SPACE BETWEEN WORDS

Some days change us without leaving fingerprints. They arrive quietly, disguise themselves as ordinary, and leave before we understand what they have taken or given. He met her on a day that believed itself unremarkable. Morning arrived without ceremony. No omen in the sky. No tremor in the air. It was the kind of morning that asks nothing of you, the kind that carries no warning. He woke, moved, breathed, and lived without intention unaware that the day was already bending toward him. There was no reason to remember it. No instinct to mark it. No sense that this small square of time would one day divide his life into before and after. Then she smiled. It was not dramatic, It did not linger, It did not demand attention. And yet something inside him shifted. Not loudly. Not violently. But subtly and Quietly. As though a door in his chest had been unlocked without his consent. He felt it before he understood it. A soft disturbance. A rearranging. His breath changed rhythm. His thoughts lost their edges. Ọkàn mi… kí ni eyi? My heart… what is this? He did not call it attraction. That would have been too simple, too shallow for what stirred inside him. Attraction implied choice. This felt older than choice. Deeper than want. What he felt was recognition. A strange familiarity settled in his bones, the way a melody feels familiar even when you cannot remember when you first heard it. As though a sentence he had forgotten he was writing had suddenly discovered its next word and the sentence, at last, made sense. He studied the feeling carefully, suspicious of it. He tried to name it, to shrink it into something manageable. But it refused to be reduced. It did not ask for permission. It simply was. He carried it with him through the rest of the day. It followed him into conversations where he spoke but did not fully listen. It sat beside him in silences that felt heavier than they should have. It walked with him in the spaces between tasks, in the pauses where thought drifts and the heart speaks freely. By nightfall, it had not faded. It waited with him in the quiet. It lay awake beside him in the dark. He stared at the ceiling, searching himself, asking questions he could not yet answer. Why this moment? Why her? Why now? Má ṣe jẹ́ kí o pọ̀ ju… Do not let it grow too much. he warned himself. But love when it arrives like this does not ask for restraint at the door. It enters softly and rearranges the furniture of your soul. He did not know then that this was how certain loves begin. Not loudly. Not dramatically. But permanently.