It was July 2002. I’d finished writing my final paper and according to the school’s rule, I was supposed to leave campus the next morning. I spent that night with Esther, a girl I’d spent the best part of my time on campus with. Both of us were a story drafted out of drama, from how we met how we fell in love and how we stayed in love.

That night of July was our final night together in school so we spent the whole night thinking of how we were going to keep the love going once we left the walls of the place that birthed our love.

In 2002 mobile phones weren’t for the poor. They were so expensive common people like us couldn’t own one. There were landlines hanging on the walls of rich men. We were not rich so we didn’t have them in our houses. We could write letters to each other but we didn’t own post office box numbers too. So that night I asked, “How are we going to keep this thing going?”

She didn’t have an answer so she burst out crying as if we were at the funeral grounds of our love and our love had been laid in state. I hugged her, kissed her forehead and said, “No need to cry. It’s not going to end here. We’ll find a way once we get home. There’s always a way.”

The following morning, I packed my belongings, called a taxi and hopped in. She couldn’t come to say goodbye. She was not in the mood to cry that morning. While the taxi driver sped out of the school gate, oblivious to the love I was leaving behind, I begged him to slow down. I turned back and looked at the school’s gate one last time, pretending I was looking at the face of Esther, I said to myself, “It doesn’t end here. We’ll find a way.”

I put my head on the headrest and closed my eyes so the school’s gate would be the last thing I saw while driving away.

I met Esther when I was in my second year. It was my girlfriend at that time who introduced her to me as her friend. My girlfriend knew Esther from their High school days. They were dormitory mates. I remember looking at Esther and telling myself, “Wow, she’s beautiful.” I just said it. There was no intention to leave my girlfriend for her but that’s what happened eventually.

As time went on, I and Esther discovered we had a lot of things in common. We were attending the same church and had the same favourite reverend. She loved my kind of music so when she took my Walkman and cassette from me, she never returned them until vacation that year.

My girlfriend started getting jealous, accusing me of having something going on with Esther. “There’s nothing going on trust me. Is she not your friend? How can I do that?” I assured her

One day, they had a huge fight in their dormitory and the reason (me) for the fight spread like wildfire. It was my girlfriend who went on the attack and Esther retaliated. After the fight, my girlfriend came to break up with me, calling me a snitch and a whore and every unprintable word a bitter girlfriend would say to her man.

When Esther came, she told me what happened. She said, “I don’t know what’s making her that insecure. She keeps accusing me all the time even when I’d made it clear that nothing was going on.”

I and my girlfriend broke up but the friendship between me and Esther grew until we fell in love when we were going to third year. Nobody believed us when we told them we were not lovers at first. We confirmed their suspicion and that was all they needed to know.

One afternoon, almost a month after I’d completed school, my friend came to tell me that someone on the phone was looking for me. I picked up the handset and heard someone breathing from the other side of the phone. I said, “Esther.” She answered, “How did you know it was me?” I answered, “From the way you breathe and also, you’re the only one I’d given this number to.”

I gave that number to her and told her to call and see if they would allow her to talk to me. I called my parents on that line. We were close neighbours and they were the only people who had landline in their home.

We talked for only one minute. After the conversation, she said she loved me but I couldn’t say I loved her too because it would be too disrespectful to stand in someone’s house, using their phone to profess love to someone who had no business calling their line.

She called often until my friend’s parents got angry. So whenever she called, they told her I wasn’t there. One day, it was my friend who picked up the call. His parents were out so he came to call me. It had been three months since I heard from her. She shouted, “Why don’t you stay home? Have you found a new girl? Anytime I call they say you’re not there.” I answered, “They are not happy about how often you call. Is the reason they tell you I’m not there.”

Before she said goodbye she told me, “I’ve started attending computer school. I got an email address yesterday. Write it down. Whenever you get a computer, you can email me.”

I listened carefully as she spelt out her Hotmail address to me. After, I pronounced them back to her to ensure I didn’t get any letter wrong. She told me, “I won’t call again. I will be expecting your email.”

The only place I could get an internet to send an email was the internet cafe but where I lived, there was no internet cafe. The next town to get an internet cafe was a three-hour drive away. It didn’t deter me. A week or so later, I took a bus to that town and asked the cafe attendant to help me send a mail. He said, “Do you have an email address?” I answered, “No, I don’t but the person I’m sending to has it.”

He helped me create an email address and took me through how to send an email. I bought one hour credit and because I didn’t know how to type faster, I ended up buying another hour before I could finish writing my letter to Esther. It was a long one. She needed hope for our love. She needed assurances that what we had could stand the test of time. She needed to feel loved so that long letter addressed all these angles.

Technology has stolen something from us; the romance in waiting. Today, everything and everyone is so accessible that romance is dead in our relationships.

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I can speak to a girl I’m crushing on every day. I can pick up Uber and go to her house right now. When I’m bored, I can go to Facebook and read what’s on the mind of the woman I’m crushing. I know what she’s up to because she has updated her Whatsapp status telling the world what she’s up to. There’s no place for wondering or desire or mystery.  I wrote the email knowing very well I will not get a response anytime soon.

I went home, slept on my bed and began to wonder if she had responded to my mail. “If she has, what did she say? Is the love as deep as it used to be? Did she say she loved me too?”

I went to that cafe again one month later, hoping to read a reply from the woman I loved. I opened my email and they said I was the 100000th person to have done something I didn’t do so I’d won a million-dollar raffle. You know that old-school scam.

There was no mail from Esther. I travelled for over three hours for nothing. I wasn’t angry. It added to the longing, the desire and the romance in waiting.

Today, if we don’t get a response back in a second, we question the motives of the people we are in love with. When our calls are missed for an hour, we accuse them of not caring about us. It’s a fast world now. Love happens so fast and it ends as fast too. Everything and everyone is on a high speed.

Two months later, when I heard from her she said, “You’re a man. Why don’t you come to Accra and visit me one day? How long are we going to remain like this?”

So I travelled to Accra knowing very little about where she lived. In the directions she gave me, she said, “When you get to the first junction, ask that you’re looking for where the water factory is. When you get to the water factory, there’s a big signboard that welcomes you to a church, take a left turn and ask whoever you see that you’re looking for Paradise Hotel…” On and on it went.

All we need is Google location today and we are in the house of the one we love. You don’t need a commitment of purpose to love today because it’s easy. It took a special form of commitment to take a trip of such nature in 2005 but I wasn’t scared. I went and for the first time in three years, I saw Esther. We couldn’t go home because her father was strict. We sat at a bar closer to her house and talked for hours. My heart was happy. She was happy to see me.

Slowly we fell apart. Communication became very difficult because she travelled out of Accra. There was no cafe where she went to so communication died and the love between us also followed. I never stopped wondering about her until 2013 when I was going through something called Facebook. I came across Esther’s account and contacted her immediately.

She had a phone and I had a phone but it was too late to rekindle anything between us. I still loved her and I told her. She laughed at me; “You still haven’t let go of those childhood dreams? Wake up, it’s 2013. I’m married, hello.”

She had been married for a year and there was nothing I could do but move on. I had the closure I needed.

I met Elsie along the line and later made her my wife. We’ve been married for nine years now and have three kids. We are mostly happy going through marriage and life the way ordinary people do but I’m still in touch with Esther.

She lives on my Facebook timeline and I see her often in the corridors of my WhatsApp status. We talk every now and then but nothing serious. Sometimes I see her photos and I wonder, “If we had the internet the way we have it now, would we have ended up married?”

One dawn, I was on Whatsapp when I saw her online. I said hello and she asked why I was still awake. I answered, “I can’t sleep.” She sent a surprise emoji and asked, “Old age?” I answered, “You know I’m not that old.”

I asked why she was still awake and she said, “Marriage?”

For three years, according to her, she has been facing marital issues. The issues aside, they had only one child. She wants more but her husband can’t do it because he has this condition he’s failing to resolve. We talked all dawn. I encouraged her to keep going. She told me she was not giving up but sometimes it gets to her. The conversation meandered to the times when we were young. We laughed about our dreams and the silly things we did to keep a dying love going.

She asked, “Do you think we would have been married if we had the internet and things were this easier?”

I’d been asking myself this same question but that night I pretended I had the answer. I said, “We are not meant for each other that’s why we are currently in the lives of other people. A lot of people went through the same challenges but ended up married. We didn’t have any excuse. We just don’t belong to each other.”

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She responded, “I agree but I’m happy that we tried. Maybe if we persisted, we may have gone against the designs of the universe and get married but then we’d suffer because we would become round pecks in a square hole. All is well.”

I see her every day online. It’s not a bad thing but I prefer how things used to be when we were young. We had mysteries and questions. Today, all those questions have been answered for us so we don’t do much. It’s easy now to say I love you and prove it with constant calls. But constant calls isn’t commitment. Commitment is travelling four hours to see her when you don’t even know if you’ll meet her.

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—Kumi

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