I was five years old the day my mother came to see us.

The evening sun must have been setting like a defiant chief on the western side of Niellé, leaving behind a stubborn reminder of its heat. The brown earth still baked beneath our feet, and the air carried the mingled smells of dried fish, spices, and palm oil drifting from the nearby stalls. Somewhere close, I was playing with other children beside the only photo studio, Master’s Photo Studio, just opposite the market. The sound of our laughter mixed with the calls of traders packing up for the day.

Then she appeared.

A woman in a clean wrapper ,  or so I imagine now , though her face must have betrayed the weariness of travel. Her eyes carried both hope and hunger, and exhaustion seemed to hang on her shoulders. She must have sighted me and come forward, the dust rising with each step as if the earth itself wanted to announce her arrival. Her hands, I now imagine, trembled slightly as she reached toward me.

She bent down until her face was level with mine. I must have caught the smell of the road on her wrapper — a mixture of sweat, dust, and distance. Her voice came low, soft, almost pleading.

“Do you know who I am?”

I stared at her, my small chest tightening as the world grew silent around me. Even the pestles pounding millet in a mortar nearby seemed to pause mid-beat. My eyes searched her face for recognition, for something familiar. But there was nothing. Only a stranger standing in the dust before me, her eyes wet with waiting.

“No,” I said. Mma is mother.

Her smile collapsed. Tears gathered quickly, spilling down her cheeks like sudden rain in dry season. Her lips trembled as she whispered, almost broken,

“I am your mother.”

I was confused. I remember her head shaking. Perhaps it was her dignity stripped in the presence of onlookers whose eyes pierced us with silence. Shame, pain, and confusion mingled in the dust.

Without hesitation, I ran away from her.

I was only a child then. Now I feel the weight of a truth I could not carry. Looking back, I understand. Something broke in her that day—a crack too deep for either of us to mend. By the time my own understanding ripened, death had already closed the door.

That memory has never left me. It taught me that life rarely hands us full circles. More often, we live in half-circles—unfinished, incomplete, aching for closure that never comes.

But half-circles carry their own wisdom:

• Wholeness is an illusion. The perfect circle of belonging may never come.
• Edges shape us. Our fractures become the very ground where resilience grows.
• Belonging begins inside. No tribe, family, or culture can complete us.

If you wait for the whole circle, you may wait until your beard or hair turn grey. But if you lean into the half-circles, you may find they hold more truth, more humanity, and sometimes more beauty than the wholes we chase.

Because sometimes, it is the broken edges where the light gets in.

So I ask you: What half-circles in your own story have shaped you more than the wholes you thought you needed?

— Anselm Ezemson