BY THOMAS NYARKO
'I was raised along the coast of Accra, an environment that deeply shaped my perspective. For me, reading has always been a form of introspection—a way to give voice to my own thoughts. Writing, in turn, is how I share those thoughts with the world. My work blends personal and shared experiences with fictional elements.'
I left Accra because I thought leaving would make me someone else.
That’s the honest beginning of this story — which is also the only proper place to start when you are trying to tell the truth about running.
The plane took off at noon. The city spread itself thin below us: rust-roofed blocks, the thin smiling snarl of the coastline, the market like a stained, colorful map. I watched until the Atlantic blurred into a silver ribbon and then pulled the window shade down because looking backward is a way of living in small, sharp regrets. People think running is fast. It isn’t. It is a series of small, steady decisions, like taking the last of your money from one pocket and shoving your hand into a new one that might be empty. I left everything behind — the room with the cracked ceiling, the radio that only sometimes found the station, the neighbor who made his morning prayers like clockwork, the market women who knew me because I’d nodded at them for years. And I left love. I left it ironed and folded, like a shirt you’re too ashamed to show anyone. I left it on the stoop where it belonged, expecting it either to follow or to rot.
New York doesn’t care what you expect. It has a grammar of its own: hard angles, short nights, a weather that changes your clothes twice in an afternoon. It will teach you a new kind of loneliness that’s polished and efficient. In Accra, loneliness is loud — a neighbor playing music wrong, the sudden absence of laughter at a late-night chop bar. In New York, loneliness is a small, efficient thing that files its forms and leaves.
For a while, I pretended I was a better man here. I learned names: subway lines, a coffee that didn’t taste burnt, the way the snow folds the city into a softer, flatter map. I rented a room above a shop that sold sweaters and incense. My desk was a thrift-store thing with one leg slightly shorter; I fixed it with a folded magazine. I wrote— not the big, clean sentences I’d hoped for, but sentences that coughed and then sometimes coughed up something honest.
Writing is a kind of housekeeping. It makes the house less hostile.
But every morning I woke up with the weather of Accra still under my skin. Heat that never really leaves you, the smell of exhaust and plantain, the way light in the tropics has a way of cutting your decisions into sharp shadows. I would put my hands on the window and imagine the Atlantic again, the coastline like a thin smile. I would think of a woman who once told me that cities are not places; they are a way of treating each other. Her name was Amara. Amara was not a big, cinematic love. She didn’t have a dramatic laugh or a flaw that needed fixing. She had a way of making tea and folding the world into small, manageable pieces on a Saturday morning. She could make a market appear in a cup — the scent of pepper, the feel of palm oil, a laugh that said don’t lie to yourself. We had three secret languages: the names we gave our misfortunes, the way we avoided the sun at noon, the way we spoke about leaving like it was a test we had not failed but postponed.
When I left, she didn’t scream. She watched me pack the things I thought mattered: a couple of shirts, a notebook with pages already dog-eared, a photograph we’d taken at a beach with the light too bright and our faces too young. She held my hand the way people hold on to the edge of a boat when the water is rough — not because they think the hand will save them, but because it’s a small, reasonable thing to do when the world is breaking its laws.
“Go,” she said.
That single word was a test and a mercy. It carried both the permission and the verdict. Some nights, months later, I would write her name until the ink ran dry, as if repetition could stitch us back together. Other nights I would walk the city and listen to how people chase each other with their own small emergencies. Everyone here is saving something.
Everyone here is losing something.
There are practical things about leaving that you don’t understand until you are halfway through them. You do not stop missing the house you belonged to. You stop missing the person you left because memory folds people into shapes you cannot wear anymore. You are left with the small costly reminders: the smell of frying yam in a corner restaurant, the cadence of Twi on a phone in a subway car, a laugh that sounds like a friend back home. New York gives you replacement memories like foreign coins. They buy you moments, but they cannot cover the debt entirely.
In Accra, love was public: it wore bright clothes and arrived to lift a heavy thing. Here, love tends to be private, an app message at 2 a.m., a small package of affection wrapped in carefully chosen words. I found out that love in exile learns to be patient; it also learns to be cunning. It will hide in the smallest places — a mango seed in a pocket, a borrowed book with a note on the flyleaf. It will keep to the margins.
Sometimes I would walk to the river, people-call it- river as if naming could make it clean, and sit on the steps that led down to grey water. I would hold my notebook and try to write the truth of my leaving without turning it into a plea. The truth is not pretty. It is not noble. I left because remaining felt like waiting for a verdict I couldn’t bear. I left because novelty sometimes looks like salvation.
I left because I thought a new skyline could rearrange the bones inside me. People say exile sharpens you. Perhaps. It also numbs you in ways you only notice when you touch the wrong thing. I learned how to make coffee that tasted like everything and nothing. I learned how to be friendly in lines and lose myself in the steady hum of other people’s lives. But there was always a place in my chest like a missing key. I kept looking for it under new doors.
One winter evening, when the city had folded itself into a pale, hoarse silence, I found a postcard in a used book. It was a photograph of a shoreline I didn’t recognize at first — then I realized the coastline had a thin smile like Accra’s.
On the back, someone had written a line: We are not lost when we remember how to return. The handwriting was cramped, decisive. I bought the book for two dollars and the postcard for nothing. I read that line until it stopped hitting me with
surprise. It is the thing I tell myself now: not lost when we remember how to return. Return, of course, is not a single act. It is not a plane ticket or an apology. Return is the small daily practice of keeping what you took with you honest. Amara and the market and the radio with the bad reception — these are not things for a suitcase. They are patterns you carry and clothe yourself with. So here’s what I learned after years of pretending I belonged to a skyline that never invited me in fully: leaving will not save you from who you are. It will teach you how to measure the absence. Love, even when left behind, does not always follow you like a loyal hound. Sometimes it stands where you left it, teaching others its small language.
Sometimes it goes on, forgiving you or not, living its own life. The cruel truth is that leaving is not theft; it is a decision. You pay for it in quiet ways.
I write this in a room that has more books than furniture and a window that opens to a fire escape. Outside, the city is busy inventing its own stories. Inside, my lamp throws a small pool of light across the page. I am the author of this story and its primary subject; I admit my failures because stories need witnesses. Maybe someday I will go back to the cracked ceiling and the chop bar that never learned to
close. Maybe I will sit where I sat and try to fold the world again with someone who knows the names of my misfortunes.
Or maybe I will keep walking. Maybe that is life: a series of departures stitched to a single stubborn heart that keeps trying to call itself whole. Being lost is not a verdict. It’s a room with no map on the walls. You learn to make your own map with the small things you can afford: an old photograph, a borrowed laugh, a postcard that says we are not lost when we remember how to return.
