16.4.2014.

"I want you to touch me. I want to moan your name. I want your tongue on my neck, whispering sex language, I want to feel you breath on my skin."
I stopped typing when I saw his message.
"I want to explore your body with my fingers and my tongue. I want to find those spots that would make your insides quaver. I want to suck your nipples till you forget to breathe."
I picked up my phone, and dialed his number from my memory.
"You should be here, I want you here. I need you to hold me"
We were torturing ourselves, we were just blocks away from each other and it hurt like hell.
All our conversations ended with the need for a deeper form of intimacy.
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"I want your hands on my arse. I want my tongue in your mouth. I want to feel your heartbeat against mine. I want to feel your hardness in-between my legs."
His message came in.
"I want to claim you for mine. I want to get you dripping wet with my fingers. I want to pound into you till forever."
I wanted joint bodies and heated romance. He wasn't even a few blocks away anymore, he was at the other end of the world and I was here. Some how we managed to talk about everything still, from my boring work hours to his sex escapades.
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Memory is like rain. Several emotions hitting you so hard, you want to run and look for cover. I was in love with him, I mean, there were several places I couldn't go without remembering his hands holding mine, or his laughter, or the taste of his mouth or how his skin shone like gold under the sun. My nights were incomplete without wanting him. I couldn't listen to the songs I loved without that familiar liquid ache under my skin wanting him to hold me like he did all the time when we played the same songs.

1, April, 2014.

Did I tell you how jittery I got as you took my hand while we walked through the corridor to our hotel room? Did I tell you my breathing stopped when you pushed me against the wall right before we got to the door? How my knees buckled as I felt your hardness on my ass, how I thought of all of that hardness inside me and I closed my eyes? Do you have any idea how confused and uneasy I was when we got into the room? How I had to remind myself repeatedly that we were not love, we were too damaged for love, this was sex, you said this was the better way. We both cared for each other and I was giving myself to you, you were going to be my first and I was deeply in love with you. How I saw my mother's sad eyes and my dad's disappointed face. I thought of Jesus looking down at me now, did He even understand? Did he also see my sadness, my many nights of lonely, my longing for senseless passionate nights and naive love? I smiled at you now. I needed this. You pulled me to you, kissing me fervently till my lower lips was sore from all that emotion. You were different from any other person I had been with, I felt the parts of my body your lips kissed ache delicately after you left them. How awkward and embarrassed I was at myself because I didn't know what to do, how to please you, how inexperienced I was. How I shivered with longing as your lips worked on my right boob, how I arched my back and held onto your afro. I was completely unprepared when your lips worked their way down in between my thighs, my body convulsed in pleasure and I moaned out your name like a plea. At that moment I realize I wasn't just pleading for a release but my heart was begging you to love me. I didn't want to scare you away, you always told me how you left all the other girls that wanted more. You said you liked me because I understood, that I knew better to recognize love as unnecessary weakness that would only complicate things.
You ask if I'm ready, I look at you with disturbed and uncertain eyes, and nod. You tell me to open up to you and I scramble to obey. Then I see it, we had been making out for several minutes but then I've just begun to apprehend how it looked like a weapon, an instrument of pain. I let you anyway, through the blinding pain, I closed my eyes tightly to wad of tears and bit my lips hard so I don't cry out. Was this what intimacy meant? I looked at you now, your face was wound up, your were so engrossed in riding me, at the frenzy to see the agonizing pain I was going through. I loved you even now, even with my cramped lower body. For many lifeless minutes I let that wave of countless drops of emotions drown me. You had pulled yourself from me and rolled to the other side of the bed. I looked at you and you looked away, things were never going to be the same.

24th March 2014.

The shrink was unenthusiastic about your next meeting.

You remember your first, she smiled alot when she discovered you were only 21, her warm forced smile met your cold unmoving face. You thought psychiatrists had a general grave look, maybe she kept the serious looks for her older clients or maybe it was your story. She asked alot of direct questions you didn't want to answer.

Now she looked at her watch too frequently, allowing the awkward silence engulf the both of you.

You lay on her leather couch staring blankly at the white ceiling as you thought of how you allowed all those men wound your human with their horns. How you felt yourself disappear as each man spread you open and ransacked you.  When you mistook your nights for lonely because your bed had so much space despite your many pillows, nights when you saw your own life, clear enough to recognize it as the driest desert of lonely, nights when the silence allowed your own mind to judge you. You  looked for a reason to forget so you let strangers hold you a little too tight.

Your father did not understand how his daughter's name was on the lips of all of his friends, how they had touched her most intimate places. How you watched your father crumble in front of you in unbelieving tears, how his grief told you you didn't love yourself.

“Sometimes love means letting go when you want to hold on tighter.” - Melissa Marr.

I thought about all the men in my life that had let me go.

Fredrick let me go in front of the hundred people we invited to witness our marriage. I was in my beautiful white wedding dress, looking at him with my hopeful eyes, full of love when he said he couldn't get married, that he wasn't ready. He walked out and got married to some other girl a month later.

John let me go in his alcohol reeking apartment, with careless words, in between rough kisses full of indifference, with his hands grabbing my ass so I could feel his hardness. The following months were full of pain and emptiness.

My dad let me and my mom go when he left for that dancer at his regular nightclub, who was way younger than she looked in her over exposed bleached worn out skin in the black skimpy dress she wore, she chewed her gum aggressively as she watched my dad throw my mom out of the house sneering in satisfaction.

Baantu.

Last night I went to bed happy. I woke up in the past. Purple seats. I held her. The whole world was shit, for all of us, but more so for her at this particular moment. I kissed her head. She broke down some more, but with a warning and a smile on her face. I knew she felt it too. We didn't need to say it. We were ours, and nothing was going to change that.

We always took long walks. Holding hands, misbehaving, she always called me a market woman and I called her a fish monger which always infuriated her.


She cried when everything was down and she cried when all we had were smiles. She would hold your hand tight and tug at it firmly but gently while she laughed, before  tilting her head and staring you straight in the eyes. Her eyes held promise back then, and even more so now. Behind that oval face, behind round inviting eyes, behind that fragile slender frame covered warm ebony skin, therein lies my strength, there in lies my future, there in lies my everything.
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I look at my life and I remember tears, lots of tears, lots of pain. I had a dream last night, I was on a train, I cant remember where it was going, but it didn't stop, like it kept moving till forever. He was there, I was holding his hand. We were laughing and talking about our lives, telling stories like they never really happened, like we were invincible, maybe we were. I felt different, light, like everything was over and I could smile now and I did.
Its the most wonderful feeling to have someone, someone that is not just a best friend but a part of you. Someone who understands regardless, someone who knows you inside out, someone you can be foolish with, someone who you feel safe enough with to expose yourself to in the most endearing and dangerous way, and I had him, and he was mine and we were on our road to our forever.



I was happy he was there and that my hand was in his, the same way we went through every other thing, together. This was what we promised ourselves for so long, to get through so much. Maybe we were dead, maybe we were on the road to the other side, maybe it was, only what it was a dream.

2nd March 2014.

Its was too silent today
Too silent for her to worry about her parents failing marriage
The way they always screamed at each other with hateful glaring eyes
Too silent for her to remember the doctors were killing her brother in the hospital
Malaria is always the problem, till the person dies
Too silent for her to grieve about her loneliness
The way she held her pillow to sleep on her lonely bed
and wondered why no one cared enough to stay
Too silent for her to ponder about her sexuality
why she found the glow in Claire's hair so fascinating
why she wanted to plunder her soft mouth
to bury her head and deeply inhale her fruity smell
Too silent to worry about her growing emptiness and lack of ambition
Her inability to dream impossible fantasies
Her fate was stiff and uncompromising
Her reality mirrored her future too clearly
She could see herself,
a single mother of five kids she could hardly cater for
she could see a life of hardship and pain
She couldn't dream for better
This is the only way she could see life
The only life she knew.

22 February 2014.

Drew was in my house again, I keep telling him to go away. He’s determined to help. He can’t help me; I’m fading away, losing pieces of myself every passing day.

“How do you feel, what do you feel?” he wants to understand.

I feel love. Her love. I still feel it. It’s why I hurt so much.

It makes me remember.

How I found love.

I fell in love with her husky voice over the phone.

I fell in love with her mind. How she could dream, how she was so excited about the world. I loved to hear her talk of all the things she wanted to do, all what she wanted to be, all the things she wanted to see, all the places she wanted to go.

“The world is so beautiful”, she would always say.

The world was beautiful to me through her eyes. She was the beauty in which I saw the world. She was where my world existed. The kind of life I wanted to live.

I loved to hear her talk excessively, about the most random things. I loved her small talk, how she would babble and laugh at her own silliness. She was simple, she was refreshing, and she was a free spirit.

I hated the days she was sad, how she hated seeing the children on the streets begging, I would see the pictures through her words. Children, naked with protruding bellies, rough hair, dirty skinned with hungry yellow pleading eyes. She wanted to do so much to help them.

“You can’t just save everyone”, I used to tell her.

But she was stubborn. I loved that. We argued a lot, and then laughed. It felt so good to know I couldn’t control her, that she was not like the other girls who never had their own minds and agreed to anything.

I fell in love with her distress when she confessed finally about having feelings for me. I found her confusion adorable, she was never confused. This was her first relationship.

I felt accomplished. She was mine and I didn’t deserve her. I mean she was endlessly fascinating and I was hopelessly boring.

I remember how I used to rant about how I hated love, how it was not for me, how I understood how the world worked and how having those feelings for another person was unnecessary and stressful.

I’m smiling now. I don’t think the same way anymore.

She was my nothing and my everything.

I still listen to her voice notes just to drown in her voice.

“So you’re in love?” Drew says answering his own question with another question.

He tries you know. I pity him sometimes. How he has to deal with my silence. He comes over to make conversations with himself and leaves. He gets me food that I don’t eat. I’m here waiting for him to give up on me like she did.

I just wanted her to try, fight, to show me that our love was worth something. She says I don’t understand. Maybe I don’t. What did I know, I am a French man living in Barbados and she is an Ibo girl living in Nigeria.

And her wedding was yesterday.