Author: town gist

Three years into our marriage, my husband travelled to Canada in search of greener pastures. It was a happy day for our family. Our children were very young then but I was thankful to God for paving a way for the head of our family. I believed it was the kind of breakthrough we needed to turn our lives around. We knew that it was not going to be easy to have him live miles across the ocean but we were determined to make the marriage work. We promised each other that the distance would not kill our love or tear…

I moved to Kumasi over the past year because of work. I was new to the city and probably lonely. I am not talking about the kind of loneliness where you feel alone and eventually get over it. I am talking about the kind that leaves you in a constant state of restlessness. This was something I felt like a resounding echo in my soul. I tried to make new friends and get aquatinted with the place but it didn’t help. What I craved was connection. It was the life I left behind that created this hollowness in my heart.…

My Parents Were Married For 32 Years Until Dad Died, Mom Doesn’t Want To Attend The Funeral For the past two weeks, I’ve been sharing the same room with my mom. I sleep next to her on the same bed. I only have one job, that’s to ensure that she’s alright and she doesn’t do anything funny to herself. She hardly sleeps. She might close her eyes and pretend she’s sleeping but I see through the pretence. When she sleeps she snores gently. When she’s pretending to sleep, that snore is absent. Instead, she’ll turn around and around until morning.…

I didn’t want to stay home after my national service so a month before national service ends, I started sending CVs around looking for a job. I will wake up in the morning, and move from office to office carrying nothing but a file full of CVs to distribute. Some offices gave me a good reception and later said no to me. Others said no even before I told them what I was looking for. It didn’t discourage me, I went ahead sharing and praying something come out of it. One day, I saw a poster on the wall advertising…

She was always sick during our relationship. I proposed to her in January. In mid-January, she was seriously sick and was admitted to the hospital. I was by her side, paying for drugs and helping her go through the sickness. Some family members came around but they didn’t stay. They had their lives to live so they passed by quickly and left. She spent about a week at the hospital and I was with her through it all. I will go there in the morning before I go to work. After work, I would be with her until it was late.…

Four years without children is easier than what I saw in the labour ward that day I was asleep one dawn when my wife woke me up. I struggled to open my eyes because all night she had been on me. We had a first round around 9 p.m. Around 12am she woke me up for a second round. When I felt the tap on my skin, I didn’t want to mind her, thinking she was coming for a third round. She kept tapping me until I said, “Please let me sleep small, I will go to work in the morning.”…

I was at a place in life where I lived from hand to mouth. I had a job but it was something I got with my SHS certificate. So the money wasn’t much. Everything I earned went into rent, transportation, food, and bills. Sometimes it didn’t even cover all my expenses. I couldn’t count on my family for help because things were hard for them as well. I was basically on my own. I didn’t want to keep living from paycheck to paycheck. So I decided to further my studies and get a degree that would help me get a…

Kwame has a habit of going off on the people in his life. Everybody knows this about him. They say he is proud. Some of his people nicely put it, “His head is full.” I didn’t even know what they meant by that until I saw it for myself. We would have a little misunderstanding and this guy would go completely silent on me. It would take days for him to calm down and talk to me. I have tried to understand him but it is difficult. Different things set him off. Today, he could get angry because I didn’t…

I have met a lot of questionable men in my quest for love. Each one walks into my life with honey drooling down their lips only to leave me wrecked like a badly damaged car after an accident. I suppose I could say that my heart has suffered a lot of accidents on this journey of love. At a point, I wanted to just give up and become a cat lady. But then Amos walked into my life. Amos was a sweet guy who made me wonder why on earth I ever wanted to give up on love. He was…

My mother saw her death before it happened. I don’t know how but somehow she knew what was coming for her. I say this because, one day she called Owusu to have a conversation with him. Before the call ended she said, “Owusu, take good care of my daughter for me.” Neither of us thought much of this statement until my mother took her last breath. That was when my boyfriend recognized those words as my mother’s dying wish. After the loss of my only surviving parent, I had no one. Owusu and I had been dating for about a…