BYAJE ARI UBUCUTI BUSANZWE (Final)

🎵 Before you read this last chapter, press play.

There is a line in that song that says,

Kuva wamunsi unsezera sindongera no gukunda narimwe

umutima wange uhora ukunyishyuza Sindakunda, nyuma yawe

I heard that line for the first time after everything ended. And I sat with it for a very long time. Not because it made me feel sorry for myself. But because it was the most honest sentence I had ever heard about what first love actually costs.

Let it play while you read. You will understand why by the end.

If you have made it to this chapter, I want you to know something first.

This is not easy to write. Not because I don’t remember, I remember everything, but because some memories are stored in your body, not just your mind, and when you reach for them, they don’t come as thoughts. They come as feelings. The weight of a phone in your hand at midnight. The smell of an evening you walked through because you couldn’t stay still. The exact way a short message can land in your chest and change the temperature of your whole life.

I have been writing this series because I believe real stories deserve to be told. Not the clean versions. Not the ones that end neatly with a lesson and a bow. The real ones. The ones that still have edges on them years later.

This is the last chapter.

If you haven’t read Parts One, Two, and Three yet, please go back and start there. Not because this won’t make sense without them. But because you will feel this one differently if you already know who she was to me before you learn how it ended.

For those of you who have been here since the talent show, since the first Instagram message, since the birthday cake and the walk across the city in the dark. Thank you for staying. Here is where we finish.

Before I tell you how it ended, I need to say something I have never really said out loud.

She changed me.

Not in the soft, easy way people use that phrase about someone they once loved. I mean she actually, physically, concretely changed the way I was living. Because before Benita, I was carrying habits that were quietly burning my life down from the inside. Things I thought made me look unbothered and cool and older than I was. She didn’t sit me down and give me a speech. She didn’t issue warnings or ultimatums or make me feel small. She just loved me in a way that made those things feel like they belonged to a version of me I didn’t want to be anymore.

She made me want to be the man she already believed I was.

That is the rarest thing love can do. Not fix you. Not correct you. Just make you want to choose better, on your own, because you finally have something worth choosing better for.

She helped me in ways I am still counting. She made me feel, genuinely, that someone was on their knees praying for me. Not as a religious exercise. Not as a habit. But because she actually wanted God to watch over me the way she was watching over me.

I want to say this clearly, for anyone reading this who knows her, or who will know her someday: she was a good girl. She is a good girl. I cannot write anything less than that and call this story honest. The man who ends up with her is going to be one of the luckiest human beings to ever walk this earth. I mean that with everything in me, without bitterness, without performance. Just truth.

National exams came for me in the most complicated way possible.

I had been suspended from school. Sent home before the exam period. They told me I could sit the exams, but I could not live in boarding while doing it. Sent home. Just like that. The boy who had spent two years building something real, something that existed in midnight calls and computer lab messages and a birthday night that still lives in my chest, was handed a bag and shown the gate.

When I called her to tell her, I didn’t know what to expect.

She didn’t pull back. She pulled closer.

She called me every single night of that exam period. Every. Single. Night. She asked what I had studied, whether I had eaten, how I was feeling, whether I was sleeping. She listened to me worry about things I couldn’t control and talked me back down, every time, with a patience I did not deserve. And when I told her I was scared, when I admitted out loud what I couldn’t admit to anyone else in my life, she didn’t minimize it. She held it with me.

“Babe,” she said one night, her voice low and steady and warm in a way I can still hear if I close my eyes, “I know God will work it out. I am praying for you every day. You are going to do it. I know you are.”

I held that sentence like a lantern in a dark room.

There is something about being believed in by someone who has no obligation to believe in you. She was not my mother. She was not my teacher. She was a girl in a boarding school who could have been doing anything else with her late nights. Instead she was calling me, choosing me, showing up for me in the only way the distance allowed.

I finished the exams.

I passed.

When I told her, she didn’t say “I knew it.” She didn’t say “I told you so.” She just said, quietly, like she was exhaling something she had been holding:

“I prayed for you. You did it.”

Five words. And somehow they meant more than any celebration could have.

She believed in me when the institution that was supposed to believe in me had sent me home. That is the kind of love that doesn’t show up in highlight reels. It shows up at midnight, on an ordinary Tuesday, when you need it most and least expect it.

After exams, she went back to school for her final year.

I stayed outside. In the real world. In that strange, disorienting space between the person you were in school and the person you are supposed to become next. I was looking for work, trying to figure out money, thinking about university, thinking about the future, all of it pressing on me at once without a timetable to organize it.

It is a lonely kind of confusion, being on the outside when the person you love is still on the inside.

We still talked. But not the way we used to. Not the three hour calls. Not the instant replies. The conversations got shorter. The gaps between messages got wider. Not because the love had disappeared, I don’t think it had, at least not then, but because life was pulling us into different rhythms that were hard to sync from a distance.

She was in school, in classes, in structure. I was in the streets, figuring out who I was without a uniform on. Two different worlds that had once fit together perfectly were now running on different time.

I told myself it was just adjustment. That we would find our way back to each other’s frequency.

I held onto that for longer than I probably should have.

There is one night from this whole story that I will carry until I am old.

It was dark already when we left. A few of my friends were with me, the kind of friends who don’t ask too many questions when you say “I need to go see her.” They just put on their shoes and come with you. We moved through the city together, Kimironko getting smaller behind us, Kicukiro still a long way ahead, the night air doing that thing it does in Kigali where it holds the sound of motorbikes and music from somewhere further away and makes everything feel slightly cinematic.

We walked the whole way.

Not because there was no other option. But because something in me needed to feel every step of the distance between us. Needed to close it physically since I couldn’t always close it in the other ways that mattered. Love does that to you. It makes the most irrational thing feel like the only logical response.

When we got close, I called my belle soeur.

“Tell her to come outside,” I said. “The small door at the front. Make sure the car doesn’t see her.”

I stood in the street with my friends, the city moving around us, and waited.

A few minutes later, the door opened.

She stepped out into the dark.

She looked toward the street and found me immediately, like she already knew exactly where I would be standing. And the way her face changed when she saw me, that specific shift from confusion to recognition to something I have spent years trying to find the right word for, that is the image I keep returning to. Not the birthday party. Not the first phone call. This. Her face in the dark, changing the moment she found mine.

She came to me quickly. She didn’t walk slowly the way people do in movies. She moved, the way you move toward something you have been missing without knowing how much until the moment it is in front of you.

She hugged me in the middle of the street. And I held her there, with my friends somewhere behind me pretending to look at their phones, with Kigali’s night wrapped around everything, and I felt every single kilometer of that walk in my legs and none of it, not one step of it, felt like too much.

We didn’t need to say much. We just stood there for a little while, in the dark, together. Being in the same space again after the distance of weeks and phone calls and messages that were never quite enough.

That is what love made me do. Walk across the city at night with my friends, through the dark, to stand in front of her for a few minutes and remember what was real.

I will never forget that night as long as I breathe.

Sometimes love doesn’t need a grand gesture planned in advance. Sometimes it just needs one person who decides, on an ordinary night, to close the distance on foot.

She went back to school after that.

We kept talking, but something in the conversations had started to feel different in a way I could feel but couldn’t name. Like the same words were being said but with less weight behind them. Less warmth. Like two people both reaching for something and finding slightly less of it each time.

She told me once that she didn’t have as much interest in love and relationships as she used to.

I heard it. I sat with it. But I held onto what we had been and told myself things would settle. I kept showing up. Kept texting. Kept being the person I had always been to her, because I had made promises and I do not break promises. I had never cheated. Had never tried to hurt her. Not once. Whatever was shifting around us, my part of this had stayed clean and I knew it.

But promises, as I was about to learn, cannot hold a door open if someone has already decided to let it close.

The message came on an ordinary day.

No buildup. No long conversation ending in it. No fight it was the conclusion of. Just a message. Short. The kind of message that arrives quietly and lands like something heavy being set down on your chest.

She said she was no longer in a relationship.

That was it.

I read it.

Read it again.

Put my phone face down on the table. Picked it back up. Read it one more time like the words might be different on the third pass.

I’m no longer in a relationship.

Five words. Five words that reached back across two years of late night calls and computer lab minutes and one night walking across the city in the dark, and quietly, without ceremony, turned all of it into memory.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t break anything. I didn’t call her and demand an explanation or beg her to reconsider. I just sat there in the silence of my own room with that message on my screen and felt something leave my chest that I still have not found the right name for.

It was the worst message I had ever received in my life.

And it still is.

But I didn’t just accept it and move on. I couldn’t.

I called her.

Not once. Not twice. Night after night, I picked up my phone in the dark and called her, not to argue, not to make her feel guilty, but because I genuinely believed that if I could just find the right words, if I could just say the thing that made her remember what we had, we could fix it. We could go back. We could find our way to each other again.

I will never forget those nights for as long as I live

Lying there in the dark, the phone pressed to my ear, hoping she would pick up. Sometimes she did. And when she did, I didn’t know how to start. I didn’t have a speech prepared. I just had the truth, raw and unpolished and probably too much, that I still loved her, that I didn’t understand what had changed, that I was willing to do whatever it took.

Some nights she listened. Some nights the call was short and careful, like she was already somewhere I couldn’t reach.

And every single night, I went to sleep without the answer I was looking for.

I used to think if I called enough times, something would shift. That one of those calls would be the one where her voice came back to me the way it used to, warm and certain, the one that said Babe like it was a word she had invented just for me. That one of those calls would undo the message and put us back somewhere before it arrived.

But it didn’t work. None of it worked.

And slowly, painfully, one unanswered feeling at a time, I had to begin to understand that some doors, once closed, are not asking to be reopened. Not because the love wasn’t real. But because sometimes love is real and it still ends. And the person on the other side of the door is not being cruel. They are just being honest.

That understanding did not come quickly. It came in pieces, over weeks, in the silence between calls that got fewer and further apart until one night I looked at my phone and realized I hadn’t called in days. And the fact that I hadn’t called didn’t feel like giving up anymore. It just felt like finally, quietly, letting go.

I will never forget those nights. The hoping. The dialing. The way the phone ringing on her end sounded like the loneliest sound in the world when you don’t know if anyone is going to answer. I gave everything I had to fixing something that had already finished. And I have no regrets about that. Because at least I know I tried. At least I know I didn’t just walk away without reaching back.

There is a kind of pain that doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t break things or make noise. It just settles into the empty space where something warm used to be, and stays there quietly, until you learn how to live around it.

I have thought about this part longer than any other.

There is no anger in me when I think about her. I want to say that clearly, not because it makes me sound good, but because it is simply true. Not a single corner of what I feel when her name crosses my mind has anything to do with resentment.

She was good to me. She was good to me in ways she probably doesn’t even know. She stopped me from things that were slowly taking pieces of me I didn’t know I was losing. She prayed for me during exams when the institution that was supposed to carry me had sent me home. She called me Babe like it was the name I was born with. She cried on my shoulder at her own birthday party because she couldn’t contain how loved she felt. She said “I prayed for you, you did it” in a voice I still hear sometimes.

That is not nothing. That is actually everything.

I thank God that I never broke my promises to her. I never cheated. I never tried to hurt her. Even when things were getting harder and quieter and I could feel something slipping, I stayed. I walked across the city in the dark to stand in front of her for a few minutes because that was the kind of love I had for her. And I am not ashamed of a single step of it.

Some people don’t just walk through your life. They leave fingerprints on the person you become. She is one of those people for me. And whoever ends up with her someday, I genuinely hope he knows what he has. I hope he knows to hold it carefully.

First love is not a rehearsal.

I know that sounds like something you put on a quote card. But I lived it. And I am telling you from the other side of it: what I had with Benita was not practice for something else. It was its own complete thing. It counted. It built parts of me that are still standing.

She taught me what it means to be chosen. To have someone decide, every single day, that you are worth their time and their heart and their prayers.

She taught me what it means to choose someone back. To block her for a week, to feel terrible every hour of those two days, and hold the decision anyway because you loved her enough to hurt yourself a little if it meant making her happy.

She taught me that love is not just a feeling. It is a decision you make again and again, quietly, without applause, in moments nobody ever sees.

And she taught me, in the ending, that sometimes love is not enough to make two lives fit together. That timing is real. That distance is real. That two people can love each other genuinely and still find themselves standing on different sides of something they cannot cross. And that is not a failure. It is not something anyone did wrong. It is just life, doing what life does, moving people forward even when they would rather stay.

You don’t have to hate someone to lose them. You don’t have to have done something wrong for something right to end. Sometimes love is real and the ending is still real too. And the only thing you can do is be grateful, fully grateful, that you got to have it at all.

Benita, if you ever read this, I want you to know something.

I meant every single word I ever said to you. Every late night call. Every promise. Every “nanjye ndagukunda” typed in a computer lab while I was supposed to be writing code. Every step I walked from Kimironko to Kicukiro in the dark. Every post, every repost, every time I set your face as my wallpaper because I wanted even my phone to remind me of what I had.

I don’t carry this story as a wound. I carry it as proof that I am capable of loving someone the right way. You showed me that. You were the first person who made me feel like the version of me I always wanted to be was real, was possible, was already there waiting to be chosen.

I pray for you. For your future. For your joy. For the plans God has for you that none of us can see yet.

You are a good girl. You were always a good girl.

And to everyone reading this, wherever you are in your own story, whether you are still in the beginning, in the middle of something beautiful, or sitting with a message on your screen that changed everything:

It is worth it. Every part of it.

The midnight calls. The computer lab minutes. The birthday surprises you plan for weeks. The cities you walk across in the dark just to be in front of someone for a few minutes.

All of it.

Even the ending.

Especially the ending. Because the ending is what makes everything before it mean something. And everything before it was real.

Byaje ari ubucuti busanzwe.

It came like an ordinary thing.

But it was never ordinary at all.

THE END

If this story made you feel something, made you remember someone, made you want to go back and read from Part One, then it did exactly what it was supposed to do.

Share it. Quote it. Send it to someone who needs to read it.

And if you are in the middle of your own love story right now, pay attention. The ordinary moments are the ones you will miss the most.

Joe Rukundo