Sojourning

There was a solitude about him, a kind of detachment that allowed him to unflinchingly leave things behind. Nobody really belonged anywhere, and he was not meant to belong to a single place; it was a thought he hanged onto like breath— and in turn, it offered him a sense of autonomy most people could never be comfortable with.

The time had come again, quite unexpectedly, but he was ready.

Glad this time he wasn’t walking away from another failed love affair (the cycle was beginning to wear on him); rather, he was moving back home to the city of his birth, after seventeen years of spreading his life generously across Namibia, London, Peru, Australia, Kenya, and Denmark; Accra has come calling again, with a single email sitting in his inbox.

Ghana Interior Magazine wanted his expertise and skills. They were offering him a chance to be the next editor-in-chief, offering a juicy severance package he could not believe anyone, or organization would offer a man his age; someone languishing in his forties, who at times found himself nursed feelings of regret, and fears that suggested his best years had eluded him. His bad days truly got the best of him when his mind wasn’t steady.

He kept returning to the email— every time he read the paragraph, he found himself silently admitting that he had covertly been waiting for such an email all of his professional life. He had apprehensively been breathing for it; because he wasn’t the kind of person who keenly toy with the virtue of hope. He liked to play it safe with indifferent. From his experience, life could be a slave master, a tease, a bully… and he had finally learned that, the best way to keep some of his power was to disengage.

And yet there he was, a culmination of his dreams, staring back at him in a five-sentence paragraph. Finally reading these words. After all these years of living and sojourning. Undoubtedly, it was the second act he had unbeknown been waiting for. The prayer he had never been able to voice out boldly; a kind of affirmation he didn’t think he needed, yet clearly, he had been yearning for. He was going back home.

It looked like something in Ghana wanted him back after all.