FIRST GLANCE, FOREVER

 

Title: "First Glance, Forever"

In the quiet town of Zabzugu, where the sun sets like melted gold across the savannah and the air smells of dust and distant mango trees, lived a young man named Karim. He wasn’t rich, nor was he famous. He worked as a mobile phone repairer at the local junction, under a small shed that leaned to one side every time the wind blew too hard.

Karim didn’t believe in love stories. To him, love was something that belonged in movies or music videos. He was too focused on fixing phones, saving for his own shop, and helping his mother at home. But all of that changed one Thursday afternoon.

The market was busy that day—voices shouting, goats crossing roads like they owned the town, and women selling kelewele by the corner. Karim was replacing a cracked screen when a voice, soft but confident, broke through the noise.

“Excuse me, do you fix Bluetooth problems?”

He looked up, and there she was.

She wasn’t dressed like anyone he had seen before. Her skin glowed like polished mahogany, her hair was wrapped in a colorful scarf, and her eyes... those eyes looked like they held secrets from another world. Karim’s hands froze. For the first time in his life, he didn’t know what to say.

“Yes… yes, I do,” he finally stammered, standing up too quickly and almost knocking over a fan.

The girl smiled, and that smile hit him like lightning. Her name was Sila, a university student visiting her aunt for the holidays. They spoke while he worked on her phone, but he barely heard her words. He was busy studying the way she bit her lip when thinking, how she twirled her scarf, and how she made his heart beat like a drum in a cultural festival.

That evening, as she left with her fixed phone and a soft “Thank you, Karim,” he stood there, lost. It felt like a piece of his chest walked away with her.

He didn’t sleep that night.

He kept asking himself, Was this what love felt like? This strange, beautiful ache?

The next day, she came back—not because her phone was still broken, but because she had “forgotten her charger.” Karim smiled. He understood what that meant.

And from that moment, things changed. She brought him food from her aunt’s house, and he told her stories about fixing phones with paper clips and hot spoons. They walked by the riverside, shared roasted corn under moonlight, and laughed like old souls who had just found each other.

Karim didn’t fall in love slowly.

He fell all at once.

From the moment he saw her, something inside him whispered, That’s her.

Not everyone gets a love like that—a love that walks into your life unannounced and rearranges everything. But for Karim, it happened one dusty afternoon in Zabzugu, when a girl asked if he could fix Bluetooth.

And just like that…
She fixed something in him too.