I tweeted about it because apparently my natural response to having an existential question about romantic love is to put it on the internet and ask strangers to help me figure it out.

The unanimous answer from my mutuals was “no”. They are right.

The first thing I find interesting is that we talk about love as though it can be measured. We say we love someone “so much.” We say we love them “more than anything.” We say “I love you more” and, despite the fact that there is no obvious unit of measurement involved, we understand exactly what is being communicated.
More than what?
More than we believe they love us, presumably. More than we thought possible. More than before. More than we know how to articulate.
But more love is a strange concept when you actually stop to think about it.
If I say I love someone more today than I did a year ago, what has increased? Is there literally more of the feeling? Is love something that accumulates? Does every experience of tenderness add to an existing store until, eventually, the container is full?
And if that is the case, what happens when it is full?

This is where the idea of a saturation point becomes interesting to me. A saturation point is essentially the point beyond which something cannot take in any more. You reach the maximum. Anything additional simply does not fit.
It seems reasonable that love should work this way. There must, surely, be some upper limit to the amount of feeling a person can hold for another person. We are finite people. Our emotional capacities, like everything else about us, presumably have some boundaries.
And yet, this does not seem to be how being in love feels. At least, it hasn’t been my experience.

I have had moments with him where I have felt absolutely certain that I could not possibly love him more than I did in that moment. One time it was something as simple as lying on the couch fighting sleep because I wanted to stay awake with him, while Tame Impala played in the background. Another time, he wrote me an entire Love Island-style episode from my perspective, with an almost unsettling accuracy about the way I think and behave. Another time, he was sick and asleep in my arms, and I felt this fierce, almost painful desire to take away all his worries and give him all the happiness in the world.
These moments don’t even feel like the same kind of love.
One was comfort. One was recognition. One was protectiveness.
And yet my brain filed all three under the same category: I have never loved this person more than I love him right now.
Which makes me wonder whether “more” is actually the right word.
Perhaps what changes isn’t the amount of love but our access to it.

We don’t necessarily love someone more because there is suddenly a larger quantity of love inside us. We may simply encounter another aspect of the relationship that allows us to experience love differently. You can love someone because they make you laugh, and then love them because they make you feel safe, and then love them because you understand something about them that nobody else does, and then love them because they are hurting and you would do almost anything to make it stop. None of these experiences necessarily cancels out the others or ranks above them. But they can still feel like more. I think this is partly because love is not one feeling.

We talk about love as though it is a singular emotional state, but romantic love contains an almost absurd number of things. Attraction. Affection. Admiration. Attachment. Desire. Friendship. Familiarity. Concern. Excitement. Trust. Tenderness. Comfort. Pride. Sometimes even irritation, which seems unfair, but apparently loving someone does not exempt you from finding them super annoying from time to time.

You can love someone because of who they are, because of how they make you feel, because of how you feel around them, because of what you have experienced together, because of what you imagine experiencing together in the future. And these things can keep accumulating.
Not necessarily into a larger amount of love, but into a more extensive knowledge of what loving this particular person feels like. Maybe that is what changes over time.

When you first love someone, there are entire categories of love that you simply haven’t had the opportunity to experience with them yet. You haven’t seen them sick. You haven’t seen them grieving. You haven’t watched them succeed at something they have worked hard for. You haven’t seen them at their most exhausted, their funniest, their most vulnerable, their most annoying. You haven’t yet learned all the tiny things that make them who they are. You can’t love the versions of them you haven’t met.
Then you meet them.
And sometimes you discover that you love those versions too.

This makes me think that perhaps the reason I keep experiencing “more” love is not that love itself has no limit, but that a person is not a finished object.
You don’t meet someone once and then spend the rest of your relationship loving the complete, final version of them. People continue to change. Circumstances reveal things. Time gives you access to parts of each other that weren’t available at the beginning. Even if you knew everything there was to know about someone today— which is probably impossible— you wouldn’t know who they will be five years from now. Or even a week from now. There is always another version of them coming.
And, consequently, there is always the possibility of encountering them in a new way.

I think this also complicates the idea that loving someone “more” means loving them better. It doesn’t necessarily. I can imagine loving someone profoundly and still failing them in some way. I can imagine loving someone more than I have ever loved anyone and still being selfish, inattentive, impatient, or occasionally spectacularly stupid.
Love is not a moral achievement. Feeling more of it doesn’t automatically make you better at expressing it.
That distinction matters because I think we sometimes treat intensity as proof of the quality of a relationship. But a huge feeling is still just a feeling. What we do with it is another question entirely.
Perhaps the more interesting thing about love, then, is not how much of it we can feel, but how many forms it can take.

There is the love that makes you want to kiss someone until you forget what you were talking about.
There is the love that makes you want to tell them something stupid that happened to you five minutes ago because they are the person you immediately thought of.
There is the love that makes you listen to music you otherwise would never have put on yourself (and thank God because oh how I love that album by SiR!).
There is the love that makes you learn someone’s habits so well that you can recognize their mood from the way they say hello.
There is the love that makes you want to protect someone’s peace.
There is the love that makes you genuinely delighted by their happiness even when it has nothing to do with you.
There is the love that is not particularly exciting at all. It is just sitting beside someone while you both do your own thing and feeling completely content that they are there.

There is, I think, a tendency to believe that the most intense version of love must be the truest one. I’m not sure that’s true. Sometimes the moments that have made me feel most in love with him have been incredibly unremarkable. There was no grand declaration, no dramatic revelation, no particularly beautiful setting. Sometimes it was just his hand on my foot. Sometimes it was something he had remembered about me. Sometimes it was watching him sleep.
The feeling was enormous. The circumstances were not.

And maybe that is part of why I find the idea of a saturation point so difficult to believe. If love were simply a feeling that increased in intensity until it reached its maximum, perhaps eventually I would get there. Eventually there would be a moment where I could say: This is it. There is nothing left.
But love doesn’t seem to behave like that. It behaves more like a process of discovery.
You think you know how much you love someone, and then you find yourself loving them in a circumstance you haven’t encountered before.

You think you understand what this person means to you, and then something happens that rearranges your understanding slightly.
You think you’ve felt every possible version of tenderness, and then apparently your boyfriend gets sick and falls asleep in your arms and your brain decides that you would personally like to eliminate illness from the planet.
There is always some new piece of information.
Some new context.
Some new version of them.
Some new version of you.

So I don’t think there is a saturation point.
I don’t think there is necessarily a maximum amount of love one person can feel for another.
And I don’t mean that in the grand, romantic sense in which love is described as an infinite, all-consuming force and everyone starts speaking like they are narrating a commercial. I mean something simpler.
I think that as long as you are still living alongside someone, you are still encountering them. And as long as you are encountering them, there are still new circumstances in which you might discover what it feels like to love them.

Maybe the scale isn’t actually getting longer. Maybe there was never a scale.
Maybe “I love you more” is simply the best language we have for the strange experience of discovering that a feeling you thought you already understood has found another way to surprise you.
Because that is what keeps happening to me.
I keep thinking I have reached the most. And then I don’t.
I don’t think the previous feeling was smaller. It was the most I had experienced then. It was complete in its own way. I wasn’t secretly capable of more and withholding it. I just hadn’t met that next feeling yet.

And perhaps that is the nicest thing about loving someone over time: you don’t necessarily become capable of loving them because you force yourself to love them more.
You just keep meeting them.
And, somehow, you keep finding more to feel.

Every once in a while, she reaches to adjust the puffy sleeves of her kaba. Just like you used to.

And they keep singing those Catholic and Presbyterian hymns you were always humming. I didn’t know most of the lyrics because you rarely ever sang them out loud.

I’ve not cried since you died. But I broke down in church today after trying to hold it in for about thirty minutes. Thirty minutes of pressing my nails into my palm, of counting the people around me, of doing anything but feeling. And then I wasn’t doing any of that anymore. I was just crying over Ewura’s shoulders. It felt like the universe was conspiring to get me to finally face my emotions today. Grief, I’m learning, doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t wait for the right moment or the private one. It finds you in church, in a crowd, in the middle of a hymn you’ve heard a hundred times, and it says: now.

They say that when someone dies, you start seeing them everywhere. I thought that was just something people said to comfort themselves. But grief has a strange way of turning strangers into mirrors. A scarf. A pair of glasses. A familiar hymn. Suddenly someone who has never met you carries pieces of you into the room, and for a moment it feels like you’ve found your way back.

Maybe that’s what happened today.

For weeks, I’ve been moving through life as though your death was a fact I could file away. I said the words out loud. I accepted condolences. I even laughed when people expected me to. Somewhere in all of that, I convinced myself that because I wasn’t crying, I was coping.
I wasn’t.
I was simply postponing the moment my heart would catch up with reality. Today, it did. You were nowhere in that room, and somehow you were everywhere.

I miss you. I have a lot of regrets. I regret not visiting you more when I was at home. I regret not calling you a day earlier than I planned to. Maybe then I’d have heard your voice one last time. It felt like everyone knew you were about to die. Everyone but me. Mama said you woke up from your coma just to say goodbye before permanently leaving. I wish I got to say goodbye to you.

You took care of me at a very delicate period of my life. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without you. I’ve always believed we’re mosaics, each person we love becoming another tessera in the pattern of who we are. Now one of mine is gone. The picture is still here, but it will never look quite the same.

You lived a good and long life, and for that I’ll always be grateful. But selfishly, I wish you got to see me become the successful woman you always said I’d be. When everyone was rooting for me in my childhood years to become a doctor, you shut them up with that look and said “Maame is going to be a professor.” I’m working my way up that ladder now.

Death steals a person all at once, but grief returns them in fragments.
I don’t know if this ache ever disappears. Maybe it isn’t supposed to. Maybe love simply changes shape when the person we love is no longer here. Maybe it becomes this quiet companionship with memory, where a stranger in church can undo weeks of carefully held composure.

I cried today because, for the first time since you left, forces stronger than me broke through my walls.
And that’s okay.

Maybe grieving you isn’t something to overcome. Maybe it’s something to carry. Because as long as I notice the scarves, the hymns, the rosaries, the pearly earrings, and the women who unknowingly remind me of you, some part of you is still walking beside me.

I think I’d like to believe that’s how love survives death.

When I was six,
my father would carry me from the car to my bed
when I fell asleep on the ride home.
I never worried about how I’d get there.
I simply closed my eyes and trusted.
So I thought love was safety—
being carried through the dark by someone stronger than you.

When I was eight,
my mother sat beside my bed through a fever,
pressing cool cloths against my forehead
long after midnight had arrived.
Her eyes were heavy with sleep,
but she stayed anyway.
So I thought love was staying—
the refusal to leave when leaving would be easier.

When I was ten,
I had a best friend who knew everything about me.
We shared secrets,
inside jokes,
and plans for a future we were certain we’d share.
So I thought love was forever—
the promise that people who matter never really leave.

When I was fifteen,
A boy said he loved me.
I waited for messages that never came.
I reread conversations
and found meaning where there was none.
I confused being consumed by someone
with being cared for by them.
So I thought love was longing—
an ache that grew larger the less it was returned.

When I was seventeen,
I left familiar places behind
I watched people drift away
without arguments,
without betrayals,
without warning.
I learned that sometimes endings arrive in the quietest of ways.
So I thought love was grief—
the proof that something mattered because losing it hurt.

When I was nineteen,
I met people who saw all my rough edges
before they saw my strengths
and stayed anyway.
People who saw the unfinished parts of me
and treated them as works in progress,
not flaws to be repaired.
So I thought love was acceptance—
being known completely and not being asked to become someone else.

When I was twenty-one,
a boy became my friend.
He showed me that the best kind of romance was built on friendship.
He made me watch cartoons for the first time in my life.
He learned the language of my thoughts and how my brain worked.
He made me feel comfortable enough to be my full, unedited self around him.
Somewhere between shared laughter,
comfortable silences,
and conversations that never seemed to end,
I found a best friend with whom I could also experience romantic love with.
So I thought love was home—
not a place,
but a person;
someone whose presence always gave me rest and comfort.

I am twenty-two now,
And after all these years of collecting definitions,
I am beginning to think love is none of these things alone.
It is all of these things,
and more than I have words for yet.
I suspect that when I am thirty,
and forty,
and every age I haven’t lived yet,
love will find new ways to teach me.
New definitions I cannot anticipate.
So I have stopped trying to pin it down.
Maybe love is a definition that grows with you;
one I will spend my whole life writing.
Or maybe, love was never meant to be defined;
only lived,
and lived,
and lived again.

I’ve been thinking about this phrase since I watched that video from YouTube creator Sisyphus55. Not because I have any problem with it exactly, but because I think we use it too quickly. Too comfortably. Like it’s the kindest version of a story that might actually have a much more complicated truth underneath it.

We say it and there’s this instant relief. The love was real. The person was right. The timing just... wasn’t. It’s almost romantic when you say it like that. Like you were two people held apart by forces bigger than yourselves, star-crossed in the most gentle way possible. It lets you keep the love and release the guilt at the same time, which is a very convenient thing for a phrase to do.

But I want to delve into it a little deeper. Because I think “wrong timing” is actually several different things wearing the same attire. And depending on which one you’re dealing with, the way you carry it and the way you grow from it is completely different.

There’s a boy I met the weekend after I wrote my BECE. Kay. We’d been friends on social media for a while before that — the kind of friendship where you talk about everything and nothing for hours and it feels so easy. He was older, handsome, sweet, smart, all of that. I don’t think I liked him then, not romantically at least. It was more like admiration. Or maybe I just hadn’t let myself think about it.

The day we met in person was completely unplanned. I remember it in that fragmented, half-dreamy way that only the most significant moments get stored — not as a clear sequence of events but as a feeling. Seeing him from across the restaurant and thinking, wait, is that actually him? Him seeing me. Our eyes meeting. Moving away from my friends without really deciding to. Sitting next to him. Losing my words completely. And the smiles. Oh there were so many smiles.

That evening, he told me I made him lose his words too. That he liked me as more than a friend. And the feeling was completely mutual. Clear and uncomplicated and a little overwhelming in the best way.

About two weeks later, he told me he was relocating to the US permanently.

He followed me on Instagram a few years ago. He’s doing really well and I genuinely couldn’t be prouder. But still. You know how it is. The “what if” just lives somewhere quiet in the back of you.

This one, I’ll call the true version of the phrase. Because the circumstances were genuinely, simply, out of our hands. Nothing was chosen or delayed or avoided. There was no disguised fear. The ground moved before anything concrete could be built on it. That’s its own kind of grief — mourning something that never even got to begin. And it’s different from mourning something that ended. It’s lighter in some ways and heavier in others. Lighter because there’s no breakage, no fallout. Heavier because there’s nothing to point to. Just a feeling. Just a knowing. Just a what if.

Joe is a different story.

I had seen Joe around in JHS for a while before I ever really noticed him. Not even when we ended up in the same class in final year. It took one afternoon, one conversation after school, for that to change. Something in the way he talked. I don’t even remember what we talked about. I just remember thinking, oh. Oh, okay.

But I never said anything. I buried it instead and did a very good job of it. JHS Joana was focused. She wasn’t about to let a crush distract her priorities. Which is a reasonable and even admirable thing — except that “I’ll deal with this later” has a way of becoming “it’s too late” faster than you’d expect.

A couple of weeks before I started high school, we became close. Texting all the time. A mutual friend quietly confirmed what I’d been hoping; the feeling was mutual. I decided I’d tell him when I came home after the first semester. I was building up to it. I was ready.

He sent me a letter a few weeks before vacation. He was moving to the UK. He wasn’t sure he’d ever come back. We did end up confessing to each other, and there was something bittersweet and a little beautiful about that, about it finally being said, but we both knew it wasn’t worth pursuing long distance at that stage of our lives. We tried to stay friends. Over time, we just fell off. I was crushed. Not again.

Was the timing wrong? Yes. The geographical distance became impossible. But here’s what I keep turning over: the feelings existed long before I said anything. I just hid them. Organized them neatly into a corner of myself where they couldn’t cause trouble. And by the time I was ready — really ready — the window had already shifted.

I’m not saying I could have changed the ending. He was always going to move. But there’s something worth noticing about the pattern of waiting for the perfect moment to be honest, because the perfect moment has a tendency to not arrive. Or to arrive just slightly after you needed it to.

In uni, I met someone who felt like — and I don’t know how to say this without it sounding like too much — the first person I could be fully known by. Emotionally, intellectually, in all the ways that tend to matter most. He was just like me. That was the first time I thought the concept of “soulmates” could be real.

We were both with other people. And in the years since, we have never been single at the same time. Which sounds like fate. Like the universe simply having other plans.

But if I’m being honest with myself — and I think that’s sort of the point of writing something like this — we never really put in the work to be together either. I don’t think either of us was brave enough. I personally was afraid of what happens when the most significant connection you’ve found gets tested by an actual relationship. Because what exists in the space of almost is always safe. You can keep it perfect there. You never have to find out if it survives contact with reality.

Nana became like my best friend and the one constant in my life. The lines did get blurry sometimes, and in those moments, I got a glimpse of how a romantic relationship with him would look like, and I don’t think I liked the full picture. Sometimes, when you’re too similar to someone, you end up clashing. So we stayed in almost. And we called it timing.

I’m not sure that’s the same thing. I think timing was the word we reached for because the real word — fear — was harder to say. It’s harder to say “I loved you too much to risk losing you” than it is to say “the timing just wasn’t right.” One of those sentences requires you to look at yourself clearly. The other lets you look away.

In university again. Someone who became a very good friend before he became more. It was a good time, a genuinely good time. But I was in a terrible mental state during that period, and I couldn’t fully show up for it. I sabotaged it before it could really become what it might have been. I told myself it wasn’t fair to him. Which was true. But it was also the only way I knew how to protect both of us from what I couldn’t yet offer.

The days with him were the small, quiet rays of light in what was otherwise a very dark stretch. I want to say that clearly, because I think it matters. Even in its incompleteness, there was something real and warm there. He gave me that without knowing how much it was needed.

This one wasn’t about external timing. The geography was fine. The circumstances were fine. The timing that was wrong was inside me. I wasn’t at peace enough with myself to hold someone else well. And you can call that wrong timing, technically, but I think it’s more honest to call it what it was: I wasn’t ready, not because of the external timing, but because of where I was in myself.

And that’s not something to be ashamed of. Because the difference matters — if you think the timing was external, you wait for better circumstances. If you know the timing was internal, you do the work.

And then there was Papa. Papa is the one I find hardest to categorize, which is maybe why he's the one I find hardest to put down. [He was not included in the first draft of this essay lol]

I met him (on Twitter) in my final year of university, I believe, and to this day I don’t think I’ve ever met someone I clicked with quite that quickly.

You know that feeling where you meet someone and have one conversation and get to know how they think and go: wow, you get me so well. We could spend hours talking about books, ideas, life, relationships, and somehow never run out of things to say. We challenged each other. Understood each other. We were similar in a way that felt almost unsettling at times. Not identical like Nana, but close enough that we understood each other’s thought processes without needing much explanation.

He wrote me a poem once. It’s one of my favorite poems ever.

We ended things because we weren’t in the same country, and because we knew each other well enough, and tried enough times to know long distance wouldn’t work for us. And unlike some of the other stories in this essay, this wasn’t a case of either of us being afraid to try. If anything, the problem was that we kept trying not to give up on each other. We talked constantly. Too constantly, probably. At some point we both realized that whatever this thing was between us (knowing it wasn’t going anywhere), it was making it difficult to fully invest in the people and lives around us. We were holding onto each other while simultaneously trying to move forward, which turned out to be impossible.

So we decided to go no contact. Or at least we tried to.

We blocked each other. And unblocked. And blocked again. Then decided to be friends. Then realized we couldn’t. Then started the whole cycle again. It took us a ridiculously long time to let go.

I’ve thought about what that cycle means, and I think it means this: knowing the right thing and being able to do it are not always the same thing. Every time one of us reached back, it wasn’t confusion or delusion. It was just that giving up something (almost) so good is not a single event. It keeps costing you. You make the decision and then you have to keep making it, and sometimes in a weak or quiet or lonely moment you just… don’t. You reach. And the other person reaches back because they feel it too, because no one else has quite filled that particular space either.

This one doesn’t fit the other categories. The timing wasn’t external, not really. I wasn’t hiding or afraid or unready. We were both clear-eyed and present and still couldn’t stay away from each other. It was just a right decision that kept being hard to keep. And I think that’s different from all the others. The grief of the conscious sacrifice.

If Kay taught me that sometimes circumstances get in the way before anything can begin, Papa taught me that sometimes circumstances get in the way even when something has already begun. And sometimes love isn’t defeated by a lack of feeling. Sometimes there is plenty of feeling. Sometimes there is just too much distance.

I think about all five of these people sometimes. The way each one arrived at a different version of me and left something behind. And I’ve come to think that “right person, wrong timing” isn’t one feeling but a whole family of them. There’s the one where the circumstances were truly, simply impossible. There’s the one where you waited a little too long. There’s the one where the timing was a story you told together because the truth was more vulnerable. There’s the one where the work hadn’t been done yet (inside you). And there's the one where the connection was real but the practical reality of your lives couldn't support it.

None of these is wrong to grieve. All of them are real. But they ask different things of you on the other side of them. The first asks you to make peace with what was out of your hands. The others ask you to look at what wasn’t. The last asks you to accept that sometimes wanting something isn't enough to make it sustainable.

I’m still grateful that I got to love all of these people. I mean that. Even the ones that stung the most, even the ones I still think about when a particular song comes on or a scent hits me. There’s something I find genuinely beautiful about the fact that love can exist fully in the space of what-almost-was. That it doesn’t need a neat ending to have been true.

But I also think love asks us to be honest. And part of that honesty is asking yourself, sometimes, whether it was really the timing. Or whether the timing was just the kindest story available.

PS: all names are made up

In an earlier version of this love story, we reported that it began when you met.

This was incorrect. It began three weeks before that, when you saw their name in someone else’s mouth — a friend saying oh, you’d like them — and something in you filed it away with more care than was warranted. We regret the implication that love requires presence to begin. It does not. Sometimes it only requires a name and a quiet evening and a brain that is looking for somewhere to put its hope.

We apologize for the confusion.

We incorrectly described the first conversation as “easy.”

Upon review, it was not easy. It was performed ease, which is a different and more impressive thing — requiring significant invisible labor from both parties. What we should have reported was: two people, each privately terrified, doing an excellent impression of someone who isn’t. We stand by the outcome. We retract the adjective.

An earlier edition stated that you were “not looking for anything serious.”

We have no evidence for this claim. In fact, a thorough review of the archive suggests that you were looking for something very serious indeed, and that not looking for anything serious was a story you told yourself the way people whistle walking past a dark alley — not because it helps, but because silence feels worse.

We should have reported: you were terrified of wanting what you wanted.
The editors apologize for the inaccuracy and for the eighteen months it cost you.

We misidentified the best night as the night everyone agreed was the best night.

Further investigation reveals the best night was actually a Tuesday in February that neither of you mentioned afterward. You had eaten takeout on the floor because the table was covered in things neither of you had put away yet. There had been a stupid argument about nothing, and then it had dissolved, and then you had sat in the particular silence of two people who have just chosen each other again in a small way.

You did not photograph it. You did not say this is it, this is the one. That is precisely why it was the one.
We regret the oversight.

In our coverage of the relationship’s middle period, we omitted several relevant details.

Among those omitted:

1. The way you started editing yourself. Small cuts at first — a sentence swallowed, an opinion softened — so gradual you didn’t notice until you were a significantly abridged version of yourself and couldn’t locate the original text.

2. The evenings you performed happiness so convincingly you almost believed it, and how that almost made it worse.

3. The specific loneliness of being lonely next to someone who loves you.

We did not report these things at the time because they were inconvenient to the narrative we were invested in. We recognize this is not good journalism.

We incorrectly attributed the relationship’s difficulties to external circumstances.

We cited: timing, distance, stress, the difficulty of that year, the way life sometimes gets in the way.

We should have reported: two people, each carrying wounds that predated the other, trying to love each other with tools they hadn’t been given and had never been taught to build. We should have reported that this is not a failure. We should have reported that it is, in fact, the most ordinary and heartbreaking human condition — to want to give someone something you were never given yourself.

We regret the lack of nuance. We retract the word circumstances.

An earlier report stated that you saw it coming.

We cannot verify this. Cross-referencing contemporary sources — journal entries, texts sent to friends, the particularly hopeful hair install you got two weeks before the end — suggests you did not, in any meaningful sense, see it coming.

You felt it coming. There is a difference. Feeling something approach and being able to name it, prepare for it, soften its landing — these are not the same skill. Many people feel the weather changing and still leave the house without a coat.

You were not clairvoyant. You were human. We should have been more precise.

We reported that the ending was mutual.

We retract this.

Not because it wasn’t — it was, formally, in the way that most endings are, which is to say that one person let go first and the other understood, eventually, that holding on alone was a different thing than holding on together.

We retract it because mutual suggests equal footing, and grief is not a place of equal footing. One of you found solid ground before the other. One of you slept through the night before the other. One of you said their name to a new person with something other than mourning in your voice before the other.

None of this makes either of you wrong. It makes both of you human.
But it was not mutual, not in the way we implied. And accuracy matters, even here. Especially here.

In our original coverage, we described what followed as “moving on.”

This phrase has been reviewed and found to be inadequate.

Moving on implies a fixed point from which motion occurs and a direction toward which it proceeds. Our investigation found no such point and no such direction. What we found, instead, was something more like moving through — a gradual, nonlinear, often recursive process of carrying something heavy and finding, over time, that the carrying got less loud. Not lighter. Less loud.

You did not leave them behind. You integrated them, the way a tree grows around a scar. They became part of the rings. They are in there, somewhere, in the person you are now.

We find this, on reflection, to be the more accurate and more interesting story.

Finally: in all previous coverage, we referred to this as a love story.

We stand by this description.

We would only add: it was also a story about fear, and about the particular courage of people who love anyway, knowing what love costs, knowing they’ll likely get it wrong, knowing the ending is coming from the moment the beginning begins.

That is, we think, the only kind of love story there is.
We regret nothing, in the end.
We just wanted to get it right.

This publication is committed to accuracy. Corrections may be submitted to the part of you that is still figuring out what happened.

You start telling yourself maybe you don’t even want those things that much. Maybe you’re being dramatic. Maybe you’re asking for too much. Maybe you should just be grateful.
Sometimes you don’t even bring it up. You’re afraid of annoying them. Afraid of being labeled “too much.” Afraid they’ll sigh. Afraid they’ll pull away. Afraid that one honest conversation might cost you the whole relationship.

So instead, you swallow it.

And most of the time, the things you’re swallowing aren’t even any extravagant demands. They’re simple things. Basic things. The kind of things someone who truly loves you should not struggle to give — reassurance, effort, consistency, loyalty, intentionality, being chosen loudly instead of quietly tolerated. But because you want to keep them, you convince yourself you can live without it.

We like to call this compromise. And yes, relationships require compromise. They require flexibility and humility and meeting each other halfway.
But halfway.

Compromise is a two-way street. They should meet you in the middle. You should not have to walk all the way over to their end while they stand still and call that love. That’s not compromise. That’s self-abandonment.

And that’s how we lose ourselves.

We lose ourselves in the constant adjusting. In the over-explaining. In the quiet hope that one day they’ll wake up and voluntarily become the version of them you keep begging for.

But loving someone should not require you to disappear. If you constantly have to diminish yourself and ask for less, what does that tell you about the person you’re doing that for? And more importantly, what does that tell you about what you’re doing to yourself?

Now having been in a couple of these situations myself in the past, the solution, I think, begins with loving yourself more. Not in the cliché, bubble-bath-and-affirmations way, no. But in a more grounded way. The kind where you know your values. Where you are clear on what matters to you. Where you respect your own emotional needs enough to voice them out without trembling.

Wanting out loud means saying (to yourself, and to everyone around you) that “this matters to me.” It means being honest about what you need even if your voice shakes. It means being assertive enough to walk away from anything that consistently makes you feel like you’re giving up too much of yourself just to hold on to someone who isn’t meeting you halfway.

That’s where letting go comes in.

Letting go is not weakness. It is not failure. It is not giving up on love. It is choosing not to give up on yourself. Giving up pieces of yourself in a bid to keep someone who won’t even make an effort is not romantic. It’s not noble. It’s not loyalty. It’s self-betrayal.

And the truth is, people who make you feel like you’re asking for too much when you’re only asking for basic care or things that really matter to you, are not worth shrinking for. They are not worth negotiating your standards for. And they are certainly not worth losing yourself over.

There are so many people in this world. So many good ones. So many capable of loving deeply and intentionally and generously. This might be the one place where the “illusion of options” actually works in our favor, because it reminds us that no single person is our only chance at being loved well.

We have to let go of things that drain us.

One of my favorite quotes is by Paulo Coelho. It says that if you’re brave enough to say one goodbye, life will reward you with a new hello.

And I believe that. It’s one of the things I repeatedly tell myself whenever I’m in a situation where I’m struggling to let go of something I know I should. Not every goodbye is painless. In fact, most goodbyes are painful. But every goodbye that protects your peace makes room for something that honors it.

Wanting out loud is not about being demanding, it’s about being honest.
It’s about refusing to shrink so someone else can feel comfortable.
It’s about choosing yourself as fiercely as you’ve been choosing them.

You deserve to be met in the middle.
You deserve effort.
You deserve love that does not require you to become smaller to keep it.

So want boldly.
Want unapologetically.
Want out loud.
And if someone cannot rise to meet you there, let them go.
Because the right love will never ask you to disappear in order to stay.

And just last night, I decided I had a lot more to say on this matter so here goes.

There’s a scene that appears in almost every love story ever written.

The protagonist is moving through their life — dating someone who’s almost right, or recovering from someone who was completely wrong — and then, somewhere around the middle of the book, they meet the person. The one the whole story was building toward. And everything that came before — every almost, every heartbreak, every wrong turn — suddenly gets reframed as prologue.

It’s a satisfying structure. Clean. Purposeful.
But here’s the question nobody asks: what happened to the people in the chapters before?

The Mathematics of Being Someone’s “Before”

Think about the last great love story you know — real or fictional. The couple who found each other after years of searching. The friends who finally admitted what everyone else already knew. The two people who met at exactly the right time.

Now think about everyone who came before.

The person they dated for two years in their mid-twenties who taught them what a healthy argument looked like. The situationship that dragged on just long enough for them to get clear on what they actually needed. The first love that cracked them open so something else could eventually get in.

Those people had full lives. Full feelings. Full stories of their own. And yet, in the narrative of someone else’s love life, they exist mostly as context. Character development for the protagonist. A necessary detour on the way to the destination.

The strange, quietly devastating truth is this: at some point, in someone’s story, you were that person. The chapter they learned from. The relationship that prepared them for the next one. The almost.

We’re All Convinced We’re The Protagonist

Every single person alive is the main character of their own life. This isn’t arrogance; it’s just how consciousness works. You experience the world from the inside of your own perspective, always. You are the one constant in every scene of your life. Of course the story feels like it’s about you.

But the moment you step into someone else’s story — as a friend, a lover, a stranger on a bus who said something they never forgot — you become a supporting character. And you’ll never fully know what role you played.

The person you dated for eight months in 2019 might have told their therapist about you for years. Or they might have forgotten your last name by 2021. You have no way of knowing. In your story, that relationship is a chapter with weight and meaning. In theirs, it might be a footnote. Or vice versa.

This asymmetry is one of the loneliest and most fascinating things about being human.

The Chapter That Changed Everything (Just Not For You)

One of my friends once described their first serious relationship as “the one that taught me everything I needed to know, just in time to use it with someone else.” They said it without bitterness. Almost with gratitude.

But I kept thinking about the other person in that relationship. The one who did the teaching. Who showed up fully, loved honestly, and then watched someone walk away carrying all the lessons they’d helped them learn — straight into someone else’s arms.

There’s a specific kind of grief that comes with being someone’s growth chapter. It doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it shows up years later, when you see an old photo or hear a song, and you realize: I helped build the person who loves someone else now. I was the rehearsal for a show I never got to see open.

But Here’s What The Metaphor Gets Wrong

Stories have protagonists because stories need structure. One perspective, one arc, one resolution. It’s a technical requirement of the form, not a reflection of reality.

Real life doesn’t have a protagonist.

Or rather, everyone is one. Simultaneously. All the time. The person you think of as a minor character in your story — the one who appeared briefly, left an impression, and then exited — is living a full, sprawling, complicated narrative of their own in which you are the one who came and went.

This means that being someone’s “chapter three” doesn’t make you less than (using chapter three here to represent any story/chapter that isn’t the final one). It makes you part of the extraordinary, invisible web of influence that connects human lives to each other in ways we rarely get to trace.

You changed people. Without knowing it. Without meaning to. Without being there to see the effect.
It almost sounds like a consolation prize but I think that’s actually remarkable.

A Different Way to Read Your Own Story

What if the goal was never to be the main character in the greatest possible number of stories?

What if it was simply to be fully present in the chapters you’re actually in — yours and other people’s — without always needing to know how the story ends, or what role you played, or whether you were the love interest or the lesson?

Sometimes we’re going to be the co-main character, and sometimes we’re going to be a side or minor character. But either way, we’re in that life for a purpose. Sometimes that purpose isn’t to be in their final chapter but to play a role, however small, in how they reach their final chapter, and I think that’s also pretty important.

Most of us will never know the full reach of our effect on other people. The conversation that shifted something. The relationship that rewired someone’s understanding of what love could look like. The brief, bright chapter that a person carried with them long after they stopped carrying your name.

We move through each other’s lives like this — leaving marks we can’t see, being shaped by people who’ve already moved on, haunting chapters we never knew we were part of.

There’s something quietly beautiful about that. And something worth grieving, too.

The best novels, if you look closely, aren’t really about the main character at all. They’re about everyone the main character touched, and how in touching them, they were touched in return.

Maybe life works the same way.

What I did not tell you is that she texted Nii from the car park before she had even left the building.

Just three words: Are you around? Casual. The text of a woman who already knew the answer, because she had been keeping that answer warm, at a low and steady temperature, for about two and a half years.

Nii replied in forty-five seconds. He always replied in forty-five seconds. This is relevant.

Now. Before you say anything, Ama would like you to know that it is not what it looks like. And she has a whole explanation. And the explanation, honestly, is not without merit. But we will get to that.

Nii had been Ama’s friend since university. This is the official version, and it is technically true. They had met in a group project in second year, bonded over mutual disdain for a particular lecturer who spoke exclusively in PowerPoint slides, and had been close ever since. He was the friend she called when something happened. The one who remembered how she took her tea. The one whose name appeared so frequently in her phone that her younger sister once asked, with the directness that only younger siblings deploy, “but what exactly is Nii?”

“A friend,” Ama had said.

Her sister had looked at her the way you look at someone who has just said something that is not technically a lie but is doing a lot of work to avoid being the truth.

The truth — which Ama knew, had always known — was that Nii had feelings. It had never been subtle. He had feelings. She knew he had feelings. He knew that she knew. She appreciated the feelings in the way you appreciate a very good insurance policy — glad it exists, hoping you never have to use it, quietly relieved it’s there.

The man had driven to Tema at midnight when she couldn’t get a ride home one night and didn’t even make it a big deal, said he was just “passing by.” Nobody is ever just “passing by” Tema at midnight, and especially not Nii who lives at Kwabenya.

She knew all of this. And she had made a decision: she would not act on it, would not lead him on, would keep things exactly where they were. Just friends. Just there, in the background, the way a good coat hanging by the door is there. You are not wearing it. You are simply glad it exists.

This is the version Ama told herself. She had not done anything wrong, because she had not done anything. No deception. No late nights that became something else. No promises she didn’t intend to keep. She had simply chosen not to close a door she was also not walking through. That was all. That was the whole of it.

The Open Door

The reason that door stayed open was not Nii. It was Kofi. Or rather, it was every man Kofi represented, which is to say every man who had arrived fully, made her feel chosen, and then begun, slowly, to hedge. Every man who had been present and then less present. Every man who had said things that sounded like promises and turned out to be ✨a man✨.

Ama had loved people with her whole self before. She knew what that cost. So she had made an adjustment — a small, quiet, completely rational one. She would be with Kofi, yes. She would be present, yes. But she would not clear the table entirely. She would not bet everything on a man in a city where betting everything on a man is how you end up texting your friends at 1am asking what “noted” means as a reply to a heartfelt message.

Nii was the insurance policy. The knowledge, kept warm in the background, that she would not be starting from zero when Kofi did what Accra men eventually do.

And when Kofi did what Accra men eventually do, Ama was not destroyed. She was composed. She was, by her own assessment, fine. Smart, even. Ahead of the situation. She felt vindicated.

She had not led him on. She had simply left the light on. Just in case. For six years. To her, the distinction was everything.

The friend zone

Let’s talk about the friend zone, because the friend zone as it is typically discussed is a myth. The real friend zone — the one that actually operates in Accra — is not a place where feelings go to die. It is a waiting room. And it is full.

There is, in almost every woman’s life, a Nii. A man who has been thoroughly briefed on every relationship she has ever had, who has listened to hours of analysis about other men, who has shown up with food during difficult moments and asked for nothing in return. And the reason he asks for nothing in return is not because he has no feelings. It is because he has correctly assessed that asking would cost him the access, and the access, at this point, is the only thing he has.

This is its own quiet tragedy. But we are not here to feel sorry for Nii — not yet. We are here to understand Ama. Because Ama is the more interesting case. Ama knows exactly what she is doing. Or at least she thinks she does.

The real victim

Here is what happens when you have spent months being wronged by someone: you build a very high opinion of your own morality. It is understandable. It is even deserved, partially. But it can make you blind to the ways in which you are, quietly, doing your own version of the thing.

Ama was not Kofi. She knew that much. But Nii had also been her friend for six years. In those six years, he had watched three men pass through her life, each one getting the full version of her attention, each one eventually proving her right about men in ways that brought her back to his couch, his tea, his patient and very careful not-quite-asking. He had shown up without complaint. He had not pushed.

He was a person who had arranged a significant portion of his emotional life around a woman who thought of him, lovingly, as a contingency plan.

He had already made the tea when she arrived. Of course he had. He put on a show she had mentioned once three months ago that she wanted to watch, and said nothing about Kofi until she brought it up herself.

She told him everything — the wedding, Abena from the office, Kwame’s permanent spiritual departure to get water, all of it. He listened the way he always listened: fully, without interrupting, in a way that Kofi had never quite managed even on his best days.

But human as he is, he could not help noticing that the thing she was describing had cleared a space. He did not say this. He said: “You deserved better than that.”

She said: “I know.”

There was a pause. The kind of pause that had existed between them for six years — familiar, weighted, always carefully stepped around.

He looked at her in a way that was one degree too honest, and before he could say anything, she said: “Nii. Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“I know. I’m saying don’t anyway.”

A beat. Then, almost reflexively: “I’m just not ready right now.”

The words came out before she fully processed them. She heard them the way you sometimes hear yourself speak from a slight distance, as though your own voice has stepped back to let you listen properly. I’m not ready. The exact three words she had spent nine months resenting Kofi for. In the exact patient, reasonable tone.

She looked at Nii. Nii looked at her.

“Did I just—”

“Yes,” said Nii.

“That’s not the same thing.”

“Ama.”

“It’s genuinely not the same—”

“Ama.”

She picked up her tea. She put it down. Considered moving countries.

The good person problem

Not doing anything is still a decision. This is the thing Ama lay in bed, finally realizing, at midnight.

She had not lied to Nii. She had not made him promises. She had simply kept him available. Kept the door open at the back of the house where nobody could see it, and told herself it didn’t count because she never walked through it. This, she was now realizing, was its own thing. Not Kofi’s thing — not as loud, not as dramatic, not the kind that causes a scene at a wedding. But its own thing. The polite, well-behaved, self-aware version of not choosing someone. The version that gets to feel like the moral one while still doing the damage.

The reason she kept the light on was fear. The fear of being the one who chose first and got nothing back. The fear of clearing the table entirely and having nothing left when the person you cleared it for decided they weren’t hungry after all. She had seen that happen too many times — to herself, to her friends, to women in this city who had given everything and been left standing in car parks, texting someone else, composing themselves.

So she had kept Nii. Not because she was a terrible person. She doesn’t think she’s a terrible person. But as a reminder that she had somewhere to land. And she had told herself this was self-preservation, which it was. She had told herself it was different from what Kofi did, which it was, partially. What she had not told herself — what she was only now beginning to realize — was that Nii had not agreed to be the somewhere she landed. He had just loved her long enough that she’d stopped noticing she was using it.

She had arrived at Kofi already pre-damaged. Already pre-defended. Already in possession of a Nii, just in case, because somewhere along the way she had decided that loving someone without a safety net was a risk she was no longer willing to take.

Kofi, with his mental spreadsheet and his gym lies, was both the symptom and the confirmation. Every time he was inconsistent, she moved a little more of herself over to the “just in case” column. By the wedding, she was barely in the Kofi column at all. She was just waiting for permission to leave.

She left Nii’s place at eleven. Not because anything had happened — nothing had happened. But because something almost had, and she needed air, and she needed to think, and she was starting to understand that the thinking she needed to do was not about Kofi or Nii but about herself, which is the most inconvenient kind of thinking.

She called Akosua in the morning. Akosua, who had watched this situation develop for eighteen months and kept her mouth shut because Ama had a particular look she got when she did not want to hear something.

“So,” said Akosua, by way of greeting.

“I told him I wasn’t ready.”

A pause. “You told Nii. Patient, consistent, drove-to-Tema-at-midnight Nii. That you weren’t ready.”

“It came out.”

“Ama.”

“I know.”

“You genuinely know. That’s the thing with you — you always know.”

“I know.”

“So what are you doing?”

Ama was quiet for a long moment. Outside, Accra moved past her window — the lights, the roadside sellers still out, the city doing its usual thing of being fully awake at an hour when it should be sleeping.

“Protecting myself,” she said. It came out smaller than she meant it to.

Akosua’s voice shifted, went a little softer. “From Nii? That man has not missed a single one of your birthdays in six years. He has never, not once, given you a reason—”

“It’s not about Nii.”

“I know it’s not about Nii.”

Silence. The comfortable kind, the kind that means someone understands you.

“I’m tired, Akosua.”

“I know.”

“I’m genuinely tired of being smart about it. I’m tired of having a plan.”

“Then stop,” Akosua said. Simply. As if it were that simple.

Ama sat with that. Then she called Nii. Not to say anything final — she wasn’t ready for final, and she was allowed to not be ready, just not forever. She called to say she was sorry for the “don’t.” That she needed a little time. That the tea, as always, had been perfect.

He said he wasn’t going anywhere.

She knew. She had always known.

What the backup costs the person keeping it

We talk a lot about what it costs the Nii in this situation — and it costs him plenty, six years of it, and that is not nothing. But the backup costs Ama something too, and it is worth naming.

It costs her the ability to be fully anywhere. When you are always keeping a door open at the back, you cannot fully walk through the one in front. Kofi got a version of Ama that had already pre-managed her own feelings, already half-prepared for the exit, already made peace with the loss before it happened. Which meant that whatever they had was never allowed to be the full thing. She had protected herself so thoroughly from being hurt that she had also protected herself from being in it completely, the way being in something actually requires.

The Accra dating landscape — the Kofis and the 9pm gyms and the weddings where everyone ends up at the same table — has produced a generation of people who are deeply capable of love and absolutely terrified to prove it. Who can be warm and present and wonderful and still, at the back of everything, have a door open that the other person doesn’t know about.

We keep backups because we are scared. Not because we are bad people. Not because we are Kofi. Just because we have been in this city long enough to know how the story usually goes, and we have quietly, sensibly, decided that we would like to be prepared for it this time.

And the tragedy is not that it doesn’t work. The tragedy is that it works just well enough to keep doing. Just enough warmth. Just enough safety. Just enough to never have to find out what the real thing feels like.

Ama is not Kofi. But she is not as far from him as she thought she was, standing in that car park, typing three words to a man she had kept on hold for six years. She was just running a cleaner, quieter, more self-aware version of the same fear that had Kofi making a mental spreadsheet with two columns.

Different spreadsheet. Same fear.

And the only thing that fixes it — for Ama, for Kofi, for all of us maintaining our various doors and backup plans and carefully managed feelings — is the thing that nobody in this city wants to be the first to do:

Close the back door.
Stand at the front one.
Knock.

And find out what happens when you stop being prepared for it to go wrong.

If you have a Nii in your life — someone warm, someone steady, someone you’d text if things went sideways — this isn’t an accusation. It’s just one question: does he know that’s the role?

They met at a friend’s birthday at that one restaurant in Osu that has become known as the unofficial birthday location. She was in the yellow dress everyone complimented, he was the one who parked the Benz in a way that was technically blocking someone but confidently enough that nobody said anything. They danced. They exchanged numbers. He texted first. She waited thirty-seven minutes to reply because she is not an idiot.

By month two, they were, in the language of Accra, together. Not officially. Nobody said anything official. But she was in his phone as “Ama ❤️”, pinned to the top of his chats, and they had started doing “awoshia” every weekend, which in this city is basically an engagement.

Ama knew something was off when Kofi started going to the gym at 9pm. Not because exercise is suspicious, but because the gym he claimed to attend closed at 8:30. She didn’t say anything. She simply began paying attention in the way that Accra women are trained from birth to pay attention: quietly, methodically, with a smile on her face and a growing spreadsheet in her head.

What she did not know was that Kofi also had a spreadsheet. His was less emotional and more logistical. It had two columns. One said “Ama” and one said “Abena from the office.” It was not a written spreadsheet. It lived in his head, which is somehow worse.

Here is the thing about dating in Accra: commitment is treated like a limited resource that must be rationed carefully, distributed only when absolutely necessary, and preferably after several months of completely free benefits.

The average Accra man will spend six months building something real with you and then act shocked — genuinely confused — when you suggest that what you have built together might deserve a name. “Why are you trying to rush things?” he will say, from inside the thing he has been rushing since month one.

This is not to say the women are completely innocent. Accra dating is an equal opportunity dysfunction. It does not discriminate.

The commitment problem

Ask a man in Accra why he won’t commit and he will give you one of three answers: he is “focusing on himself right now,” he is “not where he wants to be yet financially,” or — the most spiritually ambitious one — he is “still healing.” From what, you will never find out. The healing is perpetual.

The irony is that these same men are extremely committed in practice. They will show up consistently. They will meet your friends. They will send good morning texts with the devotion of a man in a relationship. They are performing commitment without agreeing to any of its terms and conditions.

The situation came to a head at Efua’s wedding.

Kofi and Ama arrived together, looking — and there is no other word for this — stunning. She had a dress that made three married men momentarily forget their vows. He had a suit that suggested wealth without screaming it. They took photos at the entrance. Someone who didn’t know them personally assumed they were also engaged.

What nobody at the wedding knew was that Abena from the office was also there. As a guest. On the groom’s side. Kofi saw her from across the room at the exact moment Ama went to greet the bride. His face did something that faces should not do in public.
Abena, to her credit, also froze. Because she too had someone with her. A man named Kwame who was, as it turned out, Kofi’s cousin. Second cousin. But still.

They all ended up at the same table. These are exactly the types of situations that have led to many “Accra is way too small” tweets.

Cheating in Accra is not a moral failing. It is, based on available evidence, a hobby. A passion project. Something people pursue with the kind of energy and organization that they could, theoretically, apply to their actual careers.

People have second phones. They have code names. They have friends who are complicit. They have alibis that have been workshopped and refined over multiple relationships. There are men in this city who have built entire parallel lives. And the most baffling part? The secrecy is not always really about guilt. It’s more about convenience.

Nobody wants to have the honest conversation, “I am not ready to be only with you,” because that conversation has consequences. It requires accountability. It might end things. And ending things means starting over, which takes effort, and effort is not really what we’re doing here.

So instead, everyone just... maintains. Multiple situations, simultaneously, with project management skills I could only ever dream of.

Dinner was served. There were eight people at the table and approximately four ongoing deceptions between them, though nobody had done a full audit yet.

It was Abena who created the moment, and she did it with the precision of someone who had six glasses of wine and no working awareness of the room. She was describing, to the table at large, a situationship that had been stressing her out. The man, she said, kept showing up. Kept being present. Kept doing everything right, technically, but refused to say what anything was. “You know?” she said. “Like, what are we?”

The table made sympathetic sounds. Kwame looked at his phone. Kofi developed a sudden, intense interest in a piece of plantain.

Ama, who had by this point put two and two together, spent it being perfectly pleasant in the specific way that means she is planning something. We cannot say exactly how Ama put the twos together, just that Accra women ALWAYS find out. Combine that phone call she overhead last week when Kofi thought she was asleep with her intuition that has never failed her and the gossip Akosua from her friend group had shared with her about some Kofi that was stressing her friend Abena out and… there you have it.

Ama let the sympathy sounds finish. Then she turned to Kofi and in a deceitfully sweet voice, said: “So. How’s the gym?”

The table did not go quiet all at once. It went quiet in the way that a room does when something has been said that everyone immediately understands the weight of, but nobody is willing to be the first to acknowledge. One by one, the conversations just... stopped.

Kofi opened his mouth. The sentence that came out was not a sentence. It was the sound of a man discovering, in real time, that there is no correct answer to such a question.

Abena suddenly developed an interest in her jollof. Kwame stood up, said he was getting more water, and went to get more water that he did not need and has not come back from, spiritually speaking, to this day.

Ama finished her wine. Set the glass down. Picked up her purse. She did not raise her voice. She did not cry. She said “congratulations” in the direction of the bride’s table and left.

Kofi stayed. He even had dessert.

So where does that leave us?

I’d like to say we are all “fine.”

I want to mean that sincerely. And I guess in a way, I do, because “fine” is exactly what Accra has perfected. We are fine the way Ama was fine at that table: composed, present, already decided. We have built an entire emotional culture around performing fine, and we are extremely good at it, and it is costing us things we cannot really name yet.

Here is what I think is actually happening: somewhere along the way, this city decided that the person who cares more automatically loses. That vulnerability is naivety. That keeping your options open is sophistication. And we absorbed this so completely that it no longer feels like a choice. It feels… natural? It just feels like being smart about things.

So we do not commit. Not because we have not found the right person, but because committing means showing your cards, and showing your cards means losing leverage, and losing leverage means — what, exactly? That someone will know you wanted them? That you might have to say “I choose you” out loud, with your whole chest, to a person who might not say it back?

Yes. That. That exact thing. And we have decided, collectively, that the risk is not worth it. Better to be the one who cares less. Better to maintain. Better to be Kofi, with his mental spreadsheet and his 9pm gym sessions, than to be the person who said what they meant and got left anyway.

The problem is that the strategy doesn’t work. The people playing it cool are not protected. They are just alone in a more complicated way. Ama walked out of that wedding having lost Kofi, but she also walked out having never really had him, which is a different and equally painful kind of loss, and one she had been absorbing in small amounts for months before she finally put the glass down.

We are not broken. But we are not fine either. We are somewhere in between — a city full of people who are extremely good at proximity and terrified of closeness, performing connection with the fluency of people who grew up watching connections fall apart.

The fix is not complicated. It is simply the thing nobody wants to do: say the true thing, at the right moment, to the right person, before it is too late and the DJ is playing something devastating and Kwame has gone to get water and you are sitting alone at a wedding table with your dessert and no real defense for any of it.

Say the thing. Put down the spreadsheet. Let someone know you.

Accra will survive it. You might even like what comes next.

By the way, Ama was not perfect. Ama had a “just a friend” of her own — a guy called Nii who texted her things that were not what friends text each other. And in this moment, she was proud of herself for not leaving all her eggs in Kofi’s basket. But that’s a story for a different day.

2019.

Okay so picture this. The year is 2019. If you were a young person in Ghana (or more specifically, Gey Hey) around 2019, you know exactly what I’m talking about. There’s this whole thing going on where customized jerseys are just everywhere. Like every young person suddenly wants one. Not even necessarily because they watch football, it was more of a fashion moment, a culture thing. You just wanted a jersey that looked cool and said something about you. Your name on the back, your favorite number, your team colors. My friends and I were absolutely not missing out on this.

The thing is though, my friends weren’t football people. They just wanted something that looked good and felt unique. I wasn’t opposed to that, because at the time, I was supporting another team (we’ll come to that soon) and their jerseys were… uhhh, let’s just say I was okay with us not going with that one. So we did what made sense: we went looking for the prettiest jersey we could find.

Chelsea? Too common. Man United? Half of Ghana already has one. Liverpool? Meh. Arsenal? Please. (It’s so funny how I was an Arsenal hater even before I became involved with the Prem. My boyfriend at the time was an Arsenal fan and one of my favorite hobbies was teasing him about his team and tbh they made it really easy for me).

Anyway, we went through option after option and then we found it. The 2019/20 Tottenham Hotspur away kit.

Oh my God this jersey. Deep navy, almost like a midnight blue. So clean. So different from everything else. While everybody else was picking the same five clubs with the same loud kits, this one just stood out. We looked at each other and that was it. Decision made.

The funny thing is, I was the only one in my friend group who actually started following the team after. For them it was just a jersey. For me it became a whole life path. Which, honestly, feels very on brand.

I was a Messi fan, not a Barcelona fan.

Now before Spurs, I was a Barcelona girl. And I say that with a small asterisk because really, I was a Messi girl. Like if Messi had been playing for a beach volleyball team I probably would have been watching beach volleyball. The man was just genuinely other-worldly. His left foot alone should have had its own Wikipedia page (yeah, okay, I’ll leave some for his wife, my bad).

So for years, Barca and Messi were basically the same thing to me.

But here’s the thing, I never had an English club. And at some point if you love football, the Premier League just calls to you. It’s the best league in the world ( I will not be accepting any contrary opinions, this is not a democracy). The drama, the pace, the chaos, the way any team can beat any team on any given weekend. I HAD to be involved.

Also, there was something so fun about being Ghanaian and not supporting the Big Four. You know how it is — Chelsea, Man United, Liverpool, Arsenal *eye roll* That’s basically the full list for most people here. Being a Spurs fan just felt different. Like I’d found something that was actually mine.

So in 2019, when I had the jersey and I had no English club and I was ready, I just decided. Tottenham. Let’s go; a decision that would later cause me great pain and joy in equal amounts.

also, 2019 Spurs were doing things.

Now bear in mind that I was in high school in 2019. Boarding school. So for most of the academic year, from January to May, I was away and football was something I caught in fragments. Highlights on visiting weekends. News from friends. Phone calls from home. I wasn’t sitting in front of a TV watching full matches. I was living on scraps, catching up when I could.

But even through the scraps, 2019 Spurs were everywhere. You couldn’t miss them.

Because this was the Tottenham that went to the Champions League semi-finals. Oh that beautiful night in Amsterdam. Against Ajax — a young, terrifying Dutch side that had already knocked out Real Madrid and Juventus like it was nothing.

(Note, I got to watch this match live because it happened on the very day we vacated. May 8th 2019. It felt like the best gift after surviving 5 months in the place that shall not be named)

The first leg was in London, ended 1-0 to Ajax. Going into the second leg, Kane was injured. We were already behind. And then at half time we were 3-0 down on aggregate. Three. Nil. With no Kane. Everyone had already written the obituary, lit the candles, gone home.

And then Lucas Moura just decided to have the greatest, most beautiful 40 minutes of his life. Scored in the 55th minute. Then the 59th. And then in the 96th — ninety-sixth — Dele Alli slips a little pass through, Moura gets one touch, and puts it in. Hat-trick. Away goals. Champions League final. First time in Tottenham’s history.

Poch was on his knees on the pitch crying. Son was crying. JOANA was crying. Hearts were stopped. Grown men were collapsing. The fans were in complete chaos. I was sitting there thinking — wait. This team is insane.

That was the specific moment this Spurs fan was born.
(We lost the final 2-0 to Liverpool and we shall never talk about this. Moving on.)

Harry Kane.

I need a whole section for this man and I don’t apologize for that. I was absolutely obsessed with Harry Kane.

Harry Kane is genuinely one of the best strikers of this generation and I will not be accepting any other view. Not just a goal scorer — though the goals were something — but a proper, complete footballer. He could hold the ball up, bring others into play, score from 30 yards or tap in from two, convert penalties in the 90th minute... Watching him felt like watching someone who understood football at a different level. Three Premier League Golden Boots. He broke Jimmy Greaves’ all-time Spurs scoring record in 2023 and became the greatest scorer in the club’s history. He gave this club everything.

And he never won a single trophy with us. Which is genuinely one of the saddest things in football if you think about it too long so I avoid doing that.

He left for Bayern Munich in 2023 and I was sad for days. Genuinely sad. He was so Spurs to me. Still is. I hope he’s happy at Bayern. He deserved trophies. I just wish we’d been the ones to give him one.

Messi left.

Messi left Barcelona in August 2021. After twenty years. For free. Because the club was falling apart financially and couldn’t keep him. It was sad.

And I expected to feel more than I did. But honestly? I moved on pretty quickly. Which told me everything I needed to know. My investment in Barca was always really about Messi, and once he was gone there wasn’t much left for me there.

By 2021 I was already so deep in Spurs anyway. I was checking results on days I had no business being emotionally invested. I had opinions about squad rotation. I was genuinely annoyed about specific substitutions in matches that had zero impact on my life. And if you’re annoyed about substitutions, it’s over… you’re a proper fan. You don’t come back from that.

I didn’t even officially “switch.” Spurs just slowly took over, and one day I looked up and Barcelona was just a team I used to know. Like a childhood friend you drifted from.

we won a trophy.

21st May 2025. A day forever engraved in my mind.
Tottenham vs Manchester United. Europa League Final in Bilbao.

I need you to feel the weight of this. Tottenham had not won a single trophy since 2008. Seventeen years. Pochettino built arguably the best modern Spurs squad and couldn’t do it. Mourinho couldn’t. Conte couldn’t. Every season there was hope and then there was the very specific, very Tottenham way of watching it not quite happen.

Then Ange Postecoglou arrived. In one of his first press interviews, he delivered arguably the coldest line in football history. “I always win things in my second year”.

Back to that night in Bilbao. Brennan Johnson scored and it went in the way goals sometimes do — slightly scrappy, slightly deflected, completely who cares because it’s in. Spurs held on. Van de Ven made a clearance off the line at some point that I’m pretty sure took a year off my life. Vicario made saves late on. The whistle blew.

We won.

Tottenham won a trophy. An actual trophy. The first in SEVENTEEN years. Son Heung-min, who had been at this club for years, through all of it, who deserved this so badly , was on the ground. Maddison was conducting the fans like he was born for the moment. Ange looked completely calm. He’d told us. He literally told us.

I WAS SCREAMING. (side note, we should’ve gotten a season 3 Ange, we deserved that. He deserved that.)

I cried real tears.

And a bit unrelated, I graduated just the next month. In the same month that Tottenham ended seventeen years of waiting, I finished my degree. Two of the biggest things happening back to back. I keep saying that 2025 was just my year, and I meant it in every sense.

I’ll be telling that story for the rest of my life.

one point above relegation. Arsenal top of the league.

Yeah.

I genuinely cannot even watch the matches this season. I have tried. I cannot do it. It has never — in the seven years I’ve been supporting this club — been this bad. One point above the relegation zone. The same club that was lifting a European trophy less than a year ago. Football is genuinely cruel and Spurs are giving us the full experience right now.

Oh, and as if that isn’t bad enough, Arsenal are top of the league. Practically gift-wrapping the title for themselves. Just sitting up there comfortably while we’re down here fighting for our Premier League lives. The football gods really looked at Spurs fans and thought — you know what, let me really go for it this year.

I follow the scores from a distance. I check the result after it’s done. I’ve even stopped playing the FPL. I cannot put myself through 90 minutes of this in real time, I’m being very honest with you. It’s heartbreaking. It genuinely is.

But you know what? it has never crossed my mind to leave (okay maybe when Harry Kane left). People say “just support someone else” like that’s a real thing you can do. Like you can just reassign the feeling to a better-performing club. You can’t. That’s not how this works.

These players are my family. Dysfunctional, chaotic, currently scaring the life out of me, but mine. And you don’t leave family because things are hard. You don’t start over because it’s painful. You stay, and you hope, and you believe, even when believing feels a bit delusional, because what’s the alternative?

There is no alternative. Not for me.

(I genuinely hope we’re not relegated though. People think the worst thing would be us getting relegated, but knowing my team? I fear we might not make it out of the championship after a season. Not because we’re bad tbh, but because it’s just the Spursy thing to do)

Tottenham Hotspur till they kill me though🤍

PS: Tani’s post inspired me to write this.

When the food arrived, I flipped the package over and read, in a small handwriting: OT, no tomatoes.

I hadn’t asked. I hadn’t reminded her. I hadn’t even thought about it when I was ordering. She just knew. She knew, and she acted on the knowing without making a thing of it.

I stood in my room holding that sandwich and felt something I’ve been trying to name ever since. It wasn’t gratitude exactly, though I was grateful. It wasn’t surprise, though I was a little surprised. It was something more foundational than both of those things.

It was the feeling of being truly known.

I’ve been thinking about what it actually means to love someone, and I keep coming back to this: love, at its most practical, is accumulated attention. It is the slow, patient act of noticing someone — what they reach for, what they avoid, what makes their face change — and filing it away, not as data, but as care.

The no tomatoes was not a small thing. It was the evidence of dozens of small observations made over years: the face I make when a tomato surprise ruins a good bite, the way I pick them out silently rather than complain, the fact that I hate the sight of them even more than the taste. She had collected all of this without being asked to. And then, when the moment came, she used it.

That is love in action. Unannounced. Unremarkable to her, perhaps. But everything to me.

We talk about love in grand terms. We talk about it as a feeling, as a decision, as something you fall into or choose or work at. And all of that is true. But I think we undervalue its most mundane expression: the willingness to hold someone’s preferences in your mind as if they were your own.

There’s a kind of loneliness only truly known by people who have experienced it more than once — the loneliness of being present in someone’s life and still feeling unseen. Of having to explain yourself, over and over, to people who care about you but haven’t been paying that particular kind of attention. Of getting tomatoes anyway.

And then there is its opposite: the deep, almost cellular relief of being with someone who already knows. You don’t have to preface. You don’t have to remind. They’ve been taking notes, not because you asked them to, but because you matter enough to remember.

I think this is what we’re really looking for when we say we want to be loved. Not the declaration. Not the gesture. Not even the consistency, though all of these are absolutely necessary too. We want to encounter evidence — small, specific, irrefutable evidence — that someone has been paying attention. That they have built, inside themselves, a version of you that is detailed and accurate and tenderly maintained.

To be loved is to be known. Not in the abstract. Not known of, not observed from a safe distance. But known in the sandwich order. Known in the thing you never had to say out loud.

It lives in the small things. The way they don’t leave your side at a party, not because they have to, but because they know. The way they write you a poem or letter when you need proof that you are loved. The way they send you a book on a random day because you mentioned it was on your TBR. The way chocolate cake arrives on a bad week without you saying it was a bad week. The way they already know before you’ve found the words, because you hate asking, and they hate making you have to.

The way they take care of it quietly, so you never have to feel like a burden for needing it.

I’ve been luckier than I sometimes remember. I have a handful of people in my life who know me like this. It’s the kind of knowing that doesn’t require maintenance or reminding, that just quietly accumulates over time until it becomes fluency. They speak me. I speak them. We don’t always have the words for what we mean to each other, but we have the no tomatoes.

And I think that’s the invitation in all of this — not just to receive that kind of love, but to practice it. To pay the kind of attention that remembers. To notice what someone never says but always means. To put it on the order quietly.

To love someone well is to become a student of them. The best ones don’t just study to perform. They study because they can’t imagine not knowing.

The food was good. The sandwich was better without the tomatoes :)

I came across a thread where a woman proudly announced that she — and apparently every woman in her bloodline — had never been sexually assaulted. She then went on to explain why, concluding with this gem: “victims also bear some responsibility in certain situations.” This was said in response to an alleged rape victim sharing her story.

Victim blaming? In big 2026? As a woman? Are we serious???

What fascinates me most about women like this isn’t even the cruelty of the statement; it’s the illusion behind it. The belief that if you behave correctly enough, modestly enough, obediently enough, patriarchy will spare you.

There is this unspoken bargain some women think they’ve struck with sexism: I will not challenge you, and in return, you will not harm me. Dress “properly.” Speak softly. Don’t provoke men. Don’t be too visible. Don’t be too free. Don’t be too much. Follow the rules, and you’ll be safe.

Except, that bargain does not exist. Patriarchy has never protected women.

Women who did everything “right” have still been harassed, assaulted, dismissed, underpaid, silenced, and blamed. The system does not pause to evaluate your morality before it harms you. It simply reminds you that you are a woman in a world built to prioritize men. The fact that something hasn’t happened to you yet is not proof of moral superiority. It is luck. Temporary luck.

Sexism is not selective. It will eventually reach your sister, your daughter, your friend, your colleague…because the oppression is structural, not personal. You cannot individually behave your way out of a collective problem.

And nowhere is this delusion more dangerous than in conversations about sexual violence.

Let’s be painfully clear: the only cause of rape is rapists.
Not clothing.
Not alcohol.
Not friendliness.
Not being out late.
Not trust.
Not poor judgment.
Not existing in public.

Rapists rape because they choose to rape.

Every time we tell women to dress differently, walk differently, live differently, we are not preventing violence; we are redistributing responsibility. We are just teaching women to shrink their lives while leaving perpetrators untouched.

We have spent generations teaching women how not to be raped instead of teaching men not to rape. Entire rulebooks exist for potential victims, and almost none for potential offenders. Think about how absurd that is.

Victim-blaming isn’t just cruel; it’s logically bankrupt. If modesty prevented assault, modest women would never be assaulted. If caution prevented violence, cautious women would never experience it. Reality disproves these myths every single day.

What victim-blaming actually does is comforting — not for women, but for observers. Because if violence only happens to women who made “bad choices,” then everyone else gets to believe they are safe. It creates the illusion of control in a world where misogyny refuses to follow rules.

But misogyny does not care whether you distance yourself from feminism. It does not care whether you say, “I’m not like other women.” It does not care how respectable you think you are.

The system does not reward your loyalty. It simply waits its turn.

And that is why I find it genuinely baffling when I come across women who claim they’re not feminists. Like, what planet are you living on? Our society is steeped in sexism from the second we’re born. From the way girls are praised for being “polite” instead of ambitious, to the way women are blamed for literally everything that goes wrong, it’s insane. The conditioning starts early and never really stops.

Yet somehow, some women have convinced themselves feminism isn’t for them.

Let me spell it out: feminism isn’t a political hobby. It’s survival. It’s demanding that women get to exist, thrive, and make mistakes without being punished for challenging a system designed to control them. It’s insisting that your body, your choices, your career, your voice, your ambitions — yes, all of it — belongs to you, not to society, not to men, not to anyone telling you how to behave.

If we actually sit down and look at it, we are nowhere near equality. Yes, progress has been made. Yes, there are opportunities women didn’t have before. But let’s not kid ourselves. We are far from where we need to be, and progress moving at a snail’s pace is still slow enough for injustice to thrive.

Sexism is structural and subtle. It shows up in hiring decisions, credibility gaps, unequal emotional labor, safety restrictions disguised as “advice,” and expectations that women must constantly adjust themselves to make the world more comfortable for men. It kills women emotionally, financially, professionally, and sometimes physically.

And sometimes, painfully, our biggest obstacles aren’t even men. Sometimes it’s women.

Women who have internalized misogyny so deeply they mistake it for common sense. Women who police other women. Women who dismiss feminism while benefiting from the freedoms feminism fought to create. Women who shame others for speaking up, for dressing differently, for asserting themselves, for refusing to shrink. Women who perpetuate the very system limiting us.

You see it everywhere.

At work, there’s the woman who tells you to “smile more” while the men in the room get to grunt and look bored and still get promoted. In relationships, there’s the friend who gaslights women for being “too aggressive” or “too emotional,” while excusing men for literally the same behaviors. On social media, there’s the influencer who preaches “empowerment” but constantly posts about bending over backward to keep men comfortable or relevant.

It’s exhausting. It’s endless. And it’s infuriating.

Because feminism isn’t about hating men. It’s about equality. It’s about making sure women have the freedom to live fully, without apology, without constant adjustment to make the world more “comfortable” for men. And yet there are women out here acting like it’s some radical club they’re being asked to join, when really, it’s a survival manual for anyone born female in a sexist society.

We should all be feminists. Not because it’s trendy. Not because it looks good on a résumé. Not because it’s a buzzword. But because it’s necessary. Because living in this world without challenging the bullshit, without speaking up, without dismantling the structures that oppress us and the people we hold accountable for it, is exhausting, unfair, and unnecessary.

Feminism is messy. It’s hard. It challenges people we love. It makes us uncomfortable. It forces us to confront our own complicity and the ways we’ve internalized harmful ideas just to survive. But it’s worth it. It’s necessary. It’s the only way we ever get closer to a world where gender doesn’t determine value, opportunity, or safety.

And yes, it is angry work.

It’s yelling into the void sometimes. It’s calling out your aunt for saying “boys will be boys.” It’s rolling your eyes at the coworker who critiques your confidence while men blunder through meetings unchecked. It’s noticing your friend subtly defending toxic behavior because “he didn’t mean it that way,” and realizing the weight of centuries of conditioning sitting in their reasoning.

It’s exhausting.

But if that anger wakes you up, good. Let it.

Let it fuel you. Let it remind you that feminism is not optional. It is survival. It is persistence. It is refusing to shrink in a world that has long demanded women take up less space.

So yeah, we should all be feminists. Because until we are, none of us are truly free.

And I’m honestly tired of explaining why.

I said it the way people say things they’ve learned are acceptable to want. I told myself I just needed one last conversation, one honest explanation, one moment where everything would finally make sense. I believed that if I could understand why, I would be able to move on.

But do we really need closure?

What I didn’t realize then was that closure was never really about understanding. It was about control.

Closure is the hope that someone who confused you will suddenly become clear. That someone who was careless with your feelings will, for one brief moment, be careful. It’s the fantasy that the person who hurt you will also be the person who heals you; as if they could suddenly give what they never gave while you were there.

In modern relationships, this fantasy has gotten harder to let go of because silence has become so normal. People disappear. Conversations trail off. Messages go unanswered. And because there is no formal ending, we convince ourselves that the ending hasn’t happened yet. That we are still owed something. That if we could just talk it through, we could finally close the door properly.

I told myself that ghosting wasn’t an answer — that it was avoidance, immaturity, confusion. I believed that what they were really saying was hidden behind the silence, waiting to be explained if I could just reach them one more time. I framed my need for a conversation as emotional maturity. As communication. As doing things “the right way.”

But silence is communication.

Not the kind we want, not the kind that feels fair or generous, but communication all the same. It says: I am choosing not to show up. I am opting out of this. I am unwilling to engage further. And as much as we resist it, that message is often clearer than any explanation we imagine they might give.

What I didn’t want to admit was that my desire for closure wasn’t about clarity.

It was about reassurance concealed as maturity.

I wanted them to confirm that what we had was real. That I hadn’t imagined the connection. That I hadn’t been foolish for caring. Closure felt evolved. It sounded healthy. But underneath it was a very human request: please tell me I mattered.

So I waited for conversations that never came. Drafted calm, reasonable messages I would never send. Imagined them finally explaining themselves — their fear, their timing, their inability to show up — in a way that would make everything easier. I believed that once I heard the truth, I’d be free.

What no one tells you is that closure assumes something deeply unrealistic: that the person who disappeared is capable of explaining themselves in a way that brings peace. That someone who avoided you once will suddenly lean into discomfort for your sake. That they care enough now to be honest, even if they weren’t honest when it mattered.

Most people don’t ghost because they are cruel. They ghost because they are unwilling to have a hard conversation.

And that unwillingness is the conversation.

I’ve had moments where I got a response. An explanation. Even an apology. And still, I walked away feeling the same. Because answers don’t always heal. Sometimes they just reopen the door you were finally learning how to close.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from waiting for closure in this age of ghosting. You keep emotional doors cracked open just in case. You reread old messages, looking for meaning. You delay your healing because you’re still hoping someone will return and say the right thing, as if the absence itself hasn’t already said plenty.

At some point, I realized that closure was keeping me attached.

As long as I believed I needed a final conversation, I wasn’t fully gone. I was still orienting my healing around their words, their explanations, their ability to show up differently now. Closure became a socially acceptable way to not let go.

The hardest truth I’ve learnt is that communication doesn’t always come in sentences. Sometimes it comes in patterns. In repeated silence. In effort that never arrives. In the way someone consistently chooses not to choose you.

Sometimes the closure is realizing that the ghosting was the answer.

Sometimes the lack of explanation is the explanation.

Not every ending will announce itself. Not every relationship will give you the dignity of a goodbye. And waiting for one can keep you stuck longer than the loss itself.

I don’t think closure is a conversation anymore. I think it’s a decision. The decision to stop asking someone to translate behavior they’ve already made clear. The decision to believe actions the first time instead of hoping words will undo them later.

So yes, we do need closure. But not from the other person. Only you can give yourself the closure you deserve <3

A couple of months ago, I was doing a journal writing challenge with Nii and one question was “what defines you at your core?” I remember thinking about it for a long time, writing a whole lot of somewhat unrelated things before the answer became clear: a yearning for permanence. For stability. And I realized that longing came from the simple fact that I hadn’t really experienced either in a lasting way.

That realization reframed so many of my attachments. It helped me see that I wasn’t always holding on to people, I was holding on to the feeling of something steady. Something consistent. Something that felt like it might finally stay.

There have been so many times in my life where I’ve struggled to move on from people I didn’t really like.

I don’t like admitting this, because it makes the attachment feel embarrassing instead of romantic. But it’s true. I didn’t miss them in the “usual” way we miss people. It was more like the way you miss a noise you’ve gotten used to. The way silence can feel wrong even when the sound itself was irritating. I would see their name and feel that familiar pull in my chest, even though half the time their messages left me annoyed or oddly small.

I didn’t admire them. I didn’t like how dismissive they could be. I didn’t feel safe with them. I didn’t like how conversations felt like they ended just when I was getting somewhere. I didn’t even feel particularly understood. And I especially didn’t like how I always walked away feeling like I had given more than I received.

Still, when they stopped showing up, I felt hollow.

For a long time, I told myself that meant something. That it had to be love, or at least something close to it. But the longer I sat with it, the more uncomfortable the truth became: I wasn’t attached because they were good for me. I was attached because they arrived during a version of my life when I needed someone to witness me, and they stayed long enough to become a fixture. Not a partner, a fixture.

I’ve noticed this pattern in myself more times than I’d like to admit. It usually starts innocently. A late-night conversation. Someone who texts back consistently. Someone who asks questions when you’re not used to being asked any. And slowly, they become part of your routine.

Papa was the last guy I had this experience with. We used to talk to every day for months. If you asked me what I liked about him, I would have struggled to answer in full sentences. He wasn’t particularly kind, or curious, or aligned with me in any meaningful way. But he knew my schedule. He knew when I was likely to be awake. He knew how to fill silence. And when that stopped, my days felt somewhat unstructured, like I had lost a reference point.

What I missed wasn’t him.
It was the rhythm.

Romantic attachment makes this even harder to untangle, because we’re taught that longing is proof. That if it hurts, it must have mattered. But sometimes the pain isn’t coming from love; it’s coming from habit. From the sudden absence of someone who had woven themselves into the background of your days.

I’ve stayed emotionally tethered to people I wouldn’t choose again if I met them today. People whose values didn’t excite me. People whose futures didn’t align with mine. People who, if I’m honest, I outgrew while still holding onto them. And yet, letting go felt like withdrawal. Like my body hadn’t gotten the memo that my mind had already moved on.

The people I struggled hardest to detach from were rarely the ones who treated me best. They were the ones who were inconsistent in just the right way. Present enough to keep me hoping. Absent enough to keep me guessing. They offered proximity, and I mistook that for intimacy.

I think we underestimate how powerful familiarity is. The body will cling to what it recognizes, even when the mind knows better. There is something terrifying about starting over emotionally. About facing your own company without a buffer. Sometimes it feels easier to stay attached to someone who doesn’t quite fit than to face the question of what you actually deserve.

Most of the time, I wasn’t attached to the person at all, I was attached to the version of myself I was when they were around. The one who felt chosen. The one who had someone to text when something small happened. The one who didn’t have to sit alone with herself.

The moment things began to change for me was when I stopped asking, Why do I miss them so much? and started asking, What did they give me that I’m scared I won’t find again? Consistency? Validation? Distraction? The relief of not being alone?

Once I could name that, the attachment loosened. Not immediately. It never is. But gently. Like something finally unclenching. I stopped romanticizing absence. I stopped confusing longing with compatibility.

I don’t think it’s shameful to be attached to people we don’t genuinely like. I think it’s human, actually. But I do think it’s important to tell the truth about it. Because the danger isn’t in the attachment, it’s in mistaking it for something better than it was.

Missing someone doesn’t always mean you should go back. Sometimes it just means you’re learning how to let go of a version of yourself that needed them to survive.

And that, too, deserves tenderness.

You fold it slowly,
not because you’ve stopped caring,
but because this is how love leaves:
one small, careful motion at a time.

Then, the apologies start coming.
Not dramatic ones…just regular words
that sound like they’ve been rehearsed in his guilt.

You can tell he means them.
And that’s what makes it harder.
Because this time,
you’re not fighting his lies;
you’re fighting the part of you
that still wants to believe he’s changed.

You catch yourself almost replying.
You draft the message in your notes app,
the one that starts with “I miss you too.”
But you never send it.
You just stare at the words
until they lose their balance,
until you realize that missing him
isn’t the same as wanting him back.

You start to remember things differently
not just the love,
but the small cruelties that came with it:
how he’d reach for your hand after a lie,
how every promise started to sound
like a cover for something he wasn’t ready to confess.

And yet, part of you still softens
when you see his name light up your phone.
You read the message once,
then again,
and finally whisper,
“I know you’re sorry. I just can’t live inside that anymore.”

That’s when the real forgetting begins.
Not when you stop thinking of him,
but when you stop hoping he’ll undo what’s already done.

You start to reclaim the ordinary things
your books, your favorite song,
the mirror that once only showed you together.

You notice how quiet peace feels,
how your laughter sounds different now;
lighter, less careful.

And one morning,
you wake up before your alarm,
sunlight spilling through the curtains,
and you don’t reach for your phone.
You just breathe,
and realize you’ve made it through another night
without dreaming of him.

That’s how it ends;
not with forgetting,
but with remembering who you were
before love taught you how to disappear.

i want love that looks me in the eye
and sees; not just the smile,
but the fight behind it.
love that sees the storm in me
and stays anyway.

but what i have
is someone who doesn’t hear the tremble
beneath my “i’m okay.”

i want poetry written with my name
folded into the lines.
the kind of love that aches to say things out loud
not just “i love you,”
but why.
again and again.
until i believe it.

i want yearning.
not the kind that hurts,
but the kind that holds.
a love that leans in.
that reaches for my hand in rooms full of noise
just to say you’re the one i want to talk to.

but what i have
is smiles on the surface,
laughter that skims the water
while my heart is drowning quietly beneath.

i want a love that’s all in.
that doesn’t ration affection like it’s gold.
that overflows.
that sees my need not as too much
but as a map.
an invitation.
a mirror of how deeply i love too.

i want the kind of love
that meets me where i am
and writes a sonnet
about the way i laugh
and how brave i am
for choosing softness
after everything.

but what i have
is comfort without connection,
touch without truth,
a warm hand that doesn’t reach into my depths.

and it’s not that he’s unkind.
he’s good, he’s steady.
but i’m not built for shallow seas.

i was born with oceans in me,
and i ache for someone
who isn’t afraid to drown a little
just to know me.

Every night, my dreams reopen
the door I swore I locked.
You stand there
with that stupid, smug, nonchalant look.

I wake up angry at my own heart
for keeping you alive in the dark.
I try to unlearn your voice
the way I’d unlearn a bad habit,
but it lingers;
soft as smoke,
sharp as memory.

People say healing is choosing yourself.
But how do I choose myself
when I still see you
in the mirror of my mind;
standing behind me,
smiling like you never broke me?

So I write instead.
I write until your name
is just ink,
until your ghost
finally stops turning over in my sleep.

a glance or a meaningful stare?
i choose the latter
i have an insatiable need to know
and there’s no room for error

fear drapes my heart as i brace myself
but i want to know,
i need to know
i face his eyes,
watching as the story unfolds

i search
remorse- absent
guilt- absent
shame- absent

the fear sends a threat
i ignore it

i search again
absent.
absent.
absent

this time, there’s no warning
the fear erupts into fire,
a turbulent flame.
it morphs into anger
no, rage.
it finds its home inside of me
and it’s burning me alive.

My 15-year-old self steps through the sunlight streaming in the window as if it were a doorway. She looks exactly as I remember, only smaller, sharper, more deliberate. Her hair is cut short, her eyes wide and precise, scanning everything like she’s already solved the puzzle of my life.

The edges of the room warp slightly as she moves, the walls stretching like rubber. My books lean toward her as if trying to greet her. My laptop hums, the screen flickering like it’s alive. She sits on the edge of my bed without asking. Her small hands fold neatly in her lap, knees together. She looks at me like I’m a story she’s reading for the first time.

“You look tired,” she says, voice calm, precise, a little judgmental.

“I’m fine,” I reply, though my voice trembles.

“You’re not,” she says, studying me. “I can see it. You’ve been making mistakes I warned you about. You don’t even remember half the lessons you swore you’d keep.”

I look at her nervously. “Okay, maybe a few. But life is harder now. Things aren’t obvious anymore. Decisions aren’t simple.”

She leans forward, elbows on her knees. The sunlight shifts, tracing golden lines across her face. “You think life was simpler at 15?” she asks. “I saw paths clearly. I made choices deliberately. You stumble over things I handled with calm and precision. And you don’t even notice when you’re unlearning me.”

I feel heat rise in my chest. “I know. Everything felt so clear when I was younger. I miss the certainty I used to have. I don’t know where it went… or when I lost it.”

Something flickers across her expression; not judgment this time, but confusion, maybe realization. The air shifts with her.

She tilts her head. “You think knowing everything means never being lost? You never felt lost at 15 because you carried it like armor. You didn’t get to play. You didn’t get to rest. You learned how to survive before you were allowed to be a kid. And now, now you finally get a chance to breathe.”

Her words linger, twisting around the room. Dust motes in the sunlight begin to shimmer like tiny stars. My childhood toys on the floor lift slightly, spinning in place, memories of who I was flickering like a film reel. I see myself racing through classrooms, doing homework late at night, staying quiet when I wanted to scream. Always perfect, always careful.

“Now you are allowed to make mistakes,” she continues. “You are allowed to stumble. You are allowed to cry when you feel like you should hold it together. You are allowed to be messy. That is not weakness. That is survival catching up with you.”

I feel tears prick my eyes. “I want to go back. I want to be her again. The one who knew everything, the one who never faltered.”

She reaches out. Her fingers are small, warm, steady. When they touch my hand, the room hums softly. Shadows on the walls stretch and twist, forming shapes of every lesson I’ve learned and every mistake I’ve made. “You are still her,” she says. “She is not gone. You just forgot to be gentle with yourself. You are learning now. That is better than perfection. That is bravery.”

The room bends again, walls tilting outward, sunlight flooding in like rivers of gold. My memories swirl around us, tangible and floating… birthdays I barely remember, victories I forgot to celebrate, nights spent wondering if I was enough. I can see my younger self standing among them, fearless and precise, smiling with the same confidence she always had.

“So mistakes aren’t the end?” I whisper.

“No,” she says. The dust motes swirl faster, forming tiny shapes that almost look like tiny versions of us laughing. “Not the end. Chapters. You are allowed to write them badly. You are allowed to write them beautifully. You are allowed to write them however you want.”

A small, broken laugh escapes me. “I grew up thinking I had to get everything right on the first try”

“You never did,” she says. “And that is exactly why you are still here. You survived the parts you thought would break you. Now you can finally live the parts you were too scared to touch. You can play. You can explore. You can finally be childish sometimes. That is what you were never allowed to do before.”

I squeeze her hand gently. The room hums, objects shimmering, shadows dancing. I realize I have been carrying the weight of both of us, trying to protect her, trying to be her. And now I understand. I can finally give her what she never got.

I look at her, 15-year-old me, and I think about everything she did right. The wisdom she carried. The calm, the certainty. I realize that even if I stumble now, even if I make mistakes, she would not be disappointed. She would nod, small and firm, and tell me I am learning exactly what I needed to learn.

And for the first time in years, I feel it. The possibility of being whole. Of being both strong and soft. Of being myself.

“Thank you,” I whisper.

She smiles, small and fierce, and the sunlight bends around her. “You just need to keep walking. That is enough.”

The walls of the room straighten. The floating memories settle. The hum fades. But in the quiet, I know the two of us are still here, hand in hand, moving forward together.

I know I have potential; not the vague motivational-poster kind, but the heavy kind that sits in my bones like electricity. Growing up, I always had someone to flip the switch on. My mother’s voice was a steady hand on the small of my back, pushing me forward gently but firmly. She’d wake me before sunrise, whispering reminders that felt like blessings: you can do this, you were made for this. With her nearby, I never questioned momentum; I rode it like a wave. That’s how I became the girl teachers whispered about, the one parents compared their children to. Excellence was a familiar language. Effort was a house I lived in.

But when I got to uni and her voice became a memory filtered through a phone speaker, everything changed. Alarms rang but I snoozed them. Assignments nudged me but I shrugged them off. My mind felt full of fog; days blurred into each other. I didn’t realize how much proximity mattered until I didn’t have it anymore. At first it felt like freedom: late nights, quiet mornings, nobody watching; but freedom without discipline is just gravity pulling you down slowly.

It took me too long to notice I had to parent myself. To understand that motivating your own body out of bed is an act of war some mornings. That believing in your own future without proof is a kind of faith most people never learn. By the time I realized it, a couple of semesters had spoken for me. I wasn’t a disaster, I did well. But deep down, I knew I could’ve been spectacular. So much more than that. Sometimes that unrealized possibility presses against my ribs, sharp and unforgiving. Regret tastes metallic at 3am.

The version of me that stops trying is frightening because she doesn’t fail dramatically, she fails quietly. Slowly. She keeps telling herself she’ll start tomorrow until her tomorrows run out. She lets life happen to her instead of happening to it. She loses her curiosity. She lets other people’s voices dictate her worth. She settles for rooms that shrink her. She knows exactly what she could’ve been, but chooses distraction over discomfort. That’s the haunting part: she knows.

But there’s another version of me, the one I’m still learning how to become. When she wakes up, the morning light doesn’t feel heavy; it feels promising. She ties her hair back like she’s gearing up for battle. Her calendar is full of tasks she committed to, not excuses she curated. When she walks, her posture announces that she takes herself seriously. Her phone doesn’t own her. Her mind is clear. The future looks like something she can reach out and touch.

People admire her not because she’s perfect, but because she’s consistent. Kids look up to her, seeing someone who didn’t just dream loudly; she delivered. In her chest, peace doesn’t flutter anxiously; it sits like warm tea in a ceramic mug, steady and grounded. She knows her worth, so she doesn’t negotiate with people who try to dim her. She’s a boss, not because she’s ruthless, but because she finally learned how to protect her potential like it’s sacred.

I don’t want to meet the woman who explains to everyone, with a sad smile, that she “could’ve been great.” I want to meet the woman who became great, not by miracle, but by small, relentless choices.

So I write this as a warning and a promise:

the version of me that doesn’t try may terrify me,

but the version of me that does makes everyone else nervous.

And maybe that’s exactly who I’m supposed to become.