THE DREAMS OF YESTERDAY: A DETOUR

As Pelley and I strolled along the sidewalk to a wooden bench near what was once my family’s pharmacy, I noticed the building had been painted over, a faded blue, not the cheerful cream it had once worn. The old signboard was gone. In its place was a digital banner that read “Blessed Hands Boutique & Hair Lab.” I almost laughed. My father would have hated the name, not out of snobbery, but out of a certain attachment to permanence. To him, things that had names should keep them.

We sat in silence. Pelley peeled the label off his bottle of malt while I watched the streetlights flicker to life. Campus was winding down for the semester, students trickling home in buses and taxis. The air smelled of dust and rainclouds. In the quiet, I found myself thinking again about Dorcas.

Not in longing. Not even in regret. Just a passing ache, like touching a healed scar. What I had felt for her now seemed like an echo of a younger version of myself: the boy from the village, heart loud in his chest, chasing a girl who never once looked back. It wasn’t her fault. It was mine for confusing visibility with connection. For projecting significance onto someone who had been polite, not present.

What stung most wasn’t the silence she left behind, but the one I’d carried into other spaces, the way I’d drawn inward, too embarrassed to acknowledge Emefa’s eyes on me when I’d all but ghosted her those early weeks.

Emefa. There was a tenderness in her I had missed while chasing after noise. We hadn’t spoken often, but when we did, her words carried the weight of someone who thought before she felt and felt deeply. In her presence, there was no need to perform. No need to impress. Only a quiet challenge to be honest with myself.

The last time I saw her was at the Science Library. She had her head bent over a novel, something foreign-looking, thick with footnotes. I waved. She smiled. We didn’t speak. I had meant to go over, to sit, to ask her what she was reading. But I let the moment pass. The way people let seasons pass, thinking they’ll return the same way again.

I sometimes wonder if she had waited even briefly for me to choose her. Not romantically, not necessarily. Just to notice her. To acknowledge the ways she had made space for me without demanding anything in return. In all the hours I had spent fretting over Dorcas, it had never occurred to me that Emefa had been extending friendship in small, quiet gestures: the messages checking in, the group library invites, the warm half-smile in the hallway.

And I, fool that I was, had looked past her. Not out of cruelty, but out of a boyish blindness to the real things that nourish us.

My phone buzzed.

“Thought of you today. Hope you’re okay.”

Just that. No punctuation. No urgency. It steadied me more than I could explain.

“You ever think about leaving?” Pelley asked, not looking up.

“All the time,” I said. “But not today.”

We sat there for a while longer. I found my thoughts drifting again this time, not to Dorcas, not to Emefa, but to my father.

I had not seen him since that morning he dropped me off at the bank and paid my fees in full. There was no conversation, no sermon, no embrace. Just a stiff nod, a cough from the back seat, one of his new children, probably, and then the closing of the car door. He had driven off without looking back.

At the time, I had mistaken that silence for detachment. Now, I wasn’t so sure.

The older I got, the more I recognized the language of restraint in the men around me. Their care came wrapped in the unfamiliar grammar of duty, in silent payments and dry nods. I remembered how my father had stood by the teller’s window, arms crossed tightly over his chest, as if to shield himself from something larger than just the sum of the fees.

Perhaps guilt. Perhaps pride. Perhaps love, awkwardly shaped and poorly timed.

I don’t know if I’ll ever understand that man completely. But I think I’ve stopped trying to win from him a tenderness he doesn’t know how to give. Maybe that’s growth. Or maybe it’s surrender. I haven’t decided yet.

Later that night, as I folded my clothes for the trip home, I realized that the loneliness hadn’t vanished, it had only changed form. It no longer terrified me. It had become a companion of sorts, like the hush that follows rain. Not emptiness, exactly. Just space. A quiet possibility.

I remembered something Ato had once said, half-drunk at the Black Shade: “Freedom isn’t doing what you want. It’s deciding what to do when no one’s watching.”

That stayed with me.

The next morning, I walked alone to the campus chapel. I didn’t go inside. I just stood near the open windows, listening to the hymns float into the air. I still didn’t believe not in that way but I understood now why some people needed the shape of belief to make sense of life.

Outside, the sun was finally breaking through. I pulled my bag onto my shoulder and began the long walk back to my hall. The semester was over. I had passed my courses. Auntie Ama had paid off her loan. Somewhere, my father was perhaps thinking about me, in his own way. And somewhere on campus, Emefa was reading something that I might one day ask her about slowly, carefully, without expectations.

I didn’t know what would come next, not love, not certainty, not even joy. But I was still here. Still thinking. Still walking.

And maybe that, for now, was enough.