I met Philo the way you meet something that will rearrange your mind. It was at a festival. Lights everywhere, drumming everywhere, people laughing as though nothing bad ever happens in this world. Then there she was: quiet, smiling, standing alone like she was waiting for me. I asked for her number, and she gave it without hesitation.

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One week later, after long calls that stretched into dawn, I heard myself asking her to be my girlfriend on our first ever outing. She didn’t even blink. She just said, “Yes,” like she had been waiting all her life for that question. That night we went home together. The next morning she made tea, cleaned my room, and arranged my wardrobe.

During conversation, she told me she worked with an insurance company as a field marketing officer, moving from place to place, meeting clients, convincing people to buy policies. It sounded stressful so I encouraged her that things would get better.

I loved her fast. Too fast that introduced her to my friends and even gave her a key to my room. Meanwhile, she never showed me where she lived. Any time I asked, she had the same calm answer:
“I’m perching with a friend. It’s not a place I can take you.”
“If I take you there, she’ll think I don’t respect her.”
“She doesn’t like visitors.”

Yet she visited me almost every day. She spent weekends. She cooked. She washed. She slept on my chest when we slept at night. She made my room feel like a home but somehow I wasn’t allowed to know where she slept when she left my house.

Three months into our relationship, I told her, “Philo, how about your parents? Can I meet them?” She smiled and said she would arrange it.

That Sunday she left my room in her favorite brown dress. And vanished. Her phone went off. Her WhatsApp disappeared. I visited every insurance office in Accra asking about if they knew her. Each time, they shook their heads and said, “No one like this works here.”

Is There A Perfect One Out There For Everyone?

Sometimes I wonder if I should file a missing person report. Other times I think maybe she wasn’t missing, maybe she was just running from commitment. Running from a life she didn’t want. Or maybe I fell in love with a woman who never existed at all. And that is the mystery that keeps me awake every night in this small room. My friends tease, “Maybe she’s one of the ancestors who come alive during festivals.”

We laugh about it but trust me, I get scared some nights. What if what my friends are laughing about is actually the truth?”

—A.A

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