Letters to the Girl in Sunflower Yellow

Every morning at exactly 7 AM, Tunde stood at the Ojuelegba BRT bus stop, pretending to scroll through his phone while secretly watching her. The girl in yellow.

She was impossible to miss. Her dress, always a shade of bright sunflower, swayed with the Lagos breeze as she stood waiting for the bus. She never fidgeted, never looked impatient, just stood there, serene amidst the chaos of honking cars and hurried commuters.

Tunde wanted to talk to her. Desperately. But every time he worked up the courage, his words stuck in his throat. What if she ignored him? What if she laughed?

So, instead, he wrote.

The first letter was simple:

“You don’t know me, but I see you every morning in your yellow dress. You stand like the world isn’t rushing around you, and I wonder, where do you go? What do you dream about? If you find this, smile at the sky today. I’ll know you read it.”

He slipped the letter between the pages of a book at the roadside stall where he had seen her browsing before. The next day, she smiled at the sky.

His heart nearly burst.

More letters followed. A folded note tucked into her café receipt. A message handed to a street artist sketching her portrait. Each time, she responded, sometimes in words, sometimes in gestures.

“I do have dreams,” she wrote one day, leaving the note under the lid of a takeaway cup. “But I like mysteries too. So I’ll let you keep guessing.”

And so it went.

Tunde felt like he knew her now,  the way she loved old books, her habit of counting the number of red buses that passed, and how she believed yellow wasn’t just a colour but a feeling.

But they never spoke. Never met.

Then one morning, she wasn’t there.

Tunde waited. The next day, and the next. Still no yellow dress.

Panic gripped him. He combed through her letters, searching for clues. The bookstall. The café. The street artist. Nothing.

Then he saw it, his last note, still where he had left it. Unread.

Something was wrong.

Summoning all the courage he never had, he asked the café manager about her. The man frowned. “Oh, you mean Amina? She used to come here every day, but she mentioned travelling soon. Maybe she already left.”

Tunde’s heart sank. He had waited too long.

Then, just as he turned to leave, the manager handed him a slip of paper.

It was a note.

“I hoped you’d come looking. Meet me at the park on Saturday at 5 PM. No more letters. Just you and me.”

Tunde grinned.

Sometimes, love wasn’t just about words. It was about showing up before it was too late.

The End.