BEFORE WE LEAVE

A story in parts

BONUS CHAPTER: ELIANA

Three months later.

Ashesi University’s orientation week was five days long, full of students from fourteen African countries who all seemed to know exactly what they were doing, and a campus in Berekuso that smelled like red dust and rain and something Eliana could not name but that felt, unexpectedly, like possibility.

On the second day, during the leadership module, the facilitator asked the new students to break into groups of eight and discuss: What does it mean to lead from who you are, rather than who you think you are supposed to be?

Her group settled into a loose circle on the grass outside the main hall. Seven people from seven different countries — Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Cameroon, Senegal, Zimbabwe — all freshers, all slightly overwhelmed in the polite way of people who had been selected for something and were only now feeling the full weight of it.

Nobody spoke for thirty seconds.

Eliana looked at the silence, thought about morning assemblies and conference rooms and a mango tree that had been there longer than the school, and said: “I’ll start.”

She did not plan what came out. She said what was true — about formation, about ordinary days, about the specific courage it took to show up faithfully in small rooms so that you would know who you were when the large ones arrived. She spoke for three minutes. When she stopped, the conversation opened like a door that had been waiting.

Afterward, the facilitator — a Ghanaian woman in her forties with the unhurried quality of someone who had led rooms like this for a long time — found her during the break.

“Where did you come from?” she said.

“Lagos,” Eliana said.

The woman smiled. “No. I mean — where did you come from? Who made you?”

Eliana thought about that. About Bunmi, who texted her every two days and had cried exactly once on the day she left and then immediately pretended it had not happened. About Chibuzor, who had sent a voice note from UI: you’re going to be excellent, Eli. Kuku go and prove it. About the fellowship and the football pitch and the library garden and a speech that had done something to a room full of people.

About Tito, who was at UNILAG now, studying sports management, and who had sent her a message on her very first day here: Oya, go and do the thing. You were formed for this. She had read it twice and sent back one word: Watch.

In her journal’s front pocket, folded small, was a torn notebook page she had carried across the border without thinking twice about it.

“A school called Vivian Grace,” she told the facilitator. “In Lagos. It was not a big place. But it was exactly the right one.”

She walked back to the circle on the grass, sat down, and listened to the next person speak. The red dust settled around them. Somewhere on the campus a bell rang, and the afternoon opened wide in front of her full of everything she had not yet done, and everything she had already, quietly, without knowing it, been prepared for.

She was ready.

She had been ready for longer than she knew.

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End.

Author’s Note: “I’ll start.” 😭 She walked into a circle of seven strangers from seven countries and she said I’ll start because Vivian Grace made her somebody who knows how to begin. And the torn notebook page folded small in her journal pocket? I cannot. I am the writer and my eyes are actually wet right now. What a journey. What a girl. 🤍

This is the end of the main story but not quite the end. The last bonus chapter is coming. Five years later. They are older. The world is bigger. And some things that were handled with grace at seventeen are going to ask a different question entirely at twenty-three. I need at least 10 restacks and 20 comments before I drop it. The chapter is already written and it is sitting right here waiting. Share this story, restack your favourite chapter, quote your favourite line, tag me on Substack and let us get there together. This story deserves to reach every young person who needs to hear that feelings are not the enemy. We just need wisdom for how we carry them. Thank you for staying with me until the end. I love you all for it. 🤍