By Joy Aideyan
When Two Worlds Collide
Amara didn’t believe in fate. Not anymore.
Not after five years of heartbreak, two major relocations, a failed engagement, and the quiet loneliness that followed her everywhere like a stubborn shadow. She had mastered the art of pretending— smiling at brunch with friends, posting vacation photos on Instagram, and filling her nights with work emails and Netflix noise.
But on the night everything changed, she wasn’t thinking about destiny. She simply walked into a quiet bookstore café in Lekki because her generator had packed up again and she needed Wi-Fi to meet a deadline.
She found a table, plugged in her laptop, and ordered peppermint tea. The bell above the door chimed. She didn’t bother looking up.
That was when a voice she hadn’t heard in seven long years said, calm and low:
“Mara?”
Her heart stopped.
She looked up… and the past stared right back at her.
It was Korede.
The one who got away.
The one she pushed away.
He stood there holding a book he clearly wasn’t planning to read— awkward, tall, handsome in that effortlessly annoying way, and wearing the same faint dimple on the left cheek she used to kiss when saying goodbye.
Time froze.
The lights hummed.
The café smelled like baked cinnamon and memory.
Her past and her present collided without warning.
“Wow,” Korede murmured, stepping closer. “I wasn’t sure if it was you.”
“It’s me,” she whispered. “I… didn’t expect to see you.”
Neither of them sat.
Neither of them blinked.
And in that suspended moment, it was impossible to tell if life was giving them a second chance…
or simply dragging them back to a lesson they never finished learning.
The Wounds We Pretend Not to Feel
They ended up sitting across from each other, the way ex-lovers do when both are hiding more truth than they’re ready to spill. Their conversation started safe—work, Lagos traffic, mutual friends, life updates.
But silence kept intruding.
The kind of silence that carried history.
The kind that carried pain.
Korede finally exhaled.
“Why did you really leave, Mara?”
A question she had avoided for years.
A truth she had buried under resilience and denial.
Back then, she was 25, scared, insecure, and convinced she wasn’t enough. Korede loved her deeply, loudly, consistently—but she loved him quietly, fearfully, half-afraid he would wake up one morning and realise she wasn’t the woman he needed.
And so she did what wounded people do best—she self-sabotaged.
“I thought I was protecting you,” she said.
“By breaking us?”
“By breaking me.”
Her voice cracked.
Korede stared at her for a long time, the hurt still lingering behind his eyes like an old scar. And yet—beneath the hurt was something softer.
Something dangerous.
Something hopeful.
They talked for hours, and in between every confession, every unfinished sentence, every moment of eye contact—they rediscovered parts of themselves they thought were dead.
But the world outside the café had not paused.
Life had not waited.
Korede stood.
“I have to catch a flight in the morning.”
“Where?” she asked, heart tightening.
“Nairobi. New job posting. Three years.”
Amara forced a smile.
Congratulations.
I’m happy for you.
Safe travels.
Her mouth said those things.
But her heart was screaming something else:
Not again.
Not this time.
The Second Chance We Almost Miss
That night, Amara couldn’t sleep. Every memory rushed back— their late-night phone calls, their road trips to Ibadan, the stupid inside jokes, the dreams they once dared to share. She had spent years pretending she was fine without him.
But seeing him again cracked something open.
She thought of the flight he was about to board.
The life he was about to restart.
The goodbye she didn’t want to repeat.
At 4:12 a.m., something inside her snapped.
She grabbed her car keys.
Lagos was quiet, almost cinematic—the kind of night when destiny writes its own script. She drove to the airport with trembling hands, rehearsing the speech she wasn’t sure she’d have the courage to say.
She reached the international wing breathless and frantic.
Passengers were checking in.
Announcements echoed overhead.
Korede stood alone, suitcase by his side.
“Amara?” he said, shocked.
She didn’t give herself time to think.
“I’m tired,” she said, chest heaving. “Tired of pretending I don’t care. Tired of choosing fear. Tired of acting like losing you didn’t break something in me.”
He stepped closer.
People were staring.
She didn’t care.
“You were right to ask why I left,” she said, voice trembling. “But the better question is—why I never came back.”
“And why didn’t you?” he asked, softly.
“Because I didn’t think I deserved a second chance.”
Korede exhaled deeply, jaw tightening.
“You came all the way here. Maybe that’s your answer.”
Silence.
Not the painful kind—
The kind that felt like possibility.
Their eyes locked.
Hope tugged at them like gravity.
“Mara,” he said slowly, “what exactly are you saying?”
Her voice was barely a whisper:
“I want us. If you still want me.”
Love, Rewritten
Korede didn’t speak immediately.
He stepped closer, touched her face gently—almost as if checking whether she was real.
“I wanted you every day,” he said. “Even when I tried not to. Even when it hurt.”
A tear escaped her eye.
He wiped it with his thumb.
“But this,” he continued, “can’t be another unfinished story.”
“It won’t be,” she said. “Not anymore.”
He took her hand.
Warm. Familiar. Right.
And for the first time in seven years, neither of them felt afraid.
They talked for hours—right there in the waiting area. Korede postponed his flight. Amara cancelled a client meeting. The world could wait.
They talked about boundaries, expectations, healing, therapy, forgiveness, dreams—everything grown people discuss when they refuse to repeat old mistakes.
And as dawn broke, soft and golden over the airport windows, Korede whispered:
“Maybe we needed the distance to find our way back to the beginning.”
Amara smiled.
“Not the beginning,” she said. “A better version of us.”
They walked out of the airport hand in hand—two souls who had been broken, matured, stretched, and refined… only to discover that some love stories don’t end.
They just pause.
And when they resume,
they return stronger, wiser, deeper—
and unshakeably meant for each other.
