love, no matter how much of a tough skin we show to others on the outside, and it’s understandable, because when love leaves, it wrecks you as a person, but when it visits, it makes you beautiful. Love does not come until you try to reach for it, embody it, as loudly as possible, until you can no longer produce sound.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this piece. I really appreciate it…

I remember his hand, the way it held mine a little too long. The way the eyes moved across me. I did not have the words for what I felt. I only knew it was uncomfortable.

Nobody told me I was allowed to feel uncomfortable. Nobody told me I should be.

What I have come to understand is that, this is something that has become almost cultural. Something we barely speak about.

A Global Crisis

Before we come home to Ghana, we must first understand the scale of what we are dealing with globally, because child sexual abuse is not just a Ghanaian problem. It is one of the most widespread, underreported, and underpunished crimes in the world.

In October 2024, UNICEF released its first-ever global estimates on sexual violence against children. In more than 370 million girls and women alive today, one in every eight of them have experienced rape or sexual assault before the age of 18. When non-contact forms of sexual violence, such as online and verbal abuse, are included, that figure rises to 650 million, one in five women on the planet. For boys and men, estimates range between 410 and 530 million.

The majority of childhood sexual violence occurs during adolescence, with a significant spike between the ages of 14 and 17.

Survivors carry the trauma into adulthood, facing higher risks of sexually transmitted infections, substance abuse, depression, anxiety, and difficulty forming healthy relationships. The cycle sadly compounds that, children who experience sexual violence are statistically more likely to suffer repeated abuse.

Most never tell anyone.

In Africa

Of all the world’s regions, sub-Saharan Africa carries the highest burden of child sexual abuse. According to UNICEF’s 2024 global estimates, more than 79 million girls and women in sub-Saharan Africa, over one in five, have experienced rape or sexual assault before the age of 18.

Studies across the continent show prevalence rates of child sexual abuse ranging from 12% to 44% among boys and 15% to 53% among girls in various African countries. Up to one-third of adolescent girls across the region report that their first sexual experience was forced.

Several factors converge to make African children particularly vulnerable. These include deeply patriarchal social structures, widespread poverty that increases dependency and exploitation, weak child protection laws and inconsistent enforcement, cultural norms that discourage disclosure, and the stigma attached to victimhood; where girls are often blamed for the abuse they suffer.

The most dangerous of these factor is cultural normalization. This makes it very invisible, and invisible abuse is the hardest to fight.

In Ghana

A 2025 study published in Sexuality & Culture found that 23.9% of Ghanaian children aged 8 to 17 have experienced sexual abuse. Adults were the primary perpetrators in 56.8% of cases.

Earlier data from a 2015 study found that 27% of girls and 11% of boys in Ghana had experienced sexual abuse. The Ghana Demographic Health Survey found that 16.5% of adolescent girls aged 15 to 19 had experienced sexual violence, and that one in four women reported their first sexual intercourse was forced and occurred before they were 15 years old.

The situation online is rapidly worsening. In 2024 alone, there were 23,626 cyber tip line reports linked to child sexual abuse materials accessed or shared from Ghana, a drastic rise from just 750 in 2016. Between 2023 and 2024, over 45,409 child sexual abuse materials were recorded in Ghanaian cyberspace.

Reported cases show a consistent upward trend, from 62 reported cases in 2016 to 97 in 2020, and yet, most cases are never reported at all. Between 2014 and 2016, 985 cases of defilement were processed in circuit courts in Greater Accra. Only 60 (6.1%) went through a full trial. The rest were withdrawn, dismissed, or disposed of through other means. The justice system is failing the children it is meant to protect.

Why? Because the culture is not ready to protect them either.

“Your Husband Is In University”

Ghanaian children hear this repeatedly without shame:

“Your husband is in university.”

It is said to girls in basic school. It is said by teachers, aunties, family friends, and what have we. It is said with a smile, in passing, as a kind of future-telling. It is so common that it has stopped being heard as what it is: the deliberate orientation of a young girl’s romantic imagination toward an older man.

For the boys, a different version: “Your wife hasn’t been born yet.” as something to look forward to.

We say them in homes, in churches, in schools, in communities, across generations and so, by the time a girl is twelve years old, she has already been told in a hundred small ways that an older man is not predatory.

Let’s consider this: a 20-year-old man and a 12-year-old girl.

In ten years, that becomes a 30-year-old man and a 22-year-old woman, two adults, both of legal age, a relationship that appears normal to the outside world but when we run those numbers back, it is a 20-year-old and a 12-year-old; a university student and a child in basic school.

We cannot have it both ways. We cannot normalize phrases that orient little girls toward older men, celebrate wide age gap marriages as signs of maturity and stability, and then act shocked when a 20-year-old pursues a 12-year-old.

“Catch Them Young”

This is a phrase used openly, publicly, sometimes boastfully among Ghanaians, mostly men, and occasionally said to young women by those who think they are offering wisdom: “Catch them young and they shall be yours forever.”

It is an explicit articulation of grooming as a somewhat romantic metaphor. It says: find her when she is still forming, shape her before she knows herself, make yourself the framework through which she understands love, so that she cannot imagine love without you.

We say this without shame because we have wrapped it in the language of possession, “she’ll be yours”, rather than what it describes: the deliberate targeting of children because they are easier to control.

“My Wife”

Beyond all these sayings, there is a specific behaviour that many Ghanaian adults engage in: labelling a child as their wife or husband.

A grown man sees a little girl, perhaps six, seven, eight years old, and declares her beautiful. He calls her his wife. The adults around them laugh, call themselves in-laws, and play along.

I was that little girl, many of us were.

We try to make this harmless, as cultural affection, innocent teasing, nothing more.

My question is, harmless to whom?

Not to the child who felt the discomfort of the adult’s gaze.

Not to the child who grew up learning that an adult man’s interest in her was something to be smiled at.

When we sexualize a child in the language of love and marriage, even playfully, we teach her two things: that she is available, and that older men desiring her is normal and we teach the men around her that their gaze is acceptable.

We teach everyone watching that affection can work that way.

Parents stand by and say nothing, majority of them even participate. I will not say this is a failure of an individual parent. We haven’t allowed ourselves to see the harm because we all grew up in it.

The same men who call a little girl “my wife” do not call her that anymore once she has grown.

When she was seven, eight, ten, twelve, she was his wife but when she turns eighteen, twenty, twenty-five, she becomes “my sister”, “my daughter”.

Why?

If the intention was ever genuine affection, ever innocent, ever just an expression of fondness, why does it only apply to the child version of her? Why does the “wife” label disappear the moment she becomes a woman who could say yes or no?

When she grows up and gains agency, she is no longer interesting in that way.

She is reclassified.

The Wide Age Gap.

Ghana’s cultural reverence for wide age gap relationships is connected to ideas about what makes a relationship work: financial stability, maturity, “experience,” the ability of an older partner to “handle” a younger one.

We actively discourage same-age relationships. Young people dating peers are told their relationship will not last, that they are both “too immature” to build anything serious. Girls who date age-mates are sometimes viewed as less serious, less likely to be “properly kept.”

By contrast, a girl with an older man is seen as fortunate. He provides and is serious about her. The fact that he encountered her when she was probably a teenager or younger is not discussed. The fact that the relationship may have began long before she had developed her sense of self independent devoid of his influence is not considered a problem.

This is no argument against age gap relationships between consenting adults. Two adults who meet, fall in love, and choose each other regardless of the years between them have that right. When a woman is mature, independent, and fully formed in her sense of self, she is capable of making that decision for herself; that is respected.

There is a distinction between a woman who arrives at a relationship with an older man through her own autonomous desire, and a woman who was told since childhood that this what her desire must be.

Age gap relationship is not the crime; it is a choice people do get to make. The grooming of children toward it is.

Perhaps the most devastating consequence of all of this is what it does to a young girl’s ability to recognize harm.

If you have been told since childhood that your husband is in university, that older men who desire you are promising you a future, that wide age gaps are signs of serious love, that the uncomfortable feeling in your body when a grown man holds your hand too long is just shyness; you do not get the vocabulary to call it abuse.

You do not tell your mother because your mother laughed when the man called you his wife. Even when you tell a trusted adult, you are “akolaa bone” (bad child in twi) for even thinking or feeling the way you do.

What Must Be Changing?

We are responsible for what we choose to examine or leave unexamined.

What must change begins with language. Language somewhat shapes reality; we must stop saying “catch them young”, stop telling girls their husbands are in university and boys their wives are not yet born. We must stop calling little children our wives and husbands and inviting communities to play along.

What must change is parental vigilance. Parents must be willing to feel and respond to their children’s discomfort, even when that discomfort disrupts a social occasion. A child’s unease at the way an adult is touching or looking at her is something that must be taken seriously.

What must change is our idea of same-age relationships. We must stop treating peer relationships as practice and age gap relationships as the real thing. Love between equals is not naive. It is also healthy.

What must change is enforcement. Ghana has laws against child sexual abuse. The age of consent is 16. Defilement carries serious penalties, but fewer than one in fifteen cases that reach the courts result in a full trial. Laws without enforcement are merely suggestions.

What must change is the belief that children, particularly girl children, exist in relationships to adult male desire.

Children are not husbands and wives in waiting. They are simply children!

References

Ghana News Agency / UNICEF Ghana (2025)

Participatory Development Associates Child Abuse Tracker; Journal of Child Sexual Abuse; ScienceDirect; Humanium.

Sexuality & Culture, Springer Nature (2025)

Together for Girls Global Report (2024)

UNICEF Global Estimates on Sexual Violence Against Children (2024)

“Do you know what the three transactional things in the world are?”

I looked at him, probably still catching my brain up on all the knowledge he had been spitting out to me for the past hour, and responded, “No”.

Before I could even ask what they were, he mentioned them; “Power, Money and Sex”, leaned back in his seat, rubbed his face towel over his face and let out a loud laugh.

I simply asked how, and he gave me the simplest scenario:

Imagine a man flies you on a private jet and gives you all the money you want, what will he want from you? I said sex. What will you want from him? I said money. What does the money give him? I said power. He laughs again. I simply smiled and went back to my drink.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this and decided, why not? Everyone should think about it too.

This isn’t a cynical take on human life. Let’s think of the three less as literal things and more as fundamental currencies — the mediums through which human beings have always exchanged value, negotiated survival and expressed desire.

Power is the ability to shape your environment and influence others; political authority, social status, cultural influence and information control. Power answers the question, “who decides?”

Money = resources + security. It is the material ability to exist and expand. Money represents freedom from scarcity and the ability to convert one form of value into another. Money answers, “who has enough?”

Sex is desire, attraction, intimacy and the biological tendency to procreate. Beyond the physical, sex also represents the need to be wanted, to connect, to be chosen, to continue beyond your own death; a legacy. Sex answers, “who is desired?”

Three questions. Three currencies.

Money becomes power. Power attracts desire. Desire gets monetized. Power opens financial doors.

They don’t just coexist, they convert into and amplify each other.

In History

Almost every ancient empire was built on all three operating simultaneously.

Take Egypt: The Pharaoh held absolute power, controlled the wealth of the Nile’s resources, and used marriage alliances to consolidate dynasties. Then there’s Cleopatra, perhaps the cleanest example.

The popular image of her is that of a “seductress”, but she was a political genius who spoke nine languages, ruled the wealthiest kingdom of her time, and used her relationships with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony as geopolitical instruments born of extraordinary strategic intelligence (Schiff, 2010).

She held all three. Power, wealth, and desire. Rome didn’t diminish her because she was weak. Rome diminished her because she was a threat!

Then there’s Rome itself. The Senate was a constant battleground for power. The slave economy was about money. Sex was weaponized constantly as emperors used it for control, scandal, and influence. History traces the fall of Rome to corruption of power, economic collapse, and moral decay (Beard, 2015). All three failing at once.

The Medici family of Renaissance Florence didn’t start as rulers. They started as bankers. Money first: Money bought influence, Influence became political power, Power was consolidated through strategic marriages across every royal house in Europe. Over three centuries, they produced four Popes and two Queens of France (Strathern, 2003). That is money converting into power converting into legacy.

And then colonialism, the most brutal expression of all three currencies. European powers went to Africa, Asia, and the Americas, driven by the hunger for resources (money), the desire for dominance (power), and the control of bodies as a tool of dehumanization (sex).

The pattern holds across every civilization. Whoever controlled the most of all three shaped the world for their era. The most dangerous people in history were never the ones with the most weapons; they were the ones who understood how to move all three concurrently.

Why Are We Wired This Way?

The human brain is not a modern machine. Underneath all the language, culture, and reason, it is still running on what I’ll call ancient software — software designed for survival on our African savanna.

The three things that determined whether you survived and passed on your genes were exactly these three. Could you protect yourself and your group? Could you secure enough resources? Could you attract a mate and reproduce? (Dawkins, 1976).

Power. Money. Sex.

Back then, they weren’t abstract. They were life and death, and our brains still treat them that way, which is why they feel so urgent, so emotional, so difficult to reason with when they’re activated.

Power is neurologically addictive. Holding power over others activates the same reward centers in the brain as food, sex, and drugs, which is why it is so hard to give up. There is even a documented condition called Hubris Syndrome where prolonged power physically changes personality, creating recklessness, grandiosity, and a measurable reduction in empathy (Owen, 2007). The brain basically says; I’m going to rewire now, and just like that, rewires itself around power.

Money, after a certain point, stops increasing happiness. Research consistently shows this and also shows that it never stops increasing the desire for status (Kahneman, 2011). Because what we’re actually chasing isn’t the number, it’s significance. Money is just the most legitimate measure of that in modern society.

Sex and desire activate some of the most powerful neurochemical responses the brain produces. Being desired releases the same neural patterns as cocaine. Rejection activates the same pathways as physical pain (Housel, 2020). Which is why heartbreak literally hurts and why being wanted can feel like something you can’t quit.

When you map these three onto Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you notice that physiological needs and safety are about money and resources. Love and belonging are about desire and connection. Esteem and status are about power and money (Maslow, 1943).

Then there’s Carl Jung’s concept of the Shadow — the part of your personality you repress and hide. He argued that for most people, the shadow is heavily loaded with all three. Repressed desires for power and control. Shame or obsession around money and status. Suppressed or distorted desire (Jung, 1964).

His point was that when you don’t consciously deal with these three, they don’t disappear. They go underground and drive your behavior from the shadows. This is why otherwise good people sometimes do shocking things when opportunity arises.

You cannot master what you haven’t first acknowledged in yourself.

Entering Relationships

Everything above can feel very distant until you look at your own relationships. And suddenly it isn’t distant at all.

The three operate just as powerfully between two people on an ordinary evening as they do between nations. They just operate more quietly, with higher emotional stakes.

Every relationship always has a power dynamic. The question is whether it is conscious or not.

Who needs the other more? Who initiates? Who can walk away more easily? Who sets the emotional tone? These questions are rarely asked explicitly, but they are constantly and mainly negotiated through behavior.

The person who can walk away more easily holds more power. Robert Greene calls this having the most options (Greene, 2000). Psychologists call it BATNA — Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement.

Think about it this way: the person in a relationship who has friends, hobbies, other options, and a full life outside of the relationship will always negotiate from a stronger position than the person who has made their entire world about one individual. That is simply what BATNA is.

Money in relationships is rarely really about money. Arguments about finances are almost always arguments about control, security, values, and power. Who earns more often makes more unilateral decisions. Financial dependence makes leaving harder — I’ve mentioned in one of my previous articles that most women stay in marriages even after infidelity because they lack a safety net to fall back on if they decide to leave.

Couples who are financially transparent tend to be significantly happier, not because money equals happiness but because honesty about money usually signals honesty about everything else.

And desire. At its healthiest, it is the deepest form of vulnerability two people can share, but it is also one of the most common sites of power negotiation in any relationship. Who initiates? Who withholds? Who needs more?

Esther Perel, a relationship psychologist, captures it well by saying:

That tension between the stability that money and power represent and the aliveness that desire requires sits at the bosom of almost every relationship struggle we can think of.

Psychologists also talk about attachment styles. The patterns we develop early in life for how we relate to closeness and distance. The two most common in complicated relationship dynamics are the anxiously attached — who fear abandonment and pursue relentlessly, and the avoidant — who fear engulfment and withdraw when things get close (Levine & Heller, 2010).

The irony here is that these two types are magnetically attracted to each other. The anxious person’s pursuit confirms the avoidant’s fear that closeness is suffocating. The avoidant’s withdrawal confirms the anxious person’s fear that they are not enough.

They perfectly trigger each other and sometimes call it love.

Media.

Netflix. Spotify. Instagram. Twitter. Snapchat. Pinterest. LinkedIn. Facebook.

IN FILM / CINEMA

Beauty In Black puts all three in perspective: a strip club. Sex as the product. Money as who owns and who profits. Power is who controls the narrative. What Tyler Perry does is show how the women have to be three times as strategic just to survive spaces that wealthy men move through effortlessly, mostly with sex.

Love Island is the most transparent experiment on all three ever put on television. The person with the most options always holds the power. One recoupling restructures the entire social hierarchy overnight. When contestants leave, they convert attention into followers into brand deals. Attraction becomes influence, influence becomes income. The three are amplifying each other in real time with cameras rolling.

Two Broke Girls is entirely about what the absence of money does to your power and options. Max has street power and wit. Caroline has social capital from her wealthy background even after losing everything. They’re constantly negotiating whose kind of power matters more; two women combining completely different currencies just to survive a world that undervalues both of them individually.

IN MUSIC

Burna Boy, Wizkid, Rema, what have we, are reclaiming African joy, African desire, and African excellence as a global force. Burna Boy’s African Giant is an entire album about power and reclaiming African dignity on the world stage. Wizkid’s Essence captures the feeling of being completely drawn to someone

Afrobeats right now is a power story. African artists are no longer asking for a seat at the table; they are building their own.

Rihanna is another real-life case study of all three. Her arc moves from vulnerability to reclaiming power after pain, to complete ownership. She then converted music success into Fenty Beauty and Savage X Fenty, redefined global beauty standards, and became a billionaire. Cultural power converting into financial power converting into a lasting legacy.

Kanye West, a man who reached the peak of all three and had none of the inner architecture to hold it. His album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, is about exactly that. Getting everything and it's still not enough. Power opens with “No one man should have all that power” and spends four minutes proving why.

ADVERTIZING

Almost every ad ever made is selling one of three things, regardless of what the product actually is. Buy this and be powerful. Buy this and signal status. Buy this and become more attractive. Social media made every person their own media channel, which basically means everyone is now managing their own power, money, and desire for currency online, whether they know it or not. The influencer economy is literally attention converting into following converting into income.

Your algorithm doesn’t create these drives. It monetized them at scale.

So who actually pulled this off?

Most powerful figures in history were wielders of the three not masters. There is a difference.

A wielder uses the three powerfully but is still controlled by them.

A master understands them deeply, uses them deliberately, and is not owned by any of them.

The masters of the three share the same qualities: self-awareness, voluntary restraint, and a mission greater than personal appetite.

Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man on earth — Roman Emperor with absolute authority, immense wealth, the world at his disposal. He spent his private journals writing about how to resist the corruption of that power, how to stay humble, and how to remain human. Those journals became Meditations, one of the most widely read books in history. He never intended them to be published. It was just a man wrestling with himself daily. He had everything and chose not to be defined by any of it (Aurelius, 167 CE).

Nelson Mandela had every reason and opportunity to seize absolute power in post-apartheid South Africa. The people would have given it to him. He voluntarily stepped down after one term. Twenty-seven years in prison gave him something most powerful people never get: time to master himself before he mastered anything else (Mandela, 1994).

Gandhi dismantled the British Empire in India using no army and no wealth. He voluntarily lived in poverty. He believed mastering his own desires was the most fundamental. He essentially refused to play by the rules of the three. (Gandhi, 1927).

The lesson is not that power, money, and desire are evil. The lesson I see here is that attachment to them is what destroys people. You can exist in a world full of all three without being enslaved by any of them. It requires honesty with yourself about what is actually driving you.

So What Do You Do With All Of This?

You could become cynical. Start seeing every interaction as a transaction. Every relationship as a negotiation. Every tender moment as a move in a game.

That would be the wrong lesson to take from this article.

The right lesson is that, the three are not the problem. Unconsciousness about the three is the problem.

Every person who was consumed by power, money or desire was not consumed because they had too much. They were consumed because they had too little self awareness about what was driving them.

The goal isn’t to eliminate these drives. They are biological and human. You will not discipline yourself out of wanting power, security and to be desired, nor should you try.

These three run the world. They always have. They probably always will.

The question that matters is: Are you running them? Or are they running you?

References

Aurelius, M. (167 CE). Meditations (G. Hays, Trans.). Modern Library. (Original work written c. 161–180 CE)

Beard, M. (2015). SPQR: A history of ancient Rome. Liveright Publishing.

Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press.

Gandhi, M. K. (1927). An autobiography: The story of my experiments with truth. Navajivan Publishing House.

Greene, R. (1998). The 48 laws of power. Viking Press.

Greene, R. (2001). The art of seduction. Viking Press.

Housel, M. (2020). The psychology of money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness. Harriman House.

Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and his symbols. Doubleday.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Levine, A., & Heller, R. (2010). Attached: The new science of adult attachment and how it can help you find and keep love. Tarcher/Penguin.

Mandela, N. (1994). Long walk to freedom: The autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Little, Brown and Company.

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396.

Owen, D. (2007). The hubris syndrome: Bush, Blair and the intoxication of power. Politico’s Publishing.

Perel, E. (2006). Mating in captivity: Unlocking erotic intelligence. HarperCollins.

Rodney, W. (1972). How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications.

Schiff, S. (2010). Cleopatra: A life. Little, Brown and Company.

Strathern, P. (2003). The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance. Jonathan Cape.

Further Reading

Meditations — Marcus Aurelius

The 48 Laws of Power — Robert Greene

The Art of Seduction — Robert Greene

Attached — Amir Levine & Rachel Heller

Mating in Captivity — Esther Perel

The Psychology of Money — Morgan Housel

Long Walk to Freedom — Nelson Mandela

Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome — Mary Beard

The Selfish Gene — Richard Dawkins

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa — Walter Rodney

The Hubris Syndrome — David Owen

You made it to the end of this article ;)

Thank Youuu! and love you too 🤭

You can delete someone’s number and still flinch every time you hear a phrase that sounds like something they used to say.

Let me give you a specific example. Imagine you spent years in a relationship where you were made to feel small. Every word you chose was potentially wrong. Every sentence you put out came back with a question attached.

Did I say that right?

Will they be upset?

Over time, apologizing for things that didn’t need apologising for became second nature, not because you were even doing anything wrong, but your nervous system learned to pre-emptively brace for impact.

Now boom! New relationship, new person, new beginning, except your brain didn’t get the memo — not quite.

You still over-apologise. You get defensive. You interpret neutral feedback as an attack because that’s what feedback used to mean.

You’re not doing it on purpose; your brain has just been wired to do so.

You have “moved on,” but you still have the relationship with you, engraved somewhere within your character.

What we don’t talk about enough is that this doesn’t just affect you; it also affects the new person.

They carry the full weight of your history; they spend emotional energy reassuring you through triggers they didn’t cause.

Reassurance between two people should and must go both ways; when it only ever goes one direction, and when that direction is always toward you because you are always one step away from a wound, it becomes exhausting for them, eventually, for you too.

The new person, do you think of them that way? Do you think they will hurt you too? Do you think they are cruel enough?

The painful and honest answer is yes! They might, and it is not because they are a bad person; the logic behind it is that the person who hurt you was once new. They also showed up. They also seemed safe. You also chose them with everything you had, and it still went wrong.

So yes, you are not paranoid, nor are you broken. You are a person who learned, from real experience, that love can become a place where you get smaller. Your body is just trying to make sure that never happens again.

The other truth is, we are all capable of hurting one another, and we are the same people who are capable of loving one another as well. No version of opening yourself to love comes with a guarantee. The uncertainty does not go away. What changes is what you do with it.

Just so no one receives this the wrong way, I am not saying, Get over it or Your pain is inconvenient, so suppress it. I understand why the guard goes up. I understand that surviving something hard teaches your body to stay ready.

There’s a popular idea that healing is something you do alone, and yes, some of it — but some of these patterns you cannot unlearn in isolation, because they only show up in relation to other people. You only discover you over-apologise when you catch yourself doing it in a moment that didn’t require it. You only see your defensiveness when someone asks a simple question, and you feel your shoulders go up.

Healing in community, with friends, with new partners, with people who genuinely want to help, is sometimes the only and best environment in which certain things can be noticed at all, let alone worked on.

So yes, move on. Please. You deserve a life that doesn’t center the person who hurt you, but let’s expand what we mean by getting better.

Let’s start asking;

How does my healing affect the people around me?

What am I still carrying?

Live. Enjoy your life. Give yourself grace, I mean enormous, generous, endless grace, and extend some of that grace to the people willing to show up for you.

Do not let them in recklessly, but not with a closed fist either. We are wise enough to recognise patterns, to recognise smoke before the fire.

Full healing isn't the moment you leave. It isn't even the moment you stop thinking about them, but in the aftermath, when you notice the old habit rising and you choose, consciously, how to respond to it.

Why should a man’s pursuit of a woman be difficult before he even knows if she’s truly the best person for him?

Why is the assumption that a difficult pursuit results in more genuine connections, or women who are more “worth it”?

Before I even got to the comments, my thought was: “It’s crazy to think I am easy because I am attracted to you just as much as you are to me”. A lot of people in the comments were with me, others weren’t.

I sat with it for a while, and honestly, it does have two sides. Some people really are just casual about intimacy, but for a lot of women, it’s not that they have no standards. It’s that they like you, and they see no reason to pretend otherwise.

If I’m attracted to someone, if I enjoy being around them, I’m not going to manufacture resistance. Why would I? What’s the performance for?

The idea that a woman has to be difficult to earn respect sounds very backwards to me.

"Easy" here does not mean sleeping with anyone who shows up just because. It means not resisting your genuine feelings for someone. It means when you like someone, you let them know, through your words, through your actions, without performing indifference you don't actually feel. It means not building walls around something real just to seem less available. You are still fully yourself. Your values are intact. You just refuse to make someone who by your discretion is worth it, jump through hoops for feelings that are already there.

Of course, some men would’ve already decided what they want before they’ve learned anything about you. There will always be that person whose lifelong mission is to get with you — not because they like you, but because they want you to be part of their conquest. I don’t want to build my whole behaviour around a connection with someone like that. I don’t want to arm myself against the worst-case scenario at the cost of every real moment. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be cautious — it just means don’t let that person be the reason you shut everything down.

I saw an interview recently where someone was asked what they'd say to people who are always the ones extending love. The answer was that the person who allows themselves to fall in love will always win because they allow themselves to live and to feel. I think about that a lot. It takes real courage to stay open and not to let other people's carelessness make you cold.

Then there’s this animated photo, which you must have probably seen

My concern with this particular photo is just WHY?

Put Klay Thompson in Megan's position. Put Megan at the end of the queue, roses in hand, and let's see how long that line gets — even if it doesn’t, why do we care?

We don’t do this exercise, though. We never do. Unless the one at the beginning of the line is a woman.

She was the one who got cheated on, yet she’s the one we're making memes about?

We only audit women’s numbers. We act like female desire is a liability and male desire is just... life.

Breakups happen. People separate. Attraction continues. People meet new people, get together, fall into feelings, and have sex; that’s human.

Are women supposed to opt out of all of that?

What gets me is that some of the women in those hypothetical men’s lines wouldn’t even be there casually. Most of them will probably show up with roses. They’d have shown up thinking he was it.

We act as if intimate exchanges are only ever enjoyed by the man, like a woman couldn’t possibly want it too. A woman makes the same choices, and it gets used against her, while the same history on a man gets him called a “legend”.

…Smh

Anyway, that was really just a rant.

You burn so quickly for the people you love and even the ones you haven’t been able to put a name on yet. You want to care for them. You want to meet the people who matter to them. You want to share parts of your world and hope they share theirs too, and when they do, you take it wholeheartedly without question.

Being easy to love isn’t a flaw. The flaw is in a world that only counts it as one when it’s a woman.

I am not talking about the people you greet warmly but would not call at midnight. Those friendships have their place, and I believe everyone has made their peace with what theirs are.

Not every person in your life needs to hold the whole of you.

What I am talking about is the selected few.

The ones you know, consciously or not, are your people.

The ones you would drop something for.

The ones you talk to every single day, you remember the last message they sent and at what time of day they sent it.

“What are your ambitions?”

“What do you want?”

“Who do you want to become?”

A friend asked me that once. He said he asked because he felt he only knew the surface of me, and he wanted to know more.

I felt my eyes sting because, to be honest, it was a hard question, but also because I realised I didn’t have the answer.

Not for him, not even for myself.

It is not to say I did not know what I wanted for myself — I did have an idea, but something genuinely well thought out? no.

It cracks something open in you.

Having the kind of friend who is not surprised when you do something great. They already knew you had it in you. They hold your half-baked ideas seriously. The ones who say “I’m proud of you” not just because they are in awe of you, but because they pay attention and know what you are capable of doing.

In that same breadth, some people have never read a single thing I’ve written. Which is the most me thing there is. They haven’t even tried to look.

When I’ve nudged them toward it, the response is always something like, “look at you” or “I can’t believe you wrote this” — laughed out like a surprise. Like the person they talk to every day couldn’t possibly be the person doing whatever they are witnessing.

And then someone with no reason to care leaves a comment that makes you feel completely understood. How does someone who has never met me get it, while the people, “my people”, don’t even know this part of me exists?

Or when you are tired from doing the things you love, and you say so, and they say, “Who has sent you?” Like your passion is a burden you created for yourself when you just wanted to hear them say, “Maybe you can take a breather and continue later?” “Let me see where you have gotten to?”

People will say, not everyone is meant to be your close friend. You have different people for different things.

And I agree, but that is exactly my point.

This is not about everyone.

There are friends I know only on the surface as well. We have built a comfortable language together, banter, venting and easy laughter. There is something safe about staying in that register. You do not have to be vulnerable. You do not have to be seen.

This makes me realise that some friendships are of you “being known” and the other is of you just“ being frequent” and they are two very different things, but as different as they are, you could also have both in a person.

Frequency is showing up in someone’s notifications, the streak, the voice note, and the “are you up?” at midnight. It is being a constant, and constants are comforting; I am not taking that away.

However, being known is something far more precious. It is someone holding a version of you in their mind that is almost accurate; knowing what lights you up before you say it, being the first person that comes to mind when they need someone to call, and you being theirs and definitely not being surprised by you.

You can talk to someone every day for years and still only know the outline of them, and a lot of us are walking around being outlines to people we have let all the way in.

I do not say that with bitterness.

It is just for us to ask ourselves, “What friendships are we investing in?”

The ones you are showing up for daily and are willing to drop everything for.

Are you known there?

Or just present?

You do not need to understand every policy document or parliamentary procedure, but knowing what is happening in your country, why it is happening, and who is responsible. That is the bare minimum.

Speaking of which, here is one thing happening in Ghana that is worth knowing:

GoldBod: what it is, what it was supposed to do, and why it’s now under pressure.
Ghana is one of Africa’s largest gold producers. And for years, a huge chunk of that gold was leaving the country through illegal channels. An estimated 30 to 35 percent of artisanal gold was being smuggled out of Ghana annually, costing the government up to $1.8 billion in lost revenue every year (ainvest.com, April 2025). Meanwhile, the cedi was struggling, the country’s foreign exchange reserves were thin, and the Bank of Ghana had limited tools to intervene.

So last year, the government created the Ghana Gold Board — GoldBod. The idea was to bring coherence to a fragmented gold trading system that previously involved multiple entities, including the Precious Minerals Marketing Company, the Bank of Ghana, the Minerals Income Investment Fund, and private aggregators (Ministry of Finance, January 2025). GoldBod was given exclusive authority to oversee gold transactions and accumulate foreign exchange to stabilise the cedi, with the capacity to purchase up to three tonnes of gold per week and generate approximately $250 million in foreign exchange weekly (Graphic Online, April 2025). In simple terms: instead of Ghana’s gold enriching smugglers and foreign intermediaries, it would now flow through a state body, build up the country’s reserves, and protect the cedi from the kind of freefall we saw in 2023 and 2024.

And to be fair, it worked. GoldBod helped the Bank of Ghana mobilise over $10 billion in foreign exchange support to the economy, helping to stabilise the cedi and meet debt obligations (Ghana Gold Board, December 2025).

But here is where it gets complicated. The IMF, with which Ghana is currently in a loan programme and cannot afford to fall out with, raised serious concerns. In its fifth review of Ghana’s IMF programme, the Fund disclosed that losses from the artisanal and small-scale gold transactions had reached $214 million by the end of September 2025, warning plainly that the domestic gold purchase programme poses risks to the financial sustainability of the Bank of Ghana. The structural problem is this: GoldBod buys gold from miners at the full market price but sells it internationally at a discount of around 3 per cent, and the Bank of Ghana absorbs that difference (MyJoyOnline, December 2025).

GoldBod itself has pushed back, insisting it has not recorded losses and is actually on track to declare a surplus. The debate is ongoing and genuinely contested. But the tension is real: a programme designed to save the cedi may be quietly draining the very institution meant to protect it. The IMF has suggested that the losses be formally recognised on the government’s balance sheet rather than remaining in the books of the Bank of Ghana, essentially calling for greater transparency about the true cost (GBC Ghana Online, January 2026). Whether that leads to GoldBod being restructured, scaled back, or dissolved entirely remains to be seen.

---

Regardless of where one stands on this discourse, this much is true: whether it is a matter of structural design, limited resources, or competing priorities, the $214 million absorbed by the Bank of Ghana is an opportunity cost. Every cedi lost in trading discounts is a cedi that could not go toward something else, and GoldBod has done real things worth protecting. It mobilised over $10 billion in foreign exchange for the economy, stabilised the cedi, reduced gold smuggling that had been bleeding this country for years, brought small-scale miners into a formal and regulated system, helped the country meet some of its external debt obligations, and attracted the kind of investor confidence that comes when a country is seen to be taking its natural resources seriously. There is no decision made without an opportunity being forgone.

The question is whether what was gained justifies what was given up?

Now, back to that TikTok.

There is something I wish more of us understood: the people who will push your thinking, challenge your assumptions, and want to talk about what is actually happening in the world are not a mood killer. They are genuinely just curious.

Not all of us are trying to be change-makers. Not everyone is going to run for office or start a movement, and that is okay. But there is a difference between not being an activist and being completely unaware.

One more thing, being informed does not mean being insufferable. The goal of these conversations is to understand and learn from one another. It is completely okay to step back when someone is being plainly rude or dismissive about your opinions on a topic. There is nothing noble about an argument that ends with two people who cannot look each other in the eye. Know when to engage, when to redirect, and when to simply say "I hear you" and walk away.

We owe ourselves informed minds not so we are better at debate, but because it makes us better at life, better at understanding why things are the way they are, better at knowing what to demand, and better at recognising who actually deserves to yield power in our country.

The next time someone brings up current affairs, maybe don’t disappear because, unfortunately, it is your cup of tea!

References

Ghana Gold Board. (2025, December 10). How GoldBod’s gold purchasing drive helped BoG mobilise $10bn for Ghana’s stability. https://goldbod.gov.gh/how-goldbods-gold-purchasing-drive-helped-bog-mobilise-10bn-for-ghanas-stability/

GBC Ghana Online. (2026, January 20). IMF lauds Ghana economic recovery momentum despite $214 million gold dispute. https://www.gbcghanaonline.com/world/imf-ghana-gold/2026/

Graphic Online. (2025, April 14). GOLDBOD: Parliament passes Ghana Gold Board Act to boost forex reserves and stabilise cedi. https://www.graphic.com.gh/news/politics/goldbod-parliament-passes-ghana-goldboard-act-to-boost-forex-reserves-and-stabilise-cedi.html

Ministry of Finance, Ghana. (2025, January 28). Finance Minister inaugurates technical committee to establish Gold Board. https://www.mofep.gov.gh/news-and-events/2025-01-28/finance-minister-inaugurates-technical-committee-to-establish-gold-board

MyJoyOnline. (2025, December 24). Analysis: How GoldBod’s operations led to a $214 million loss at the BoG. https://www.myjoyonline.com/analysis-how-goldbods-operations-led-to-a-214-million-loss-at-the-bog/

ainvest.com. (2025, April 29). Ghana’s gold crackdown: A turning point for economic stability? https://www.ainvest.com/news/ghana-gold-crackdown-turning-point-economic-stability-2504/

I need you to tap into your imagination for me real quick.

Imagine a public basic school in a community with a very bad road network, classes without ceilings, there’s roofing but no ceiling. A library turned into a storeroom. Classrooms without windows. A science lab in a box — literally. An IT lab with about 9 working computers, dusty and outdated, students walking in and out. Some come in finely dressed, others in worn-out uniforms, carrying polythene bags as school bags. There is no urinal facility for students or teachers; the one in use is in an excruciatingly horrible state, and the classes nearby live and breathe in the stench. The horror. Teachers walking into bushes to answer nature’s call — tired and undervalued.

Let’s enter the Basic 4 class, shall we?

Scene 1

Teacher: Yes Gloria, read the alphabet sounds.

Gloria: A- ah, B- buh, C- kuh, D- duh, E- eh, F- fuh, G- guh, H- huh, I- ih, J-…

Gloria stands there with the pointer in her hand. Stuck at the letter J.

It is worth noting that Gloria is fourteen years old. And she is in Basic 4.

Scene 2 — 10:28am

Blessing: Good morning class.

Class: Good morning.

Teacher: Herh! Blessing, are you just coming to school now?

Blessing stands and fidgets.

Teacher: Blessing come.

Teacher: Why are you coming at this time? Wonim nea abc? (Do you know what time it is?)

Blessing: Madam please, my mother told me to fetch water and wait for her.

Teacher: Hmmm. Go and sit down.

Scene 3 — 9:30am

Every learner is out for break except Emmanuel. His head is on the desk. His stomach is clenched.

Teacher: Emma, why?

Emma: Madam, my stomach is paining me.

Teacher: Wadidi? (Have you eaten?)

Emma: Daabi. (No.)

Teacher: Aden? (Why?)

Emma: Me maame amma me sika, cse cnni bi. (My mum did not give me money, she said she doesn’t have.)

Teacher: Bra b3gye sika — kctc dokono sesia. Second break na wadi school feeding wai. (Come for money for kenkey. When it’s second break then you eat the school feeding, okay?)

Emma nods. Medaase. (Thank you.)

Scene 4

Teacher spots a student who hasn’t been in school since last week.

Teacher: Ei Boakye, waba? (Ei Boakye, you’ve come?)

Boakye smiles shyly.

Teacher: Oh odo, bra bra. (Oh love, come come.)

Boakye walks to the teacher’s table.

Teacher: Aden na wamba school? (Why did you not come to school?)

Boakye: Na me papa s3 cnni sika. (My father said he doesn’t have money.) Na me mpaboa no nso asei. (My shoes too were spoilt.)

Teacher: Nti 3no nti na wamba? (Is that why you did not come?)

Boakye: Aain. (Yes.)

Teacher: Kc tena ase. (Go and sit down.)

Scene 5

Teacher writes on the board — WEEK 6 Exercise.

Teacher turns around.

Teacher: How many of you are writing?

About one-third of the class raise their hands.

Teacher: The rest of you, why are you not writing?

A few students mouth that they don’t have books.

The teacher sighs. Turns back. Continues writing.

Scene 6

The teacher writes notes on the board — because the students have no textbooks, not at home, not in school.

A lesson is one hour.

After 20 minutes, the teacher begins to erase the first part of the notes.

Students: Ooohhh Madammm!

Teacher: Ah, you are still there?

Silence.

Between Blessing arriving late, Emmanuel’s empty stomach, Boakye’s absence, the missing books, the erased notes; 30 to 35 minutes of that one hour are gone. And teaching has not even begun. No exercise has been given.

All while existing in a system that somehow measures a teacher’s output by the number of exercises they are able to give.

These are just a few of the realities in our government basic schools.

Let me give you some numbers to sit with.

There are approximately 43,000+ public basic schools nationwide. Over 33,500 of them are in rural areas. About 33% just over 11,000 are classified as deprived or critically rural, meaning they face severe infrastructure deficits. Over three-quarters of all public basic schools are rural. And as of 2024/2025, there are approximately 31,093 private basic schools. Do the math on what that gap means.

Some of our public schools are genuinely among the best you could enroll your child in. But they tend to be in urban areas. The ones in the rural communities, the ones most children attend are fighting a quiet battle that the rest of us rarely see.

As of 2021, about 1 million children between the ages of 4 and 18 had never attended school at all and another 400,000 had dropped out. WATHI The highest dropout rates happen at the most critical transitions, the end of primary school at Class 6, and the end of Junior High School. Ucc Dropout at the upper primary level alone stands at 37.7%. Abacademies In 20 districts across the northern regions, five out of every ten boys between the ages of four and seventeen who should be in school are not, pulled out by farm labour, poverty, migration, and increasingly, the false promise of quick money through betting and illegal mining. Graphic Online

Now. I want to talk about who is responsible for all of this.

And my answer might or might not surprise you

It is all of us.

The Government. Yes. The infrastructure gaps, the underfunding, the policies that look good on paper and vanish on the ground, that accountability does not disappear. It stays. But the government alone cannot carry this.

The School Heads. There is something deeply cruel about embezzling funds meant for children who already have so little. If you are in a position of leadership in one of these schools and you are siphoning resources meant for those children, there is truly no softer way to say this, YOU ARE EVIL and It is wrong. Full stop.

The Teachers. I have seen them. I work with them. I watched a teacher reach into her own pocket to give a child money for kenkey at 9:30 in the morning. I watched another quietly give a student paper because they had no book. They carry so much not just a curriculum, but hunger, absence, poverty, fear and the responsibility of having to be parents to these children. You cannot call them mediocre. You cannot. They are trying in conditions that would break most of us. Oh! Ask me, I am always on edge

The Parents. Some do not show up. And before you judge them, some of them left home before their children woke up. Some of them are hawking in the sun and the dust with mouths to feed and no energy left to ask about homework. Some of them do not care, and yes, that is painful to say. But poverty does something to a person. It narrows the world down to survival. It does not excuse it, but it does explain it.

The Students. Here is what I want you to understand about them. Yes, they are unmotivated, and yes, it shows but look closer. Look past the absent stare and the torn uniform and the polythene bag. Look at the child who still showed up today even though there was no food this morning. Look at the one who is copying notes furiously because they know the board will be erased before they finish. Look at Boakye, who came back. He came back. After the shoes were torn, after the money ran out, he came back. There is a fight in these children that is almost unreasonable given everything that is working against them. They try. Not all of them, not every day but they try. And that fight deserves a better arena than what we have given them. When a child tells you they want to be a motorbike rider when they grow up, that is not a lack of ambition; that is a child dreaming as far as their world allows and we have not made their world wide enough.

And then there is the private sector. Organizations and individuals who want to help, who go in, build, donate, equip and return two years later to find it in ruins. We have a maintenance culture problem in this country. A deep, deeply troubling one. Money does not grow on trees. Goodwill runs out and when resources are not respected, the people with resources stop coming.

So why am I writing this?

Not to guilt you. Not to tell you to go build a storey building or donate a set of computers although if that is what you can do, PLEASE DO IT!.

I am writing this because I care. And I believe there are a few of you reading this who care too.

I am writing this because basic education is called basic for a reason. It is fundamental. It is primary. It is the foundation on which everything else is built and if it is this hard to access, if it is this fragile, then we are all standing on shaky ground whether we feel it or not.

A lot of us were privileged. Not because we went through a different system or had a different curriculum — we didn’t. We were simply lucky enough to have the infrastructure, the teachers, the family support. And even then, we thought it was not enough. We dreaded our teachers. We rebelled against our parents. We took it all for granted.

I grew up with my mother as a teacher in a private institution. Now I work with teachers in the public sector. I understand, in my own small way, what it costs them.

I asked Google for the top five most respected professions in Ghana. Teachers made the list. And yet I look around and I wonder when last we actually treated them that way.

Here is what I am asking of you.

The next time you go out with a friend, buy a few pencils. A rubber. A cardboard to make flashcards as you go for sip and paints. These children do not need conical flasks or pipettes. They need markers, they need counters. Even paper ones. They need a pencil that works. They need to feel like someone outside of their classroom thought about them today.

It might not be close to you. But it affects you. A Ghana where children cannot read past the letter I, where they come to school hungry, where they miss school because their shoes are torn, that Ghana comes home to all of us eventually.

See a school near you. Just see it. Look at it. That is also a start.

If you want help and you do not know where to start, ASK; you can reach out to people, you can reach out to me.

We were lucky. Let’s not forget that.

I’ve been thinking about this exchange for a while now.

Not because it was dramatic. It wasn’t but its the kind of thing that should have dissolved into the noise of a regular week and it didn’t.

It made me realize — I show up. I’m present. I respond. But I don’t reach.

When you stop asking, you stop knowing people.

Not the surface version of them for that you can know that without trying, but the actual interior of someone, the way their mind works, what they’re afraid of, what they’re quietly proud of.

You miss all of that and the truth is, they feel it, even if they can’t name it. People feel the absence of your curiosity as a kind of distance; as not being fully seen.

There’s something almost self-absorbed about it, even when it comes from fear rather than indifference.

The whole architecture of it is built around protecting yourself, what you might have to reveal, what you might have to receive, what might change and what you might not be able to carry.

Meanwhile, the other person is just sitting there, full of a life they would have shared if you’d only asked.

I think there’s also something lonelier in it than we will all want to admit. When you spend a long time feeling like the most complicated thing in any given room — not arrogantly, but in an exhausting way, in the nobody quite gets it way; you can start to forget that other people are complicated too. That their inner worlds are just as loud, just as layered, just as difficult to explain over an ice cream date.

You start to feel alone in your chaos and that feeling, if you let it, quietly convinces you that there’s nothing on the other side of a question.

I don’t have a clean resolution to this. I also notice the flinch before I ask something personal, the calculation — what will this cost me ?

That shouldn’t be there at all. I’m not sure yet how much of it is fear and how much is just a habit so old it feels like personality.

He said “Humor me”.

I say ask. Not because it’s safe, or because you’re ready but because the person in front of you has a life that deserves to be curious about just as you belive yours to be.

That feels like somewhere to start. *winks*

I saw his face — his eyes; the sclera that has a black spot right below the iris on his left eye. It glistened with his pupils whenever he laughed so hard or even smiled.

I could see how hard he clenches his jaw when he feels nervous about anything, and always keeps his left hand in his pocket because he doesn’t want to get fidgety.

How his muscles in his throat made smooth movements whenever he swallows. His lips got plump from eating spicy foods — he’d constantly lick them like it was an obligation.

I’d say no, use some balm.

He’ll respond, licking it soothes it better

I’d raise an eyebrow.

He’d laugh, his Adam’s apple moves, laughter like ripples of water.

It’d make me smile…and he’ll topple over lightly to kiss me, smack his lips together, and ask, Happy now?

I’d smile and murmur “mmhmmm” and stretch out my fork to him with a piece of chicken on it.

He’d gobble it up, and my heart will flutter.

He had a reflex — one where even in his sleep, his body adjusted to my presence, he’d open his arms when my body touched his, I’d calmly slip in, and his arms would tighten around me, and he’d kiss my forehead

I’d smile and bask in all the love and comfort.

Whenever I complimented him, the ends of his lips would curl, and he’d shyly roll his eyes and bite the corner of his mouth. He’d whisper “thank you” and kiss my forehead like it was a routine he’s sworn to stay true to.

I felt warm. Actually warm. I might have been smiling.

A finger snapped in my face, and just like that, he was gone

My coworker stood over my desk, one eyebrow raised, “You’ve been staring at that wall for like ten minutes. Are you okay? Do you need water? Do you need HR?”

His laugh was still echoing somewhere in my chest

I blinked. Straightened. Cleared my throat.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I was just… thinking.”

“About what?”

A pause.

"...work."

I turned back to my blank wall.

He wasn’t there anymore.

He was never there.

I sighed, picked up my pen, and tried very hard to remember what work actually was.

The brutality of mundane life interrupting a beautiful thing, even an imaginary one.

Another sigh…

Ah, imagination wan keee meeee!!!

I sat in a taxi three days ago with a woman who would be in her early forties. The taxi driver would be in his late forties or early fifties, and the man in the passenger seat by the driver would be about the same age as the driver. There was another gentleman in the back seat with the woman and me, who, if my guesses are right, would be in his mid or late twenties.

The woman got a call. I was nosy — sorry, not sorry, the name was “darling”. It was her husband. They had a brief conversation, in which she ended by saying, if he has not been able to leave yet, it’ll get late, so she would just go to the place herself.

After the call ended, the taxi driver laughed and said to the woman, “You already know what is going on,” and she let out a chuckle. I thought to myself, how is someone’s conversation his business anyway?

The driver mentioned that he met a man very early one morning, and he pointed out the place because we were driving past it. I did not look; I did not want to indulge. Still laughing, he says, “ He came to sleep over (at his mistress’s) and overslept, and he was talking on his phone (to his wife, who was probably questioning him on where he’s been) in a distraught state, saying he’s on his way, meanwhile, his car was not responding; it had something to do with his battery, and so he helped him, and the man gave him any amount of money he was able to place his hand on from his pocket”. They laughed.

They were talking about infidelity.

Honestly, I thought that was such a weird conversation to have and be laughing about, even for the woman who sat next to me.

They were still at it. The driver mentioned how much he hated that his wife worked at the station at which he works because then, he’s not able to be with anyone around there, and if she hadn’t taken up work there, he wouldn’t have known that she was even that jealous.

Man went on to say, “ever since the road started getting better hes been seeing really nice girls in town, but the young girls are really dumb these days because for someone who is “perching” someone’s husband, when you call once, and they’re not available, you must know not to call again.” The woman adds, “you must not even call at all. You just wait till it’s your time to meet him.” They laughed AGAIN!

She looked at me, and I was expressionless. I do not know if I was being rage-baited, but oh, they got me.

The driver continued, “What the wives hate is for you to have a mistress who does not even have any money, and you are the one taking care of her”. The woman added again, “If she has money, he can take money from her for his wife and children”…ummm, what a weird thing to say.

They laughed yet again.

I alighted—finally! I could not wrap my head around the fact that I was sitting in ‘that’ conversation, definitely against my will. When did this become normal? When did wives find it acceptable for their husbands to be with another woman intimately? Chile, I thought we were standing on business.

According to Affair Healing and Psychology Today, studies have consistently shown that roughly 60-75% of couples stay together after discovering an affair. But here's where it gets interesting: 44% of women who have cheated remain married, while 61% of men who cheated stay married. Is it still the heartbreakingly familiar reasons? the children?, financial dependency?, fear of loneliness?, love and commitment?, and religious values?. Finding these, I kept thinking about all the women I have known who are part of these statistics, God! The woman in the taxi. Was she one of these statistics, or even the wife of the taxi driver?

After a conversation at work with a few coworkers, one woman stated, “Now being called a wife is just a title”. Another man said, “Oh, but it actually helps the wives o”, “but you don’t want to be lonely, so there is nowhere to go”. What almost threw me off was, “Oh, but madam the children o hm” — I need to say this plainly: a child who is old enough witnessing their mother in so much misery will not ask her to stay for their sake. Children are not that selfish, and I repeat, they will not ask you to stay in misery for their sake. Ask me, I know all about it, lol.

DISCLAIMER

I am speaking only about women's experiences that I've witnessed and heard. I cannot speak on men's experiences with infidelity because I simply don't know them and heard very little of it.

What Changes Between Twenty and Forty? We watch our mothers and aunties accept it, and we swear, “Not me. Never me.”

I can’t help but wonder, are there social constructs that teach women to shrink their expectations as they age? Are they terrified of being divorced and vulnerable, starting over when the world tells us our value has expired? with no safety net to fall back on?

The wife is laughing; she's probably laughing because it hurts less than crying. How does it really feel to be “the other woman?” to be the cause of someone else’s misery, a child’s trauma? Having half of someone? Immediately no!.

I keep replaying that conversation, the casual cruelty, infidelity discussed like weather, with hollow laughter; an endpoint of a thousand small compromises.

At what point exactly did we decide the dignity of our union was negotiable?

I have always believed that there is a psychology behind having sex…

This is the beginning of my post, and yes, that is exactly what I want to write about.

We’ve created this silent choreography where women show up to their own pleasure like polite guests at someone else’s party. It’s a performance of participation; turn when told to turn or given the cue to, respond when expected to respond, and when it’s over, roll to the side with that hollow feeling you can’t quite name. It’s not disappointment exactly, because disappointment requires knowing what you were hoping for in the first place.

Women aren’t taught to be active participants in their pleasure. We’re taught to be accommodating. To be “good at it” in ways that center someone else’s experience.

And the men? Many carry this dangerous confidence from encounter to encounter, believing that bodies are universal, that what worked with the last woman is a master key for all women. As if pleasure has a cheat code, forgetting that what made one person shudder might leave another completely cold.

Someone asked her for the first time: “What makes you tick?”

And she paused. Not because the question was invasive, but because in all her years of having sex, no one had ever asked. She’d been touched, thrusted, even complimented, but never consulted. And in that pause, she realized the devastating truth: she didn’t know.

She didn’t know what rhythm worked for her muff, or the exact pressure that would make her mind go blank in the best way. She didn’t know if she preferred slow and deep or quick and shallow, didn’t know which position allowed her to feel everything or which words, if any, she needed to hear. She just knew, vaguely, that she wanted to be “handled with care,”— that phrase we use when we can’t articulate our actual desires.

This isn’t about encouraging masturbation, however, though, there’s no shame in knowing your own body. This is about recognizing that sex requires conversation. Real conversation. Not the performative “is this good?” mid-act that we all know is more reflex than genuine inquiry.

Let’s not forget that it can’t just be men asking women. Women need to ask men, too. What do you like? What have you always wanted to try? What doesn’t work for you even though you’ve never said so?

Treat it like a treasure hunt. Take all the maneuvers, all the risks to find the treasure, and stay safe while you’re at it—because treasure hunts do have booby traps. You might also discover something that completely transforms the experience. You might find that what you thought would be amazing actually does nothing for you and that you’ve been faking enthusiasm for something that leaves you numb, or that your partner has been doing the same.

The treasure isn’t just orgasm. It’s knowing. It’s the intimacy of being seen and letting yourself be discovered. It’s the radical act of saying “slower” or “harder” or “not there, here” without shame. It’s your partner caring enough to learn you specifically.

Here is what happens in the throat when someone tries not to cry: the glottis closes, the vocal cords tighten, and the muscles contract to suppress the sob. The body is literally trying to keep everything in. To maintain composure. To protect from the vulnerability of being witnessed in pain.

There is a specific physics to unshed tears. Something hardens just behind the collarbone like a stone that cannot be swallowed and cannot be spit out. This sensation lives in the bodies of those who learned early that showing emotion was dangerous. It travels through lecture halls and family dinners, through first dates and last goodbyes, through every moment that demands holding together when everything inside wants to come apart.

The body remembers what the mind tries to forget. Some bodies do become experts at restraint.

Learning Silence

The lesson comes early for some: that crying is currency they cannot afford to spend. When a child is small and hurting and cries, they quickly learn whether tears summon comfort or consequences. For too many, tears bring more hurt. More reasons to make them stop, so they stop. They swallow it down. They teach their faces to lie while their chests burn with everything they’re not allowed to say.

Fluency in silence develops. Crying only when no one is around; in bathrooms with the tap running, under blankets in the dark, in the shower where water can hide the evidence. Big feelings become dangerous things, best kept locked away where they can’t betray and expose weakness.

What isn’t known then is that swallowed feelings don’t disappear. They accumulate. They build pressure. They wait…

When the Past Refuses to Stay Buried

At twenty-four, there comes a reckoning. A girl begins to name what she couldn’t name before. Trauma. Abandonment. The specific loneliness of learning too young that needing someone was the fastest way to be left alone.

But understanding doesn’t mean control. The wounds decide when they want to open, and they don’t ask permission.

She meets someone who makes her feel seen, really seen, and suddenly her hands are on the door. She is planning an exit before there’s any reason to leave. Cataloging flaws, manufacturing distance, convincing herself it’s better to run now than to be left later. She tells herself she’s still young. That she needs to make her own mistakes while there’s time. But really, she’s just terrified of staying long enough to need someone.

Because needing someone means building yourself back up when they leave, but the lesson learned long ago says that prevention is far better than a cure!

Unlearning

When someone asks what’s wrong, the first instinct is still to say “nothing.” When the urge rises to say “I miss you” or “I need you” or “please don’t go,” the words stick in the throat like that old familiar lump, swallowed down out of habit.

Learning a new language at twenty-four. One where “I need reassurance” is a complete sentence, not an apology. Where “I’m scared of being left” is vulnerability, not ammunition. Where crying doesn’t mean broken, it means finally feeling.

The grief comes in waves. Grief for every connection sabotaged because the conviction that it would end made ending it first feel like control.

Sometimes, sitting with someone loved, they say something kind, and the lump appears. That pressure behind the eyes rises, and the body automatically pushes it down. But sometimes, more and more, it’s allowed to come. Eyes fill. Voice breaks. Being seen in need, in fear, in impossible tenderness becomes possible.

Staying

There is exhaustion in always leaving. In swallowing every big feeling until the throat aches with the weight of words never said.

So the work begins: learning to stay. To speak. To cry in front of people without immediately apologizing. To say “I need you” even when the voice shakes. To believe, slowly, imperfectly, that big feelings don’t make someone too much. They make them human. They make them capable of the kind of love they always wanted but were too afraid to reach for.

The lump is still there. It may never fully go away. But the discovery emerges that it doesn’t have to be swallowed. It can break open. Tears can come. Being held while crying becomes possible instead of hiding until the storm passes.

Needing someone becomes possible. And maybe, terrifying as it is, letting someone need you becomes possible too.

My dearest Himari,

I need to tell you something before you fall in love, even though I know you won't listen—and you shouldn't.

One of life’s most humbling experiences is to fall in love.

It could be one of the best times of your life, baby girl, no doubt.

For me, Imouto, with him, I thought it was the time I understood what a relationship could look like, the only time I understood that being with someone was not just about intimacy but also about opening up, making mistakes, and the role I had to play in shaping what I am and will be with him.

I was obsessed, Himari, I cared for him, so did he — healthily, of course, in a way that I was extremely comfortable. Resting in his arms felt like falling into my bed after a long day, how relaxed my shoulders got after hours of being so tense, I felt the need to slowly let go of my insecurities and share the parts of myself that scared even me the most

I had this

I mean, that’s what I thought…

But it crumbled down

I went through every phase of denial I could ever be in

The Que sera sera: whatever will be, will be — in ode of my blinding faith that he was my forever.

The right person, wrong time

All the other theories you could ever think of

Until…

Until I started asking why?

And you see that, with that, Imouto, unfortunately, you won’t have answers— I did not have answers, nor did he.

More unfortunately, you would begin to realize that you gave up your vulnerability to be fed upon

I was so palatable that he kept coming for more

I wasn’t the perfect person to ever exist; I didn’t need to lovey, but I believe I did right by him; I did my best by him.

I fought to be the version of “right” he sold to me to have wanted. The more I fought, the more I was being ripped open, but you know, he was good; he knew how to make a good mess. He haphazardly tore me open, and there was no disarray, no splatters, nothing to clean up for himself.

He said to me, Kimari, “I miss seeing you cry.”

I thought in that moment, he wanted to be there when I was at my worst.

He said again, “You are very beautiful, especially when you cry.”

I thought he was complimenting the fact that I was so gorgeous that even when I cried, I was still very beautiful.

He said, “It always turned me on.”

Now, what do I think? Nothing! I laugh, and I do remember him getting a bokki even during the times I was being torn apart by sorrow.

I thought to myself, isn’t he even supposed to not be turned on? But I dismissed it. He had patterns with me, and he was back on them: check-ins, long, long conversations, laughs, and when it died down, an exchange of goodbye/ goodnight photos, they would get flirtier by the second, one thing into another till we were both good to go to bed after getting off on whatever business was started.

I would go to bed after looking at myself in the mirror, and I ask myself, “How am I this kind of girl?” “Why have I allowed it to be me?”

I cried!

Imouto, a fresh stab in my heart, seeing this person I loved, in a different light that I never even thought was possible.

I can swear, I could vividly remember him call me “the dream”, saying he misses me and he loves me so much, when right in my hand, I read, “yes! I don’t love you anymore.”

He lied, sister, he lied about so much more, which I spared myself the decency to not know about.

It’s been deliberate!

I tried to be delusional, to make excuses for him: First time is an honest mistake, Second time is a mistake, but a third, honey!, a third time was a choice! And I knew that he made that choice; the choice to hurt me, over and over again

He feasted on me raw

Raw is fresh; fresh is soothing

I loved the soothing for what I thought it was at the time

Innocently, I gave him Sora, raw, without skin, without bones, nothing to spike his cavities

And shit! - all those times that passed, I saw how palatable I am to give away to anyone to consume

It’s not to say I lost the plot about finding my person; it is about being cautious, but the funny thing is, you can never be cautious enough, especially when you are in love.

Even for you, my love, someone somewhere can never be too cautious of you.

Love is cruel, but apparently, it is kind

It is hurtful, but it is patient, gentle, and it is strength. It is YOU and ME, Imouto.

It is the relief I felt when I finally accepted, let go, and started giving myself some skin and bones!

One of life's most powerful experiences is to fall back in love—with yourself. When you do, Imouto, call me. We'll celebrate with skin and bones INTACT! Aishitemasu.

Always,

Your Sora.

|Imouto|: little sister in Japanese.

|Aishitemasu|: I love you in Japanese.

|bokki|: erection in Japanese.

| Sora|: Sky — Older sister.

| Himari|: Sunshine — Younger sister.

Spotify listen: Love is Letting Go - Ashe, Diane Keaton

Hi,

I hope this finds you in all the million ways a person could possibly feel. For what I feel now, anxiety is the first, sadness follows, happiness, umm a maybe if you’d ask me. Confusion is probably the prominent of it all.

Not to beat about the bush, I love him. More than I ever thought I would, more than I dreamt of loving a man! But here I am, in his bed, his back to me, peaceful asleep, reminiscing on all the good times we had together and all the bad ones. Asking myself why I am letting it all slip away.

His eyes, they’re kind and not just kind in a way that makes you feel safe or at peace, but scared and a rush of anxiety all at once. Here is where I hit a wall, letting go!

Seeing him and knowing perfectly well that he’s not mine anymore.

Touching him and knowing that he’s not mine to touch.

Smelling him around and knowing he’s here and still out of reach; one of the most painful things to ever experience.

I have a theory. A theory that it gets easier when you’re far away from them or when you run away

But even that, it’s absolute torture!

You find yourself running back to them still

Then there are all these little memories haunting you while you are trying to battle a war between your emotions and the things you can not even control.

How about I give you a scenario?

Swarms and us!

You open your doors and windows

You leave your untidy trash outside

It rains, there are puddles around your house, leaving stagnant water - I mean, it’s caused by the rain, so you leave it be.

Then mosquitoes start breeding

Into your windows and doors they come!

You’re bitten, you get sick, you get some treatment, and what do you do next?

Get some insecticides, repellents, probably coils - our defensive mechanism!

Forgetting we left the doors open again somewhere between 5:16 pm and 5:45 pm

We forgot to empty the trash, so we will do it the next morning, probably the morning after tomorrow morning, oh! And the rains and all the empty cans we possibly have around.

Every time we ignorantly leave an opening, all these shadows come creeping in on us - the lies, the mistrust, the resentment, the unforgiveness, wrapped around laughter and little moments of happiness. Our feelings get ill, so much that we overdose, we overdose on the things we picked up on. Forgetting how to even be happy without each other.

Cutting pieces of ourselves to fit a narrative where all is perfect, until that perfection becomes heavy to carry, so heavy that it hurts, it hurts so much that we are hit with the realization that we cut the wrong pieces into the wrong places.

Now I love him, but I do not know who I am anymore, but it is me all at the same time, and I won’t fault him, nor would I fault myself.

I am letting go, but I am so firmly gripped onto him.

Now I am still in my house; 5:30, windows and doors ajar and the stench from the trash catches up to me from the living room and oh dear! I step out to see all the nasty water cans. Trash full to the brim, overflowing even! And there in my hand a smear of my repellent - the irony!

I love him, I love me, I love us.

All I want to do is get the damn trash can and wash it clean, fix the puddles, get rid of the water cans and remember to close the window and doors.

I want to heal and avert.

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I hope he knows that I love him - I’m sure he does.

I wish we would meet again

Maybe I’d have a new home then, out of my old neighbourhood

Or I’d be in my old neighbourhood and doing all the right things.

If not, I wish he gets all the great things he could ever reach, which are all beyond the skies, and I’d have exactly the same.

“Pour qu'il sera toujours l'homme qui me verra comme le composant le plus brut que je puisse être et même m'aimera aussi brut que je pourrais jamais le vouloir”

Translates

“For he will always be the man to see me as the most raw component as I could be and even love me as raw as I could ever want”

Warm Regards,

For lack of better words;

A girl in love.

But I always find myself in water; underwater even

Either I slipped or I took myself in there

I don’t even know how it feels to drown

All I know is that I am under water

My body is getting filled with water, but there’s still oxygen in my lungs

I can taste the water; it’s salty, stirs my stomach

I’ve been there for a while, and no one knows, so there is no one to get me out of there

I learnt to stay afloat all by myself,

I can see logs all around me, within my reach

I touch them, and they roll away

So yes! I learn to stay afloat

Water is still salty

Now, it digs deep into my skin

Afloat is good, but I could still turn underwater anytime

I want to touch the sand

I want to be on dry land

I want my feet to feel the crisp

I want to be able to hold on to tree; something stable

Not a log

A tree that stays in place and doesn’t move away; firm

Maybe have a fruit or two

Put a flower in my wet hair

Make bags out of the leaves (a reminder that I was a child before)

Even though there would be rain,

It won’t be

salty

It stops

And glues me to the hopes of being dry all over again!

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