In African culture—Wait, no, I don’t want to be presumptuous or in any way nationalistic enough to assume certain Ghanaian customs run true in other African countries. I might in fact just be speaking of what passes as practice in my family, but regardless of who the mores belong to, I was raised to keep family matters private. So if my dad has his own bedroom or my mum goes abroad for inexplicable lengths of time, it’s common knowledge within our household that we keep that business, and all matters like it, to ourselves. “They just won’t understand, you know? We’re Ghanaian, so we do things differently.”

Growing up, school dynamics, books, and shows on TV told me that best friends tell each other everything. It was almost the sole requirement, but I had to bend this rule, knowing the pieces of information I withheld meant I could never truly qualify as anyone’s best friend, not when no one really knew me.

Even now, none of my friends—helpfully, I don’t have many—know that every weekday I start the morning the same way. I wake up five minutes before my alarm and wait for it to go off at 6:00 a.m. I blink away any sticky traces of the night and tread silently downstairs, past my dad’s bedroom—now relocated to the ground floor—and into the kitchen. I close the door to restrict traveling noise and pour myself a bowl of cornflakes, eating a spoonful at a time as I move around the kitchen.

It’s a small, functional area with a gas stove (in desperate need of cleaning, but I assign that task to tomorrow evening), an oven with a missing grill door, a tall fridge, a smaller freezer filled with various unidentified let-me-not-waste-this food pieces (sorting through assigned to Saturday afternoon) and a washing machine that dances out from under the countertop when it’s on, but when empty is just light enough to push back with the weight of my body. Said countertops are a white-speckled dark gray with a dull sheen I think is meant to trick you into believing it’s marble.