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.

THE JOYFUL HORRORS OF MARRIAGE.

1. It takes patience to endure, to understand, and to contain whatever that happens in a marriage.
2. “One thing I’ve discovered in this marriage thing is that blood is thicker than love. Maintain a good relationship with your siblings; they would have your back no matter what. If I want a straight forward advice I go to Vickie or Helen, not my husband. I mean, you can marry a man today, give him your life, your devotion, your everything, and one day he wakes up to leave, and you’ll be alone, with his kids to cater for”.
3. A marriage that has God as its foundation will never fail.
4. Marriage, for some girls is the highest accomplishment, bearing your man children makes you a complete woman, keeping your home and your marriage together, is another ball game.
5. You cannot depend on love to sustain a marriage.

THE ADEWUYIS.

They were in love when they had gotten married. They had been in love since they were in the university. The kind of love that convinces you to get married. They were both yorubas, so it was not a problem, their parents had known each other. It was a blessed union. I think their love died the moment Mrs. Adewuji transformed from the slender figure she once was when they had gotten married into an enormous being, with extra-large hips and folds everywhere. Having five kids does that to you I guess. Her husband felt pain, that what he paid bride price for years ago was gone. He thought about it every night when she came to bed and occupied most of the space or how their bed sank in when she lay on it. She never stopped eating though. She fried chicken and consumed two wings while just making the food. So he chose to work longer hours to make it bearable to deal with a marriage he no longer wanted. That was when he began to notice his secretary, Anita who was slender and light skinned, her skin glowed under the florescent of the office. Anita was nice; she wore tight shorts skirts and dresses to show off her good legs, she let him have a good view of her cleavage and bent down a lot till he felt he could almost see his target. He would never cheat on his unattractive wife still but Anita came on to him that night and he found himself slamming into her while she was bent on his table. It was the most amazing thing that had happened to him in a long time. They went on like this, he would have her on his desk the way he wanted, they would have drinks and laugh about everything, he would organize business trips to have them go away together till he wanted to have the life he had with her permanently. He left his wife and five kids to move in with Anita and never looked back. He blames his wife to this day for the failure of their marriage.

              THE OKAFORS.

Mr. Okafor was a wealthy man and an elder in the church. The early morning and night devotions in his house were compulsory. He didn’t joke with matters concerning the spiritual life of his family. Like the time he stripped his daughter naked and lashed her repeatedly in the front of the rest of the family for bringing shame to his name because she was texting in church and was told by an usher to put away her phone.  Mrs. Okafor was the head of the women’s union in the church, she encouraged women devote more time to God and He would take care of their marriages, her marriage being a wonderful example. Their new maid Ndidi was a catholic always praying her rosary even in her sleep. Her voice was the loudest whenever they had devotions, singing almost aggressively and dancing till she was sweating profusely. She sang in the same way, but a different song when Mr. Okafor was fucking her. For a Christian girl she knew how well God commanded a woman to please a man, whining provocatively on Mr. Okafor. She had the most wonderful body beneath her big clothes and skirts, the first time Mr. Okafor instructed her to take her clothes off, his mouth went dry as he watched her unveil the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. So during Mrs. Okafor’s women’s’ church meetings, her husband helped himself with their sizzling maid till she got pregnant with his child. The expression on Mrs. Okafor’s face was second to none when the maid confessed that it was her husband, not some area boy, not the driver or the gate man that had impregnated her.

THE OGAHS.

Getting married at 35 was perceived to be different sorts of wrong. A girl at that point would be seen as a failure. It had taken her so long to find love, to get married. Her mother had said all sorts of things to her back then and somehow, Mrs. Ogah wanted to go back to that time just so she would never have gotten married. A woman is blamed for so many things, topping the list is when she cannot bear children.  She had gone to every church, drank all sorts of potions to make her womb fertile for her husband’s seed. She thought about whether she ever really wanted a child or she just wanted to disappoint everyone and prove she was woman enough to have her own child. She knew there was the emptiness in her marriage, the number of words her husband spoke to her reduced daily.  He wouldn’t even touch her, there was no use wasting his semen on a barren woman. Her in-laws stormed into her home occasionally to ridicule her and call her names.  She couldn’t dare to return home, her mother would have a fit. So she stayed and endured. He started drinking. Maybe to forget he was married to her, she couldn’t tell. She tried to please him. She prepared the most delicious meals for him, meals he didn’t bother eating.  He just ignored her, went about the house like she was not even there. The silence drove her to madness. The kind of madness that gave her the courage to confront him. And that was when he released everything he had stored up inside on her. The hatred, resentment and anger.  She tried feebly to protect herself from his blow. He left her unconscious on the ground in the pool of her own blood.  He chased her out of his house that week and brought in the village girl his mother married for him.

7 February 2014.

I felt just as the apple tree behind the house that my dad had cut down for refusing to bear any fruit or the dying flowers after Baba Ojo, our gardener got fired for impregnating the house girl.

Love makes you blossom like a flower, the way I blossomed for you that night when I gave you everything.

I loved the idea of us together, so whenever my eyes caught yours, I tried to make you see our love through my eyes, show you how beautiful we could be.

We never got there but that was okay, because I was ready to understand. I settled for the love that brought loneliness with it.

Now I'm staring into nothing, replaying the images that live in my mind.

A child, our child, blood everywhere, the hanger in my hands. I was in the pool of my baby's blood. Its very existence. I was screaming. I still hear my baby cry in my head. Love makes us kill. And the blood never goes away.

The other girl. The pretty one. She didn't know about us, I hated the way she held you like you were hers. Her eyes called me names. You waved me off and called me a nobody. Her high-pitched laughter, I remember the annoying sound of it.

The pills my mom had in her drawer. Pain killers. The doctor had thought they'd take away mother's pain after daddy left her for a girl of my age. They never did. Mom was gone now. The pain took her.
I swallowed all the pills left in the tiny bottle and hoped they would be enough.

They weren't. I survived.