From the bus station, the smell of roasted corn wafted across the diesel ,the air was thick with honking horns, shouting voices and the scrape of luggage wheels on concrete , Aisha sat on the bench cold metal, sweated with her little handbag of green clutching to her side and her bus ticket limp from the sweat in her palm.
Kaduna – Departure 6:30am.
She’d looked at that piece of paper for half an hour, as if the ink would magically morph. As if it might tell another story. One where he was still alive. One where this trip was for a beginning, not an ending.
Behind her, the loudspeakers crackled.
“Luxury bus to Kaduna boarding now at Terminal 3…”
Her heart stalled.
“You should leave soon,” the man beside her had said gently as he pointed to her ticket, She just nodded, but her legs were thick and heavy, as if she were dragging herself through waist deep water.
Once upon a time, Kaduna was laughter, night walks, grilled suya at midnight, it was Ibrahim’s rough fingers scribbling poetry on receipt paper at the roadside eatery where they met ,it was hot evenings and long calls after she moved to Abuja, It was dreams woven in quiet promises, shared playlists, voice notes ending with “I miss you.”
Until the accident.
Three weeks ago, she got the call. The voice on the line said it like it was a schedule change—brief, precise, irreversible. “There was a collision.” “He didn’t make it.”
She didn’t scream. Didn’t cry. Just blinked. Numbness was its own kind of heartbreak.
She booked the ticket the next morning. Not for the funeral—she missed that—but for something she still couldn't name.
The wedding.
Not theirs. Theirs never came.
But Kaduna had been the plan. They were going to go there after the wedding. Ibrahim wanted to show her the village he grew up in. The mango tree he used to climb. The mosque where he first recited Qur’an. He’d even sent her a picture of the lodge—a modest place with green shutters and red clay walls. “Nothing fancy,” he’d texted, “but it smells like childhood.”
Now, it all smelled like loss.
She slowly rose, moved through the crowd past a couple arguing over baby formula, past the boy clutching his toy truck like a talisman, she stopped at Terminal 3.
The driver scanned her with mild impatience. “Kaduna?” he asked.
She opened her hand to glance at the ticket again.
It hit her: this piece of paper was a promise from another life.
She imagined the seat next to her. Imagined what it would be like to ride that road alone, with all the scenery whispering memories she wasn’t ready to face. The weight of it pressed into her chest.
She was not ready.
“Miss?” the driver asked again.
Aisha looked at him. Then slowly, deliberately, tore the ticket in half.
It surprised her how final it felt.
She turned and walked away. Past the bench. Past the suya man fanning his coals. Past the chaos of the terminal.
She walked until she reached a quiet patch of shade beneath a tree, Sat, breathed and Pulled out her phone and dialed her sister.
“Hello?”
“I… I changed my mind,” Aisha said quietly. “I’m not going to Kaduna.”
A pause. “Are you okay?”
Aisha looked down at the torn ticket in her lap. “I think… I just want to stop chasing ghosts.”
She ended the call before she could change her mind, her eyes scanned the street,she had half expected Ibrahim to appear out of nowhere, grinning, holding a paper bag of roasted groundnuts like nothing happened, But he didn’t.
Still, she stayed under the tree, watching life go by, children skipped along the sidewalk. Hawkers waved sachet water in sweaty palms. The world moved forward.
And maybe… maybe she would too.
Somewhere deep inside her, she realized the journey had already happened. Just not the way she imagined.
Because sometimes, we do carry tickets in our hearts long after the train has passed...
Aisha did not need to travel to Kaduna to say goodbye, she just needed to let go of the story that never got its ending...
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