BECOMING ETERNAL
ALM No.95, November 2026
SHORT STORIES
It was 6:00 p.m. on a cold evening, just five hours after the July rains.
We gathered around the fire left burning in the coal pot that Mum had used to prepare dinner. There were six of us, from the eldest down to me, the fifth child, just before our last-born, Precious.
It was not our usual family gathering. Normally, we would sit around the fire and talk about what had happened during the day, especially at school. But that evening, Sarfo, the eldest, asked us a different question.
“What do you aspire to achieve in this life?”
He began.
Looking as innocent as the church servant he was, he said he wanted to become a great preacher in the future.
We applauded.
Then Richard spoke. He wanted to become an accountant. He could speak about mathematics with such confidence and solve problems so quickly that it seemed as though his mind housed a Casio calculator. The room came alive with praise. In a family whose father was a retired head teacher, his ambition seemed exactly right.
“I want to become a computer programmer,” Kwadwo the third in line said.
He spent most of his time talking about how phones worked. He would spend hours at a friend's house because that friend owned a Pentium IV personal computer. We were not surprised by his dream either.
Then came the fourth.
“I want to become a footballer.”
We all understood why. His physique and strength seemed to support the dream. He was a little short, but he had the stamina to endure a full football match. He was also the reason our father bought us boots, jerseys and footballs during the holidays.
Our family was full of talents.
And dreams.
Then it was my turn.
All eyes turned to me.
I was the fifth child.
“What do you aspire to do in ten years?”
I answered confidently.
“I want to become eternal.”
Silence.
The fire crackled.
The cold breeze moved through the evening.
Somewhere in the darkness, insects filled the night with their sounds.
I waited for the applause.
I waited for encouragement.
Instead, my siblings burst into laughter.
They began asking whether I was going insane.
“Only God and the gods are eternal.”
I sat there quietly.
For the first time, I realised that I was sitting among people who loved me but could not see what I was seeing.
The rest of the evening was spent making a mockery of my answer.
I did not know then that those few words would follow me for years.
The conversation spread throughout our community.
Soon, “Eternal” became my nickname the name people used whenever they wanted to make fun of me.
But goals are individual.
So I found somewhere else to keep mine.
With the little money I saved from my lunch allowance, I bought an exercise book.
I began writing my ideas inside it.
If my brothers could laugh at my dreams and tell the neighbours about them, then perhaps the book would not laugh at me.
The book listened.
The pen listened.
And I believed that words written in a book could remain long after the person who wrote them was gone.
Maybe that was my first understanding of what it meant to become eternal.
During the three years I spent in junior high school, I watched my classmates chase familiar dreams. They wanted to become doctors, nurses, footballers, engineers, IT professionals and teachers.
I never heard anyone say what I had said.
Nobody wanted to become eternal.
I began to feel alone.
People often say that when you become exceptionally good at something, you may have found your calling. I held on to that thought. I also remembered the words of Paulo Coelho in The Alchemist: “And when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it.”
I believed that someday I would find someone or perhaps a community that shared the same dream.
But until then, I had to carry it alone.
I remember the final days of junior high school when our teacher asked us to share what we wanted to become.
My classmates spoke confidently.
I was afraid.
I imagined the laughter.
I imagined the questions.
I remembered my siblings around the coal pot.
So I lied.
“I want to become a Curriculum Implementer.”
My lips said it.
My heart knew it was a lie.
For a long time, one question stayed with me:
How do I find my voice in an environment where my voice has become voiceless?
I began finding the answer through stories.
Whenever I watched a film with an amazing plot twist, I would collect the toys I had bought with money saved from my breakfast and lunch allowances. Sometimes, after joining my friends to pluck mangoes and oranges, I would return home and recreate the scenes I had just watched.
I played with my toys and turned them into characters.
I created scenes.
I created conflicts.
I created endings.
Playing alone became my hobby.
Not because I disliked people, but because I disliked being scrutinised for doing something I was passionate about.
My friends saw cheating as a normal part of playing.
I wanted to create.
“You're strange,” they would say whenever they saw me playing alone.
My father saw it differently.
He was a head teacher, and perhaps his experience had taught him that people were not all made the same.
“It’s not wrong to have time for yourself,” he told me.
That sentence stayed with me.
I was fifteen and approaching high school. Sometimes, I wondered whether I was already too old to be sitting on the floor playing with toys.
But the stories would not leave me.
I began making sketches with a pen inside my exercise book. Underneath the drawings, I wrote short dialogues.
I called the story The Fire Man.
I had created my own comic book.
It was nothing more than a blue pen and an exercise book.
My sketches were not good. I had not inherited the drawing skills of my older brothers. But to me, those drawings were important because they were mine.
I hid the book beneath the boxes where my clothes were kept.
Eventually, they found it.
“This sketch looks bad,” they said.
I stood there with my face facing the floor.
Once again, I heard the words inside my head.
Becoming Eternal.
I grabbed the book and hid it somewhere else.
I was learning something about myself.
When the world laughed at what I created, I became quieter.
When people criticised my dreams, I took them somewhere private.
When I could not speak, I wrote.
From upper primary through junior high school, the fear of being scrutinised and mocked by people close to me weighed heavily on my shoulders.
I preferred walking alone.
I preferred creating privately.
I believed that when you were alone, the world became quieter.
And sometimes, quieter was safer for a dream.
In 2016, we finally got a personal computer.
By then, I was in senior high school at Dwamena Akenteng Senior High School, studying General Arts.
My classmates had dreams of their own.
Once again, none of them wanted to become eternal.
But by then, I had stopped expecting people to understand.
Nothing made me feel more alive than writing and creating.
At home, I spent hours sitting beside my brother Kwadwo as he browsed the internet and chatted with his friends on Facebook.
When he left to play football with the neighbours, I would sneak onto the computer.
That was how I discovered the internet.
I learned how to browse.
I created my Gmail account.
I created my Facebook account.
And then I discovered something that changed my understanding of the world.
There were people like me.
I found platforms such as Studios Amazon, which at the time accepted unsolicited scripts for review, as well as Inkitt, Reedsy, Fairytalez and Webnovel.
These were spaces where people could write stories and share them with communities around the world.
For the first time in my teenage life, I understood that my physical environment did not have to determine the size of my ambition.
The world was bigger than my neighbourhood.
The world was bigger than my school.
The world was bigger than the people who laughed at my dreams.
On the internet, I encountered writers who shared advice and introduced me to books that would change the way I thought.
For the first time, I began to believe that perhaps I was not strange.
Perhaps I was simply looking for my people.
I submitted my work online many times, hoping that one day something I had written would be published.
Studios Amazon never accepted my work.
I was disappointed, but I was not defeated.
I was young.
I was still learning.
I had no one teaching me how to write, edit or proofread properly.
So I taught myself.
I wrote.
I edited.
I proofread.
I submitted.
And I tried again.
When I entered college, poetry became another way for me to understand myself.
I began writing after witnessing one of my college mates being bullied by seniors because she had different priorities. She wanted to focus on her education rather than entertain their conversations about relationships and dating.
I picked up my pen.
This time, I was not writing because I wanted people to understand my dream.
I was writing because I had emotions that needed somewhere to go.
It began as a hobby.
Then, during my second year, Level 200, something else changed.
I wanted my stories to become films.
I would listen to my friends discussing films they had watched and sharing ideas about them.
I wanted to create stories that could create those conversations.
I wanted my words to leave the page.
That was when I chose the name Mill Francis as my pen name.
“Mill” is an abbreviation of “Millions.”
I wanted to tell millions of stories.
I wanted to give millions of young people millions of reasons to believe that impossible is nothing.
I began searching.
Instagram.
YouTube.
IMDb.
Production companies.
Whenever I watched a film, I would wait for the end credits. I would write down the names of production companies and search for them online.
Then I would send emails.
One after another.
Most went unanswered.
But one day, someone replied.
Miss Naa Ashokor, an actress, host, news anchor and stage actress, responded to one of my emails. She asked me to send my short story for her to review.
I remember how that felt.
For a young dreamer, there was something powerful about being recognised by someone you had spent years watching on television.
Her response became one of the happiest moments of my journey.
It was small to someone else.
To me, it was a door.
I began studying young directors on YouTube.
That was how I encountered Director Vision, a young director filled with ambition and a desire to bring his creativity into the Ghanaian film industry.
Between 2022 and 2023, I sent him numerous short stories and concepts.
Then he told me something I needed to hear.
My stories could not simply be made into films.
I needed to learn how to turn stories into scripts.
It was another rejection.
But this time, I heard an opportunity inside it.
The mind that remains open to learning becomes the mind that fortune can follow.
So I started learning.
I spent weeks and months reading produced screenplays.
I studied Black Panther, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Fifty Shades of Grey and Peer Pressure.
I read Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder and The Anatomy of Genres by John Truby.
I also read The Power of Positive Thinking, The Alchemist, The Power of I Am by Joel Osteen and The Richest Man in Babylon.
During a difficult financial period, a female African-American friend I met on Facebook recommended The Richest Man in Babylon to me.
She taught me a lesson that remained with me:
The easiest way to ask someone for money is to first make yourself valuable in that person's life.
She meant that when you provide value to someone, they begin to understand the importance of your presence.
I began thinking about value differently.
Maybe becoming eternal was not simply about being remembered.
Maybe it was about leaving something valuable behind.
Then came 2024.
Director Vision wanted to begin producing impactful short films for young actors, and I got the opportunity to work with him.
What Do Girls Want? became the first film I wrote.
It was a short film.
Then came more:
My Teacher.
Sorry Mum.
My Muslim Girlfriend.
I was finally seeing something I had written become something people could watch.
That feeling was different.
I spent nights reading comments and studying how audiences responded to my stories.
The comments became another classroom.
I learned from them.
I grew.
Then came another opportunity.
I co-wrote a film that starred Enock Darko, known as What a Bombshell, who had already made a name for himself in Nollywood.
Friends and family began hearing about my work.
Their words started changing.
People who once laughed at my dream began looking at it differently.
For the first time, I felt that perhaps they were beginning to understand what that boy had meant around the coal pot years earlier.
Later in 2024, I worked on projects involving actors such as Kwaku Manu, Dr Likee/Aka Ebenezer and Papa Kumasi.
I co-wrote The Mall, a project financed by SG Mall in Kumasi. The cinema project featured Van Vicker, Agya Koo, David Osei, Aaron Adatsi, Kalybos, Kwaku Manu, Selma Mumuni, Dabo, Okomfo Kolege, the late Confion and other stars.
I also wrote Ballot Box, a film exploring how culture and beliefs can influence political views. Its release during an election year generated discussion on social media.
I wrote Single Father, a story based on Kwaku Manu raising four children as a lonely father.
These opportunities meant something to me.
Not simply because of the names attached to them.
They meant something because the boy who once hid an exercise book beneath a box was beginning to see his words move beyond the pages.
I returned home from production and noticed something had changed.
My schoolmates and friends looked at me differently.
But something else had remained unchanged.
Me.
I was still chasing the same dream.
The dream had simply grown.
Years earlier, I had said, “I want to become eternal.”
I did not understand the words completely then.
I understand them better now.
When I say I want to become eternal, I do not mean that I want to live forever.
I mean I want my footprints to become trails that young people can follow.
I want a young person who feels strange because of a dream to encounter my story and realise that being misunderstood does not mean being wrong.
I want young people to understand that their environment may influence their ambition, but it does not have to determine the size of it.
When I say I want to become eternal, I mean I want my written works to promote social cohesion and encourage diverse communities to grow together in unity.
I want my stories to outlive me.
I want the words I write today to become encouragement for someone I may never meet.
That is what becoming eternal means to me.
Not living forever.
Leaving something behind that continues to live.
Perhaps that is why I started with an exercise book.
I wanted my thoughts to survive me.
Today, I want my stories to do the same.
If the heavens grant me another two years, by 2028 I hope to write Part II of Becoming Eternal.
Perhaps by then, I will talk about the honours , citations and publications I have made during this space, more stories to tell and more footprints to look back on.
But I do not know what the future will bring.
For now, I am still writing.
Still learning.
Still creating.
Still becoming.
And perhaps that is the most honest meaning of my dream.
I am not eternal yet.
I am becoming.
Mill Francis is a Ghanaian screenwriter, poet, and story creator with over eight film credits, including international projects. His work explores identity, youth, mental health, disability, and social change. He is the co-founder of Students In Film, an international initiative connecting young filmmakers across Ghana, Mexico, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries through educational and socially impactful filmmaking. His projects have featured on Joy Learning TV and YouTube. With a passion for meaningful African stories and cross-cultural collaboration, Mill aims to inspire audiences, empower emerging filmmakers, and contribute to the global film industry through compelling storytelling.
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