Where the Sky Ends
by Praise Ukpai

The first time I tried to fly, I was six years old and absolutely convinced the sky had an end. It was a blazing afternoon in my grandmother’s village, where the air smelled of sunbaked earth and wood-smoke, and the world seemed to stretch forever. I climbed the tallest tree in the compound—a stubborn, gnarled baobab that had stood longer than the oldest elder—stretched out my arms, and leapt. 

For a brief, glorious moment, I was weightless. Free. A bird, just like the ones I had watched take off from our rooftop every evening. 

Then the ground smacked me back into reality. 

I landed in the hard-packed dirt with an impact that rattled my ribs. The women pounding millet nearby gasped, their wooden pestles pausing mid-air. My grandmother came running, her wrapper flapping, her eyes sharp with fury and worry. She found me sprawled under the tree, dazed but grinning, and clicked her tongue. 

“You want to be a bird, eh?” she muttered, pulling me up by the arm, dusting off my scraped knees. “You cannot defy the rules of the gravity, child. Girls do not fly.” 

I did not know what gravity meant, but I had seen the birds. And they were not all male. 

Time passed and years later, in my innocent adolescence, I had another attempt at adventure. That same defiant spirit dragged me to the edge of the Sahara with nothing but a backpack, a battered notebook, and the kind of reckless optimism that had always made people shake their heads at me. I had chased adventure from the winding alleyways of Zanzibar to the rolling hills of Lesotho, but here, in this vast and relentless sea of sand, I felt something I had never felt before: the sharp, searing weight of solitude. 

Solitude is not merely the absence of people. It is the presence of oneself in the rawest form. It is waking up in a world that does not expect you, does not demand of you, and yet, in its indifference, forces you to confront your own existence. In the desert, there was no city hum, no distant chatter, no clinking of pots or rhythmic calls of traders haggling over the price of kola nuts. There was only silence—the kind that stretches for miles, wrapping around you like an unrelenting embrace. 

It was not the kind of silence I had known before. Not the hushed, stolen moments in a bustling house, nor the brief respite from conversations in a crowded market. This was an endless silence, a void that made my thoughts louder, my fears sharper, my desires clearer. I could no longer hide behind movement, behind the illusion of belonging. Here, I belonged only to myself. 

At first, it felt exhilarating. The freedom to move, to exist without expectations. But then came the weight of it. The understanding that solitude, when prolonged, is not simply peace—it is also confrontation. Every suppressed doubt, every question I had buried beneath layers of ambition, every whisper of uncertainty came rushing to the surface. The sky stretched infinitely above me, the dunes folded endlessly below me, and in that vastness, I felt both powerful and terrifyingly small. 

I thought of my grandmother, of her warnings, of the women in my village who had never stood where I stood now. Had they ever longed for this? Had they ever dreamed of a world beyond the familiar? Or had they, in the quiet of their own solitude, accepted the boundaries drawn around them? 

I listened. 

The dunes whispered ancient stories, shifting under my feet like restless spirits. My guide, a wiry Tuareg man named Salim, had skin dark as roasted groundnuts and eyes that seemed to carry the wisdom of centuries. He watched my wide-eyed wonder and smiled. “The desert,” he said in his slow, deliberate Hausa, “is only cruel to those who do not listen.” 

I listened. 

At night, the wind howled like a hungry spirit. The stars blazed overhead, so bright and close they looked like they might drip fire onto the dunes. Salim brewed Tuareg mint tea over an open flame, the fragrant steam curling in the crisp air. He poured it from high above the cups, his movements slow, deliberate, reverent. He told me of his ancestors, traders who once led caravans across this very sand, men and women who had memorized the sky because maps did not work where the earth moved. 

“The desert has rules,” he continued, handing me a cup. “Rules that are not written, only known.” 

I sipped the tea, its sharp sweetness grounding me. “And what happens to those who don’t know them?” 

He chuckled. “They are lost. Or they learn.” 

I traced the rim of my cup, staring at the shifting sands beyond the fire. “And what about those who make their own way?” 

Salim studied me for a long moment. Then he said, “The desert does not punish or reward. It only reveals. Those who make their own way must be ready to see themselves, as they truly are.” 

The words settled in my chest like a weight. I had spent so much of my life searching for something—freedom, adventure, a place beyond the limits set for me. But what if all I had been running toward was a clearer version of myself? 

Maps. Plans. The safety of certainty. I had abandoned all of that years ago, choosing instead to follow my own uncharted road. 

There was a wild kind of thrill in the unknown, in stepping away from the carefully drawn lines of expectation and into the vast, ungoverned world. It was why I had packed my bags and left home, why I had sought out the unknown instead of settling for the predictable paths carved out for women like me. I wanted to test the edges of the world, to push past the boundaries I had been told were fixed. I had learned to read the sky instead of the news, to measure time in sunrises and not in deadlines. The idea of certainty, of a carefully structured life, had always felt like a trap. I was not made for walls, for maps, for limits. 

But even the wildest souls have their limits. 

On the third day, the harmattan winds came like an angry god. One minute the world was golden, shimmering, endless. The next, the sky turned ochre, the wind roared, and suddenly, the desert was teeth and fury. Salim shouted something I couldn’t hear, his voice stolen by the storm. I wrapped my keffiyeh around my face and ran, blind, through the suffocating chaos. 

When the winds finally relented, I was alone. 

The world was nothing but silence and gold. My footprints had already been swallowed by the shifting sands. Panic clawed at my throat. Adventure had become something else entirely—something raw, something terrifying. For the first time in my life, I wondered if I had finally pushed too far. 

And then I saw her. 

A woman, wrapped in deep indigo robes, her veil trailing behind her like the wings of a bird. She rode a camel with the kind of effortless grace I had spent my whole life trying to master. She was a vision against the endless horizon, moving toward me with unshaken confidence. As she drew closer, I realized she was not alone. Behind her, a small caravan of women followed, their faces wrapped against the sun, their eyes burning with quiet determination. Their robes, dyed in shades of dusk and midnight, fluttered in the wind like banners of war. 

She stopped before me, tilted her head. Her face, though half-veiled, was lined with the kind of beauty that came from endurance, from having walked further than anyone believed a woman should walk. 

“You are lost,” she said in Fulani, her voice smooth as river stone. 

I nodded, swallowing down the lump in my throat. 

Without hesitation, she handed me a small calabash filled with water. The gourd was cool against my palm, the water sweet as rain. “Then you will walk with us.” She said, smiling. 

And just like that, I was folded into the ranks of the desert women— women who had carved their own existence in a place that did not forgive the weak. They moved with purpose, spoke in soft, firm voices, and laughed like they belonged to the wind. I did not know their names, and they did not ask for mine. But they did not question why I was here. They did not ask what a woman like me was doing, wandering alone where only men were supposed to go. 

They simply accepted me. 

We walked for hours, the sun setting behind us in a riot of copper and blood. One of the women, her hands calloused from a life of survival, handed me a date from the pouch at her side. “You remind me of my sister,” she said. “She left home to be more than what they said she could be.” 

I smiled. “Did she fly?” 

“She learned to walk first,” she said with a knowing look. “Then she found her wings.” 

The next morning, as we set off again, I realized something: the spirit of adventure is not found in the fearless, but in those who fear and move forward anyway. It is found in the quiet resilience of folks who refuse to be contained, in the unbreakable bonds that form in the unlikeliest of places. It is in the mothers who defy expectations, in the daughters who dream beyond the horizon, in the sisters who walk through fire and sand and still press forward. But it is also in the men who challenge tradition, who choose compassion over dominance, who recognize that strength is not in control but in coexistence. It is in the fathers who teach their daughters to dream, in the brothers who walk beside their sisters rather than ahead of them, in the sons who refuse to inherit the shackles of old ways. 

And so, with the sand at my feet and the sky stretching into infinity, I walked on—toward whatever lay beyond the horizon, toward the end of the sky.