He didn’t call for two days. I packed my bag twice and unpacked it once, booked a bus ticket & cancelled it. I sat by the window of my apartment with a half-cold cup of tea and the weight of almost leaving pressed against my chest.
Was this the kind of silence that means “I need space”… Or the kind that means “I don’t know how to say goodbye”? I didn’t know, so I waited.
When his message finally came, it was short.
“Come. I need to see you.”
No emojis or explanation, just a location pin. It was his father’s grave.
I wore a soft blue dress, the one he once said made me look like “a morning prayer.”
When I arrived, he was already standing there with his shoulders straight, but his head bowed like a man at war with himself. I approached slowly with no words.
He looked at me, eyes rimmed red but dry. “I brought you here because this is the last time I let someone who is no longer alive dictate the course of my life.”
He exhaled…
“I loved my dad. I love my mother. But I love you too, Abuto. And if I have to lose one to keep the other, I choose you.” He knelt by the grave, rested his hand on the marble.
“Forgive me, Papa,” he whispered. “But this is my story now.”
Later, we walked through the cemetery hand-in-hand, saying nothing, moments where silence speaks more truth than words and in that silence, I felt the shift.
The storm didn’t end, but it softened and created space for hope.
A week later, we sat with his mother. She didn’t say much, sipping her tea slowly, like it gave her time to calculate which parts of her tradition she was willing to bend.
Finally, she said, “I don’t know how to unlearn what I’ve always believed.”
I nodded. “I know.” “But I do know that my son hasn’t smiled in days. And now, he’s smiling.” She didn’t give a blessing, and she didn’t curse us either, but it was a start.
We left her house in the rain, and the drenched clothes felt like renewal.
Maathai looked up and smiled, “I think the sky’s trying to say something.”
I laughed through wet lashes. “What?”
“Maybe it’s time to stop refusing the rain. And in that moment, we stood there drenched, smiling, stubborn in our love and finally choosing our own story.
Not perfect nor painless, but real and ours.