Inconvenient Love

Ada had always been the kind of woman who planned. Her life was a to-do list, color-coded and precise. She timed her morning coffee to brew as she finished her stretches. She never missed a deadline, a birthday, or a train.

Then, Chuka happened.

He was late. Always. His laugh came too loudly in quiet rooms. He quoted poetry with wild eyes and burned his eggs with reckless regularity. He was the kind of man Ada had spent her life avoiding—chaos wrapped in charm. But he was also kind, achingly so. The kind of man who fed stray cats and remembered the names of shopkeepers. And once, he handed her a flower on a Monday morning, saying simply, “The weekend left it behind.”

They met by accident. She had dropped her notebook at the university café, and he had picked it up, flipping through the pages like they were sacred texts. “You write like you're trying to outrun something,” he said. She should have been annoyed. Instead, she stayed for coffee.

One coffee turned into many. Conversations spilled into evenings, then weekends, then the quiet space between her ribs that used to feel like solitude. He never fit into her schedule, but somehow, he made time feel softer.

The problem was everything else.

Chuka had no steady job, no plans. He taught literature part-time, wrote short stories no one paid for, and had an aversion to formal shoes. Her friends asked careful questions: “What does he do again?” Her mother stopped being subtle altogether. “You’re building a future, Ada. Not a dream.”

And Ada tried. She told herself it was a phase. That it would pass like a fever. But it didn’t. Instead, she started rearranging her life in small ways. Mornings became slower. Lists grew shorter. She skipped one meeting—then two—just to spend another hour listening to him talk about Neruda and mangoes.

Still, the world pressed in.

He got an offer in Ibadan—a teaching fellowship. “Only six months,” he said, eyes hopeful but unsure. “Come with me.”

She looked at her calendar, at the blinking reminders of everything she was supposed to become. "I can't just leave," she whispered.

“I know,” he replied.

They parted on a Tuesday. No shouting. Just silence. He left her a book, underlined a single line: "Some loves are true but never convenient."

Years passed.

Ada rose fast—promotion, recognition, success that glittered. But sometimes, when the world got too quiet, she would find herself thumbing through that old book. And for a moment, she’d remember what it felt like to have her life gently undone by laughter and poems and love that made no sense at all.

Because the truth was, not all great loves are meant to stay. Some are meant to show you who you could be—if only the world were a little less rigid. If only timing were kinder.

If only love were more convenient.