A first-person lifestyle essay published this week puts words to a familiar dilemma — when confessing feelings could cost you the friendship that holds you together.
Not every story that moves people is about politics or the cedi. This week, a short first-person essay about being quietly in love with a long-time friend was published by The Ghana Report, and it touches something many readers, at home and abroad, will recognise instantly.
The piece is written anonymously, in the second person, as a letter the writer never sends. There are no names, no places and no dates. What it offers instead is a feeling: the fear of speaking up and losing a friendship that has already become part of your daily life.
What the essay says
The writer describes a friendship so long-standing that she can barely remember life before it. She recalls meeting the person and thinking almost at once that he would matter to her. What she did not expect, she writes, was that mattering would turn into a crush she has carried in secret for years.
She lists the small signals she believes she has picked up: he stumbles over his words when he runs into her unexpectedly, laughs when he is nervous, becomes shy around her despite years of familiarity, and breaks off other conversations to greet her. Other women, she says, have noticed too and given her knowing looks.
And yet, by her own account, nothing has ever happened. There has been flirting, arguing, laughing, and one moment she believes came close to a kiss. No confession. No first move.
Why she stays quiet
Her reasoning is the heart of the essay. She says she would confess in a second if she were certain of how he felt. She is not certain. She also weighs the cost of being wrong.
"I don't want to become strangers again," she writes, explaining that the bond itself is too valuable to risk on a guess.
Her conclusion is a kind of truce with herself: stay silent for now, enjoy the laughter and the flirting, and wait. If he speaks first, she says, she will drop everything and say the same. Until then, she suggests they "love each other, but just not say we're in love."
Why it lands
For readers in the Ghanaian diaspora in particular, the essay speaks to friendships stretched across distance and time zones, where a close bond may be one of the few constants. The calculation the writer makes — that a stable friendship is worth more than a risky romance — is one many people quietly run.
The essay is a personal reflection rather than a news report. It makes no claims about anyone identifiable and offers no advice. It simply sits in the uncertainty, which is likely why it will be shared.
