I won’t serve sugar here. If you sit with me, I'll show you my scars—raw, mapped. The tea is dark, bitter, honest. It sits between us in chipped porcelain, steam curling like burnt firewood smoke—something done and undone. Across the table, the shadows shift. You step in, and the room bends toward you. You, light—shifting like thirteen-year-old me, peeking through the brown-painted wardrobe when I hear someone scream at 2:15 AM, and a hand slaps a body. Once. Twice. Five times. The shadows take form—once full of energy, now turned to deaf stones. They do not speak. They do not reach for their cups. They only watch, like a quiet dawn hanging between a yawning sun and day break.

I know why you've come. You want the story too.

My earliest memory is of my brother and me rushing out of the house one morning to invite Jesus in, hoping He would calm the storms at hand. He came in the form of the pastor from our local church, dressed in his dark outfit with a pinch of light at his neck. I watched, confused, questions swelling inside me: Why was my mother crying? Who was my father cursing—his own wife? Who was breaking our home into pieces? We sat outside, like children always do when grownups keep them out of their conversations, waiting to see Jesus work a miracle.

My brother occasionally let out a cry. Something was happening to his heart, and mine too, but he felt it more deeply. Perhaps because I hadn’t yet made sense of everything that was happening. I picked up one, two, and three of the scenes before our rush to call the pastor. Wedding pictures torn from the wall and crushed. Tears welling in my mother’s eyes, her voice low with pleading. My father’s anger, rising like a tide, drowning out the walls, the air—everything. Yet, I believed that was why we had called the pastor—to calm the waves before they carried us away.

Fear mocked my faith, and so I bargained with God. I promised to offer two cedis instead of the usual one cedi at church if only He would make it stop. I thought it was a fair deal. My little hope, tied around the noose. When the pastor left, silence became the next visitor. Nobody spoke to anybody because everybody feared knowing the truth. And so we kept our tongues in our mouths without question, exchanging silence for peace. But peace is a fragile, slippery thing. It never stays where it is placed, always chasing chances—like a truce, waiting for something to break its middle, to drown in, like a mimosa, curling in at the slightest touch.

Everything after here becomes heated, so take your spoons and stir the tea with me.

One day, I would wake up to find my mother crying. She wouldn’t tell me why, only smiling between the cracks, letting me believe she was well. My father would come home late and drunk, and I would run to my room, hiding before he could pretend to see me. The next moment would be unpleasant music—a hit here and there, an angry shout, and someone would beg. A blow here, and I’d hear someone whisper, “The kids are asleep.” A silent plea. A dance. If you care to know, yes, I saw my mother’s tears. I saw her face buried beneath makeup to cover the cracks. I saw my father’s anger settle like bruises under his eyes. I never went downstairs to see the fight, but my imagination painted every detail for me. I didn’t like how it looked.

This was after the night I hid in the brown-painted wardrobe. A night I keep returning to. Maybe that is when it all began—the hunger to be left alone. To always run to where it doesn’t hurt. This mode of survival I turned on and somehow forgot where I found the switch.

I started sleeping before bedtime, took extra classes to stay longer in school. I had questions, but I never carved them into speech. I kept them bottled up. Pressing them deep in places where even I couldn’t reach. I concluded that there were cracks in my home, and my only job was to find them and fill them—to escape to the spaces where the arguments didn’t seep in, where I didn’t have to hear them at all.

Bring your hand. Hold this bread. Break it. Eat with me.

I don’t think people discuss broken homes enough. It’s an unresolved challenge, one wrapped in quiet shame. When love builds itself up in a home and then suddenly breaks down, it collapses with a ridicule too great for any heart to bear. And so, children like me love to hide in the cracks, escape the room when family is discussed. In an exam, I wrote, a family is made up of a man, a woman, and their children. To me, family meant drowning in a pool of stories I didn’t write, yet stories that shaped me. The by-product of this is learning to live life like walking on eggshells, careful not to step on anything else I might not want to break in my home.

At home, we became good at pretending. My siblings and I mastered the art of carrying wounds in silence, treating them alone because no one else knew how to touch them. Distance became the truest form of respect—the further we kept our heads above the waves, the safer we felt. At worst, I never truly healed. Even in the name of forgiveness, I remember the hands that pulled the bricks of our home apart. But again, I kept my tongue in my mouth without question, exchanging silence for peace. Silence was a better friend. Not because it was kind, but because the truth it covered would have shattered me if I knew. It wasn’t just hiding the cracks—it was holding me together, keeping me from falling through. Silence saved me.

The tea is cold now. Do not eat the bread yet.

I wore my heart like a harmattan coated with mist. At twenty-five, I could count many failed relationships. I loved like fire—stayed alight but burned whoever touched me. I folded my love into small, tight spaces like money in a susu box, unsure of what cost it might one day help me pay. I practiced the shadow’s colour fade as a new light-hearted love glowed in, and snapped out like a night killing the sun. Sometimes I was careful not to break another’s spirit, knowing too well what it felt like to have mine broken. So I treaded lightly, “let’s be friends for now” which very often was a lie. That was me, afraid to keep what I had found. That was me, betraying my heart. That was me, running.

Survival has always been my love language. Just like how I loved, I am always in a hurry to leave home. To me, home is sour—the aftertaste of a fermented lemonade. The only remains of it are the cracks, and no matter the season, I watch for the floods, the cold winds and the harsh sunlight, knowing they will find a way through. I seek shelter in myself. And the safest place has always been far from the door of my home, and any new lover who promises to give me something new to believe in other than loving the way I do.

Run your tongue along the chipped edge of the cup. Feel the cracks. Welcome to my home.

I could never say ‘my parents’ in full. I addressed each of them like my possessions whenever I spoke to the other. “My mother has already paid for that”, I’d say to my father. “My father says he will see what he can do”, I’d say to my mother. As though they were strangers who never went far beyond greetings. As though they had long forgotten each other’s names. And perhaps, in a way, they had.

Through this language practice, I learnt to live in halves. Half a parent at a time. Half a sibling at a time. Half a lover at a time. Half a house, because something is always broken. Someone is always missing. Someone is always running. Someone is always keeping a distance.

Dip your bread into the tea, soak it with bitterness, get ready to eat.

I saw everyone who gave me a sad stare at this table. I started practicing that stare myself.

I’d find my parents bleeding, and I’d keep my stare on—because there was so little I could do. Sometimes, I wish I were never born into the storm. And then, I remember the good times, when people envied my home and the love my parents shared.

I resolve in my heart that matters like this will end with me, that my family will be different. I promise myself that if anything ever shakes my home, I will forgive whoever must be forgiven so that peace may thrive. And these days, I am doing better. I broke my susu box for R. She makes me smile. She is here. She sips this dark tea every now and then. She shows me where I can pour a little sugar. She does this with no rush. Like she understands. Like a patient shore, she tells me to rest my waves with her. Quiet, peaceful.

Now, eat the bread.

“Next time, I will serve sugar.”

“Yes, brown sugar.”