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.

Incomplete.

When you have the urge to waste your life before it begins. When your own future means nothing anymore cause you've lost  faith in yourself. When you feel like slitting your wrists and watching your own blood run out. Would it be a sin to hate your life so much it hurts you to live? Would it be a sin to relieve yourself of the continuous pain you endure each day? Would you still have to suffer in eternal damnation after hurting so much in this life? Wouldn't God be a bit merciful to grant you that closure, that relief you need in your afterlife?
Tolani lost her mom to an unknown disease. She fought to save her life despite their state of destitution. Truth was that her mother was destined to die right from the first morning she complained of the terrible headaches. Friends and family turned their backs on them and even then, no matter the amount she would have come up with, she could only afford the local clinic whose efforts to stamp out the disease were hampered by a poverty of medical supplies and the negligence of the doctors. Now she was tossed around among relatives who used her but never wanted to keep her. She was presently with Uncle Arinze who carried his too-drunk self to her bed instead of his wife's. And his wife detested her for it, making her work for the penance of her husband's sin. Tolani now carried her uncle's child in her womb. She could no longer dream of a life, for a future. The abomination in her womb took all that away.

14 January 2014.

Some of us live to not forget. We carry scars heavy as bags of cement that crush our hearts so hard sometimes we fight to breathe. When love turns into sour milk, or when you give your heart to someone who cares just enough to let it fall into nothingness, or when you trust enough to believe in someone to never fail you, to always have your back. You trust that person enough to believe anything.
Loving someone is different for me. Exposing a wild part of myself that I had not understood enough to tame. So I avoided being emotionally involved with anyone for the fear of being too extreme. Until him. He made me feel safe enough to bare all of myself in the most shameless way. Maybe I wanted him to love me so bad I ignored to see whether he actually did love me. I mean why would you want to make someone who claims to love you, love you when he says he already does. I was too busy fighting for his attention, trying to revive our dead conversations to accept the obvious. I'm still trying to understand what I would have done differently. I would have never known.
Something about him made time and my breath cease for fleeting seconds. Whenever I got his messages, the times I got desperate enough to dial his number and when we went on dates. He wasn't what I wanted but he was enough. Enough for me to love blindly and ignore what I considered as petty shortcomings.
What seems petty is just what we are allowed to see. The exposed small part of something bigger lurking in the darkness. I feared for what hid in the darkness behind your eyes and inside your mind. The darkness brings a lot of things along with it. The darkness that night brought more than I could handle. I remember my excitedness. The dark lace lingerie I had on under my danshiki. The one I paid through my teeth for. The one that was to make your jaw drop and your pupils dilate. I had the keys to your apartment. It was to be a surprise. You thought I was at the other end of lagos, sleeping already maybe. It was 11pm. First thing I heard was the shower. Then laughter. You were not alone. Or you were. Something was off. I expected the imaginary girl I had always feared. But I walked into something my poor mind would have never conjured. Another male was with him in the shower. They held each other and laughed. The most horrifying part was the kiss. How they kissed so passionately. That was when my knees couldn't keep me standing and I stumbled back so I feel backwards, luckily finding the wall for support. It was his best friend. Again he took my breath away but differently this time, this time I wished to die.

5 Things We Need to Learn.

-Don't force someone else's medicine down your throat.
Mama Bayo's husband hit her always. He gave her scars that could not be hidden. Scars that were difficult to lie about.Her friend, Mama Ibeji had a similar case. She poisoned her husband and now she lives without fear. Mama Bayo took the kitchen knife and stabbed her husband repeatedly. Her son who watched her butcher his father, shot her in the head. Bayo loved his father. He was his father's son.
-Be a good friend regardless.
Tola was a good friend to Ore. Even when Ore started trafficking drugs, she worried about him enough to report him to the police to have him arrested. Ore would come out a better man because of Tola.
-Forgive always.
Amanda's father never forgave her for letting herself be molested when she was barely 7. He lashed her repeatedly with the iron buckle of his belt. The belt cut her skin deeper than the assault she barely understood. Amanda never forgive her dad for it. She doesn't remember being molested but she remembers her father's hateful words and the belt buckle...
-Avoid bad romance.
Joseph liked Lara since first grade. He'd do the sweetest things like give her flowers and write love poems. He'd dream of her smile. After graduation, Lara began to like him back. But he was always too busy to reply her. He had moved on to his best friend Tolu, who he discovered he was in love with...
-Live light.
Carry no burdens. Learn to let go. Find happiness in the littlest things. Pamela let go of all her lovers. Even George who proposed the week before to dedicate herself to God and the church. She found the joy of the Lord in His temple. His temple was her body. She'd touch herself each night till she made herself cum.

Don't mock a pain you have not endured

Many times we hate ourselves for being alone. We blame ourselves for the many times we opened ourselves up to people who didn't understand enough to stay. Sometimes we give up and give in to defeat and silence, strengthening our pain and our shame. We live inside the corners of ourselves for the fear of being discovered for what we are. Broken. Hurt. Damaged.

A lesson I learnt; "Don't mock a pain you have not endured". Halima gave in midnight showers. Something about the way the water reassured her that she was not alone even when she still had to face her lonely cold bed. She'd curl up and cry her eyes out for the people she trusted enough to see the real her. The people she wanted to stay. The ones who didn't. She gave into songs with lyrics that cut her deeper than knives. Songs that made her remember who she was. Lonely. She belonged too deeply to herself to belong to anyone now.

Nobody could want to be with her like she did. Or understand her like she did. Yet they wondered why she didn't blossom like the other flowers, why she didn't blush foolishly like the other girls. Like Mariam who blushed and laughed in her high pitched voice to everyman's joke. Who made them feel like the men they were. They flocked around her like bees. She never knew a lonely bed. Halima believed in love enough to try to be honest. She told each man of her burden. Of how her father crept in her room every night after she turned thirteen. How her mother was to lost to want to notice. How she bore scars that wouldn't heal. No one wanted a damaged girl. Some laughed waving her tale off. All of them ran.

Tonight she's fading away to memories. She's fading away to her own darkness. Somehow she wanted the comfort her own death would give her. She slit her wrists and  laughed at her own pain in the same mocking way they all did till the red filled her bath tub