It was a dark and stormy night –

Nah, that’s not true.

It was an ordinary Saturday, mid-spring. The sun was out and bright; its rays penetrated the east-facing windows of the house, low and gold. It was hardly hot. The scent of red roses blooming in the garden behind the house drifted through the kitchen window. It mixed with the aroma of hot akara dancing in the pan of boiling oil. It was the perfect day by all accounts. But the night before wasn’t so perfect.

He held the collar of his shirt with his right hand as he pressed the call button on his phone. No, the collar did not offend him; his hands just needed somewhere to go. Sweat rolled down his face like he had just completed a race; his heart was pounding, and he could hear it inside his chest. The AC was on, but it didn’t have any effect on him. He knew the weight of what was coming. He had prepared for this call for two weeks and hoped it would be easier, but it wasn’t.

“Hello,” the voice on the phone said.

“Hey, how are you?” His voice came out rough, he’d spent the day shouting over machinery at work, and he cleared his throat before it could give him away completely.

They went through the motions the way two people who know each other’s rhythms do – pleasantries, a laugh that didn’t quite land, and then the silence came. He was thinking of the best way to break the news to her. Almost a minute had passed; you would think it was a silence contest. “Hello! Can you hear me now?” he said eventually, pretending the network had cut out, the way it always seemed to at the worst moments. It was his attempt at breaking the silence. She let him have the excuse and asked about his day instead.

“My day was okay,” he replied and paused. He thought to himself, “That was a terrible answer.” “I had a lot to do, and I wasn’t able to finish,” he continued. “My boss has been on my neck lately, but I can handle him. How about yours?” he asked as he put the phone on speaker, trying to go through the breakup message he had written in his notes app a few days earlier.

“Kpele,” she said, and she meant it. “Work’s been good. I need something better, though.”

They talked about nothing for several more minutes – the kind of small talk that exists to delay something larger – while he sat with the words lined up behind his teeth. He didn’t want to do this. Four years was not a small thing to end, and he loved her too much for the shape this conversation was about to take. But he had convinced himself, over many long nights, that loving her wasn’t going to be enough reason to stay wrong for her.

It went back further than either of them liked to admit. She had grown up without a father in the house; he had grown up without a mother in his. Each of them had spent years, without quite knowing it, looking for that missing parent in someone their own age, asking a twenty-something to fill a hole a parent should have filled. He hadn’t worked this out on his own. A friend, an older cousin, a book he’d half-finished had put language to it eventually. And once he saw it, he couldn’t unsee it. He’d decided the answer was self-improvement. Discipline. Hardness. If he built himself into someone strong enough, capable enough, controlled enough, maybe the hole would close on its own, and maybe he’d finally be someone worth staying for. He read the books, followed the voices that preached the gospel of hardness and self-mastery, and somewhere in the process the goal stopped being Grace and became the project itself. He didn’t notice the difference. Grace did. She loved his ambition, she had always loved it, she had called it a sign of a man with his head on straight, but what she wanted, underneath that, was him. Not the project. Not the finished version he kept promising was almost ready. Him, now, imperfect. That was the part he couldn’t see, even as he sat there rehearsing the words that would end it.

He clenched his fist and closed his eyes like a five-year-old about to get an injection. He let the words he had practised out, stammering at first but finding his flow as he went on. She was quiet the whole time he spoke; that was quite unusual for this couple. “God, so this is really happening,” she whispered to herself as she placed her hands over her mouth.

“It’s not you,” he said at the end. “It’s me.”

What he didn’t know – what he wouldn’t find out until after he’d hung up – was that she had been building the exact same speech for herself, word by word, for almost as long as he had.

Another round of the silence contest began; this time, it lasted longer than a minute. They both knew this was the end of an era. “Ayo, I agree,” she said, so softly that it was obvious, even now, how much she still loved him. “We need time and space to heal from our trauma before dating again,” She said it like it was still possible, like there was a version of the future where they found their way back to each other. He wanted to believe her. He knew, in the part of himself that dealt in probabilities rather than hope, that possible and probable were two very different words, but he let himself hope anyway.

“I know”, he said, looking up at the white ceiling in his room, he was alone that night, his roommate had gone out to the club just at the end of the street. The music could be heard faintly from where he was seated. He never imagined a day would come when he would have to separate from the girl whom he thought to be the love of his life.

And in that moment, time froze, memories of the past 4 years came flooding, like a fountain in spring. His body knew what to do. Emotional tears began to brew in his lacrimal gland, his pupils dilated, and when time resumed again and she had finished talking, he was wet. You could see the map of islands his tears drew on his grey shirt. It was the first time he cried in years. She didn’t notice, his cry was silent, but she suspected from the multiple sniffing sounds she heard. “Are you crying?” she asked, and there was something hopeful underneath the surprise in her voice. She knew this man, he treated tears like a weakness he couldn’t afford, and some part of her wanted, badly, for the answer to be yes. Wanted proof, even now, even too late, that there was something underneath the hardness he’d spent years building.

“No,” he lied. “Just a runny nose.”

Ayo always claimed to be a hard guy, a macho man, his philosophy was mental hardness, alpha male, the type of man David Goggins or Andrew Tate would be proud of. He got it wrong, being emotionally vulnerable is an essential part of being in a relationship. He didn’t know this, he let his pursuit of self-development get to the extreme and that also affected his relationship with Grace. He would think about that lie for a long time afterwards. In the one moment that finally asked him to be honest, he reached for the same armour that had gotten them here in the first place.

“Time apart would be good for us”, Grace said “And I’m saying this because I still love you, but I can’t be with you right now. I’m not sure I’m what you need, and the same goes for you”, she continued. “But if ever in the future, you come correct, then I’d be here.”

Ayo said nothing. He would turn that sentence over many times in the months that followed and wonder, uselessly, what he should have said to it. The pain in his heart was too much to realise she had included a comeback clause in their breakup. In the moment, all he could do was sit with the ache in his chest. She said goodbye, gently, and ended the call.

He sat there a long time after the line went dead, the ceiling still staring back at him, the music from the club down the road still playing faintly through the wall. More tears came, quiet ones, widening the islands on his shirt until they ran together into something closer to an ocean.