The first time Leila saw him, the jacaranda tree was in full bloom, scattering purple petals like shy confessions onto the cobbled courtyard of the old university library. She had gone there to escape the noise of her dorm room, seeking quiet for her thoughts. Instead, she found him — the boy who would unravel and reweave the entire fabric of her life.
His name was Ayo, and he was reading Neruda beneath the tree, a soft smile playing at the corners of his lips like he had discovered something he wasn’t sure the world was ready for. He didn’t notice her until the breeze carried her notebook from her lap, tumbling pages across the courtyard. He caught them midair with the same ease he seemed to move through the world.
“Yours?” he asked, holding the page like a fragile secret.
She nodded, and when their eyes met, it felt like someone had opened a window inside her soul. There was something familiar about him, as if she’d met him in another life, or dreamed him into existence.
They talked. About Neruda, about words and wounds, about music and moments that changed them. Ayo had the kind of voice that could hold silence without making it uncomfortable. He didn’t rush to fill space — he made room in it. And somehow, she found herself leaning into that space like it was the first home she’d ever known.
Their connection deepened with the changing of seasons. They met beneath the jacaranda tree often, sometimes with coffee, sometimes with silence, always with something unspoken weaving its way between them. Ayo saw Leila. Not just the bright, composed exterior she showed the world, but the fractured pieces she kept hidden — the childhood marked by absence, the dreams she didn’t think she deserved, the poems she never read aloud. He heard her unspoken sadness, and he didn’t try to fix it. He just stayed.
One night, during a power outage, they sat by candlelight in her tiny room, shadows dancing on the walls like whispers. He read to her from his journal — a story about two souls who met in a war-torn land and found peace in each other’s arms. As he read, his voice trembled, and when he stopped, she could feel the air thicken.
“I think I’ve been writing about you,” he confessed.
Leila’s heart pounded like a drum in a ritual she didn’t know she was part of. She reached for his hand, and he pulled her gently into his arms. Their first kiss was slow, reverent — the kind of kiss that asks for permission and gives everything in return. It was not the kiss of fireworks, but of roots growing deep, wrapping around the hidden parts of them both.
They loved with intensity — not in grand declarations, but in small, sacred rituals: the way he remembered her tea order, the way she tucked a fresh poem into his bag before exams, the way they touched like the world outside didn’t matter.
But love, even in its purest form, is not always enough to silence the storms we carry.
Ayo’s father fell ill. It was cancer, cruel and swift. He withdrew from school and from her, retreating into himself. Leila tried to be there, but grief made Ayo a stranger even to himself. He would sit with her and say nothing, his eyes distant.
“I don’t know how to be with you when everything inside me is breaking,” he said one night.
“Then let me break with you,” she whispered, her hands on his face, her tears falling with his. But he didn’t know how to let her in. And so, he left — not with cruelty, but with quiet. A letter on her pillow. “I love you too much to let you watch me fall apart.”
The absence was a wound that didn’t heal with time. She hated him for a while. Then she missed him. Then she learned to breathe again.
Years passed. Leila became a writer. She turned her pain into prose, her ache into art. Her debut novel featured a boy who read Neruda under a jacaranda tree. Readers said it was beautiful, and they wept. She smiled, knowing that beauty often grows from heartbreak.
One rainy afternoon, at a book signing in Lagos, she looked up and there he was.
Older. Thinner. Wiser. The same.
“I read your book,” Ayo said softly, holding it like it was made of glass. “It felt like coming home.”
She didn’t speak. Her heart was too full for words.
“I’m sorry,” he continued. “For disappearing. For not being brave enough to let you love me through the worst of it.”
She closed the book and stood. The room blurred. And then they were in each other’s arms, the years melting like wax between them.
Underneath the jacaranda tree once more — older now, weathered and wiser — they sat in silence.
Sometimes, love walks away. But sometimes, when it finds its way back, it’s even deeper. Even more tender.
They didn’t speak much that day. They didn’t have to.
Love, they learned, doesn’t always need loud declarations. Sometimes it just needs presence. A place to return to.
And for them, that place was each other.
