When I walked out of your house that night, I believed I was walking into life. The rain drenched me, yes, but it felt like baptism—cold, wild, cleansing. Each drop washed off the weight of your anger, the silence of the house, the ghost of Mother's perfume that still lingered in every hallway. I didn't know then that freedom could also be another kind of cage, invisible and unrelenting.
For weeks, I stayed with a friend from the university, a girl named Yinka. Her room was barely larger than the cupboard in my old bedroom, but she gave me half of everything she had: her bed, her food, her laughter. I learned to share for the first time without fear of losing. I learned the value of hunger—not the hunger of the body, but the hunger for meaning.
Emmanuel came to visit often. He would arrive with a small bag of fruit or a loaf of bread, pretending it was nothing, though I knew he'd walked miles just to bring them. His eyes always carried the kind of kindness that frightened me, it was too pure, too undeserved. He never asked me about you, Father. Perhaps he knew that every mention of your name was a wound I wasn't ready to open.
After a few months, we found a tiny apartment at the edge of the city. The walls were thin and painted the color of dust. The ceiling leaked when it rained, and the wind sneaked through the cracks to hum us to sleep. But to me, it was paradise. It was the first place that ever felt mine.
I remember the first morning there. The sunlight found its way through the torn curtains and rested gently on Emmanuel's face as he read a book. He looked up, smiled, and said, "You look like you've been reborn." Maybe I had been. I was learning to live without the shadow of your disapproval looming over me.
We lived simply. Emmanuel taught in a small community school during the day, and I started writing articles and stories for local magazines. It wasn't much, but every word I wrote felt like a small rebellion against the silence that once defined me. I would write late into the night, and he'd stay awake with me, reading aloud from his favorite poets—Achebe, Soyinka, Baldwin. Sometimes, he'd take my hand and tell me that my stories carried more truth than I realized. "You write like someone who has seen both heaven and hell," he'd say.
But happiness, Father, is a fragile visitor. It never stays long in the rooms it blesses.
The first cracks began with the letters I tried to send home. Do you know I wrote to you, Father? More than once.
The first letter was apologetic, awkward, trembling, desperate. I told you I was safe, that I had found work, that I was sorry for leaving in anger. I begged you to write back, to just say, "I forgive you."
You never replied.
I told myself the letter must have gotten lost.
So I wrote again.
This time I didn't beg; I simply told you about my life—about the rain that soaked the market streets, about the smell of roasted corn by the roadside, about how sometimes, when I wrote, I could almost hear Mother's laughter again. I ended the letter with a single sentence: "I still love you."
That one came back unopened. The postman said the house had changed ownership.
Father, that was the day I realized you had truly buried me.
I began to withdraw after that. Emmanuel noticed. He said I was losing my light. I tried to smile, to pretend the silence didn't matter, but the emptiness had already taken root. Sometimes I'd wake up in the middle of the night and cry quietly so he wouldn't hear. But he always did. He'd hold me until my sobs dissolved into sleep.
He wanted us to start afresh somewhere else—to move to another country, far from the shadows of our pasts. He believed in new beginnings. I didn't. I had stopped believing that the world offered more than temporary shelters.
Still, when he got the teaching offer in France, he convinced me to go with him. "We'll build a life there," he said. "You'll write, I'll teach, and someday we'll visit your father together."
France was a blur of light and cold and strange languages. The streets smelled of rain and coffee. We rented a small flat near a river, and I often sat by the window watching boats drift lazily by. Life felt like a gentle dream, the kind you try not to wake from.
But dreams are cruel, Father. They end when you least expect them to.
One morning, Emmanuel left for work as usual. It was raining lightly just a drizzle. He kissed my forehead and promised to bring home flowers. He never did. There was a crash on the highway. A truck skidded. The radio said three people died instantly.
I went to the hospital still half-believing it was a mistake. But it wasn't. I found his body lying there, cold and still, the flowers he had bought crushed in his pocket.
I remember standing there, unable to cry. The world went mute. I could hear my heartbeat echoing in my skull, and somewhere deep inside me, something collapsed. I don't remember how I got home. I don't remember who called the police. I only remember sitting by the window that night, staring at the rain, whispering your name, Father, as if you might somehow hear me across the miles.
After his death, I moved again—this time alone. I didn't care where I went. I just needed to keep moving so the grief wouldn't catch up. I traveled from city to city, writing wherever I could, taking jobs that barely paid enough for bread and shelter. I became a ghost drifting through foreign streets, invisible among strangers.
In Italy, I worked as a translator for a publishing house. In Spain, I cleaned rooms in a hotel by the sea. In every place, I carried a little notebook, writing bits of my life that no one would ever read. My stories became letters addressed to no one—letters filled with apologies, half-prayers, and memories of home.
But no matter how far I went, the past followed.
I'd hear a man's voice in the market and think it was yours. I'd see an old lemon tree in someone's yard and remember the one you cut down. I'd wake from dreams where you finally forgave me, only to find my face wet with tears.
Father, I don't think you ever understood what your silence did to me. It didn't just break me, it erased me. For years, I walked around carrying the ghost of a daughter you had already declared dead. I tried to rebuild myself from scraps of love and memory, but every time I thought I had, the mirror reminded me that I was still your child—unwanted, unfinished, unseen.
It was in Monaco that my body finally began to fail. I had come there on a whim, following a job offer to edit a small literary journal. The city was beautiful in a sterile sort of way—too clean, too precise, too quiet. It reminded me of you. I rented a small apartment near the sea. At night, I'd sit on the balcony listening to the water slap against the rocks, and for a moment, the world would feel soft again.
Then the illness began. It started with fatigue—an exhaustion so deep it felt like gravity itself had turned against me. Then came the coughing, the fainting spells, the endless tests. The doctors spoke in low voices, their eyes careful. I understood what they didn't say: it was terminal.
For the first time in years, I wasn't angry. I just felt tired—tired of fighting ghosts, tired of pretending I wasn't broken. The hospital admitted me a month later. They gave me a room on the first floor overlooking a narrow garden. The nurses were kind. They didn't ask about family, though I could see the question in their eyes when no one came to visit.
Sometimes, I'd watch other patients receive flowers and visitors. I'd smile for them, pretending I didn't feel the emptiness beside my bed. But at night, when the halls went quiet, I'd reach under my pillow for the bundle of letters I had written to you over the years—unsent, unread, unforgiven. I'd read them aloud in a whisper, as if the walls could carry them across the sea to wherever you were.
I wrote new letters too—letters not of apology, but of peace. I told you about Emmanuel, about the sea, about how I no longer feared death. I told you that I finally understood you. That maybe your silence was not hatred, but pain too heavy for words. That maybe you mourned me in your own way, far from eyes that might see your weakness.
I kept writing until my fingers grew too weak to hold the pen. Then I dictated my thoughts into a recorder, my voice fading with each sentence. I knew no one would listen, but the act itself felt sacred, like confession.
And that brings me to this letter—the last one I'll ever write.
When I look back on my years of exile, I no longer see only pain. I see growth. I see the woman I became—the one who learned to live without approval, to love without guarantee, to forgive without being asked. I see a journey that began with rebellion but ended with surrender, not to defeat, but to peace.
You once told me, "A person without roots will be blown away by every wind."
You were right, Father.
But what you didn't tell me was that sometimes, even a seed carried by the wind can find new soil—and bloom where it lands.
I was that seed.
And though my days are now numbered, I have lived enough to know that life, however brief, is still worth loving.
If by some miracle this letter reaches you, do not mourn me as a daughter lost. Mourn me as a woman who lived, who loved, who tried to reach you across oceans and silence. I will forgive you in every breath that leaves my body.
And when the wind blows through whatever garden you now walk in, listen closely.
You may hear my voice there, whispering softly.
I made it, Father. I lived.