It isn’t my story to tell. It never was. It is not even close to my story, although my life, our lives, did for some time intersect. It is a hidden story, one that does not exist on paper or in books. It is not told to family and only nodded at among friends. It is a story so full of secrets and hopes and sweat and tears and fear and memory and future and past that it hardly exists in the present. It is the story of stories. The story of the world countless times over. The story individuals who are lost, who are found, who are confused and hurt and proud. Individuals who were my friends, but whose community I could never join, and whose stories I could partake in, but not share with others.
My life in the Ghanaian community of Athens was flavored with hope and mistrust. My friends wanted something from me that I could not give, and I wanted something from them that I could never have, never really understand. Nearly all of my friends in Athens were Ghanaians, my boyfriend was Ghanaian, and the experiences of my year hovered somewhere between Ghana and Greece and the United States. It was a triangle whose corners never quite met, and I was floating in the lost space between. I kept reaching toward one place, but the moment I felt close I was shoved back and made to reach for another. I never found a balance, I was always between, I never reached any of my destinations.
Thinking about it from the other side, it feels inevitable that things developed the way that they did. I was never hurt, I was only confused. And I didn’t hurt anyone else, although there is always the disappointment. It was a series of misunderstandings that I fell backward into, misunderstandings based upon miscommunications based upon hopes on both sides that never materialized. It was not my fault and it was not anyone else’s. It just wasn’t my story to tell.
