The search

Back to being me...

Grief, Mercy discovered, did not announce itself politely.

It did not wait for quiet moments or appropriate settings. It arrived in the middle of a Tuesday fabric sourcing class when the lecturer held up a bolt of deep blue silk and something about the colour the exact shade of a scarf Kofi had worn the first time they met hit her somewhere unguarded. It arrived at breakfast when Dami said something funny and Mercy laughed and then felt the laugh go hollow halfway through because her first instinct had been to reach for her phone to tell him.

It arrived at three in the morning when the room was completely dark and the city had finally quieted enough to hear her own thoughts and her own thoughts were not kind.

Maybe he was right. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe you are too particular, too planned, too difficult to actually be with. Maybe the problem was not him at all.

She lay in the dark and let the thoughts come because she had learned that fighting them only made them louder. She let them come and she listened to them and then, slowly, she began to answer them back.

No. Being selective is not the same as being difficult. Knowing your worth is not the same as being impossible to love. Leaving something that was not right is not the same as being wrong.

Some nights the answers came easily. Some nights they did not come at all and she just had to lie there and wait for morning.

She waited for morning more than once.

The self doubt did not look the way she would have expected it to look.

It did not announce itself as self doubt. It was sneakier than that. It arrived disguised as practicality maybe her standards were unrealistic. As maturity maybe she should have been more patient, more flexible, more willing to let someone grow into what she needed. As wisdom maybe the plan she had written in her notebook at twelve was a child's plan and the real world required compromise she had not yet learned to make.

It wore her own voice, which made it convincing.

And it affected her work, which was the part that frightened her most. She sat in front of blank pages and the ideas that had always arrived like they were eager to be caught suddenly felt distant, uninterested in her, as if her creative confidence and her personal confidence were more connected than she had realised. She handed in a brief that her tutor passed with a comment that said technically competent but missing your voice.

Missing your voice.

She read it three times and felt it land somewhere deep.

Mrs. Asante asked her to stay after class.

She sat across from her tutor in the small office that smelled of old fashion catalogues and strong coffee and waited, with her hands folded, for the professional critique she was bracing herself for.

Instead Mrs. Asante looked at her for a long moment and said, "What happened to the girl who designed the kente jacket?"

Mercy blinked. "She is still here."

"Is she?" Mrs. Asante leaned back. "Because the work I am seeing lately is the work of someone designing for approval. Your best work was never for approval. It was for something else." She paused. "What was it for?"

Mercy opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"It was for " She stopped. Swallowed. "It was for something true."

Mrs. Asante nodded once, satisfied, as if that was exactly the right answer and the only thing she had needed Mercy to hear herself say. "Then go back to that. Whatever took you away from it, leave it at the door."

Mercy walked out of that office with something small but real reignited somewhere in her chest.

She went back to church on a Sunday in the middle of her worst week.

Not the campus fellowship she had attended sporadically in her first semester and then gradually stopped attending she was not ready for that level of people yet. She found a small church three streets away from campus that she had passed dozens of times without ever entering. Stone steps. Old wooden doors. The kind of building that had been standing long before she arrived in this city and would be standing long after.

She slipped into a back pew just as the service was starting and sat in the quiet of it the singing washing over her, the words of the sermon arriving not as instructions but as company. She did not cry, which surprised her. She had half expected to. Instead she felt something she had not felt in weeks.

Still.

Not fixed. Not answered. Just still. As if something larger than her own churning thoughts had made room for her to simply exist inside it without having to have everything resolved.

She came back the following Sunday. And the one after that.

She did not make a big thing of it. She did not announce a spiritual transformation or perform a recovery for anyone's benefit. She simply kept showing up to that back pew and sitting in the stillness and letting it do whatever it was doing. Slowly, quietly, the way good things usually worked in her experience not with a single dramatic moment but with a gradual returning.

She started reading again in the mornings. Small passages. Sitting with them over her tea before the day started. She had a journal she had never properly used separate from her design notebook and she began writing in it. Not for anyone. Not even really for herself in any deliberate way. Just the act of putting words down. Naming things. Making them real and then letting them be real without having to do anything about them.

I am sad today and that is allowed.

I gave something real and it was not received well and that is not a reflection of its value.

I still believe in what I am building. Even on the days I cannot feel it.

The kente jacket came back out of its tissue paper on a Friday afternoon.

She had not touched it since that Saturday with Kofi. It had sat in her wardrobe like something she was not ready to look at not because it had been ruined, but because it had been present for a moment she was still processing. But she took it out that Friday with clean, deliberate hands and laid it on her desk under the good light and looked at it properly.

It was still beautiful.

That landed somewhere important. Whatever had happened, whatever had been said and unsaid, the work was still what it was. The jacket did not know about Kofi. It did not carry his nice, very detailed the way she had been carrying it. It was simply itself weeks of thought, hands, intention, something true and it was still entirely intact.

She put it on.

Stood in front of the small mirror on the back of her door. Looked at herself in it for a long time.

The girl looking back was not the girl who had arrived in the city four months ago with everything mapped out and nothing yet tested. She was something different. Not lesser. Not broken. Just changed in the places that needed changing, and still standing, which she was beginning to understand was its own kind of strength.

She picked up her sketchpad.

And this time when she sat down to draw the ideas did not feel distant or uninterested. They came the way they used to like they had been waiting for her to be ready, like they had known she would come back, like they had nowhere else they needed to be.

She drew until midnight. She filled four pages. Mrs. Asante's words moved through her like a current for something true and every line she put down was exactly that.

She wore the kente jacket to her Monday morning studio class.

She did not make an announcement of it. She simply wore it and sat down at her usual station and began setting up her materials. Dami arrived, saw her, and smiled the kind of smile that said everything without saying anything.

Two seats down, a student Mercy recognised by sight but had never spoken to a quiet, tall boy who always arrived early and always worked with a focused concentration she had noticed and respected looked up when she sat down.

He looked at the jacket for a moment. Then he looked at her.

"Did you make that?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.

He nodded slowly, studying it with the eyes of someone who was actually looking. "The print is that kente-inspired or directly sourced?"

Mercy turned slightly toward him. "Inspired. I wanted to reinterpret rather than replicate. Keep the geometry but bring it somewhere contemporary."

He considered this seriously. "That tension between reference and reinvention that is where the most interesting work lives."

She looked at him properly for the first time. He had already turned back to his own work, unhurried, as if the observation had simply needed saying and now it had been said.

She turned back to her station.

She did not smile. Not visibly. But something in her chest shifted a small, quiet thing, barely a movement at all. Like a door somewhere not opening.

Just unlocking.