It's our first time

Their flight paths would part within hours—her toward Moscow, him toward Accra.

The same sky above, but worlds apart.

Later, he wrote:

“I will see you soon.”

Though they both knew the logistical improbability of that promise, neither corrected the illusion. Some truths are too delicate to be measured by feasibility.

On the plane, he looked out at the tarmac, the city lights beneath him fading into distance. He thought of the first time he had seen her in the corridor—confident, reserved, with that peculiar mixture of distance and warmth.

He had not expected anything. Not friendship. Not care. Certainly not the slow, quiet pull that would eventually make her absence feel unbearable.

She, somewhere above another continent, cried silently in a taxi.

The tears were not dramatic. They were, in a way, inevitable. The kind that surface when something real has ended before it was ever fully understood.

Back in her home city, she took a photo of the snow from her window and sent it to him.

“It started to snow again,” she wrote.

In response, he sent an image of the Ghanaian road: warm, crowded, familiar.

They were home, yet neither felt entirely returned.

That night, as she lay in her childhood bed, she messaged again:

“I won’t forget. Ever.”

He replied:

“I will not forget you either.”

And that was it.

No final vows. No defined expectations.

Just two people, each changed by the other, retreating into the places they had come from—with hearts now carrying an unfamiliar ache.

It was not a conclusion.

It was a quiet sunset, witnessed from different skies.

Two Worlds Apart

Distance reveals what presence often hides. In the stillness that followed their return to separate countries, the connection they had built—tentative, tender, and largely unspoken—was subjected to the scrutiny of silence. No longer supported by shared surroundings or daily interaction, what remained was memory, desire, and the fragile thread of conversation that digital connection allows.

Morning greetings turned into brief reflections on daily life. She spoke of the cold, of the adjustment back to her university, of the train ride from Moscow to Smolensk. He responded with updates from the road, from the classroom, from Sunyani—where the heat bore down and the noise was comfortingly familiar.

But even as they spoke, something had shifted. The rhythm was no longer effortless.

She became cautious. Her tone, once playful and spontaneous, now held restraint. She answered his expressions of affection with politeness rather than warmth. Her words, though never unkind, suggested hesitancy. He, on the other hand, grew more open. Perhaps emboldened by absence, perhaps pressured by longing—he began to say more than he had before.