I met her on a hot Sunday afternoon in Lagos — the kind of day when the sun feels too close to the earth and the air smells like roasted corn and exhaust fumes. We met at a friend’s birthday party in Surulere. She wasn’t the loudest person in the room, but somehow, my eyes found her. She laughed with her whole face, the kind of laugh that makes you forget what you were thinking.

We started talking that day, and before long, it became a routine — morning texts, late-night calls, and those small check-ins that made life a little lighter. I thought it was love. No, I knew it was love. She understood me in ways no one else did. She was gentle where I was stubborn, calm where I was restless. For a while, it felt like God Himself had written our names side by side.

But love, I’ve learned, doesn’t always end the way it begins. Somewhere between the good mornings and the silent nights, something changed. We still talked, but it wasn’t the same. The warmth turned into small talk. The excitement became effort. I tried to hold on — I prayed, I fought, I compromised. But no matter how tightly I held her in my heart, she was slipping away.

One evening, as we sat in her car on a quiet street in Yaba, she turned to me and said softly, “You know we want different things, right?” I nodded, pretending to be okay, but inside, I felt something break. That night, I drove home in silence, the sound of traffic outside feeling louder than ever.

It took months to accept it. I replayed our moments like a movie I didn’t want to end. I kept wondering why something that felt so right had to go wrong. But with time, I realized — not everyone you love is meant to be yours. Some people come to teach you love, not to stay in it. They show you what care looks like, what vulnerability feels like, what your heart is capable of — and then life takes them somewhere else.

Now, when I think of her, I don’t feel pain anymore. Just gratitude. Because even though we didn’t end up together, she taught me that love doesn’t have to last forever to be real. It just has to be honest while it lasts.

And maybe that’s the hardest lesson of all — that sometimes, God lets you meet the right person at the wrong time, not to punish you, but to prepare you for the kind of love that will stay.