I will grieve
“I have never loved someone who didn’t deserve a small place of permanence in my heart.”
The summer you went away, Buchi asked how I was going to survive. I remember that evening as she came to the house and met me turning fufu for mama. She said she knew me enough to know I’d try to numb the pain by focusing on work, and she was right. So while I turned fufu, she talked. She talked for a very long time, reminding me of how we met and how the fact that you’ve gone away doesn’t mean all we shared meant nothing. I listened: not because I wanted to, but because I didn’t have anything to say. I didn’t know how to explain to her that I felt I had been run over by a train.
When the classics we read in school talk about love, they approach it like it’s the best thing to ever happen to a person. They do not talk about the pain—that ache that soon comes to live within you forever. Boy meet girl; boy likes girl; girl falls in love with boy; boy and girl are in love; boy and girl believe they would last forever. But boy and girl break up, and boy moves away, and there is nothing but loud silence and an aching emptiness where there was once love. I do not understand it. I do not understand how the universe lets us have something for a long time, make us get used to it, and then take it away.
Ekene, I’m standing in the middle of a road that has three paths, and I do not know which to take. Buchi said if I trusted my guts, I’d take a road and hope it led me to better days. I wanted to tell her my better days went away with you, but I didn’t. I didn’t have the strength to say anything, so while she talked and talked, I finished turning the fufu and started on the Oha soup. Mama told me it was the best soup I’d ever made since I started cooking at home, and for a minute, I let my lips slip into a smile. If only they knew.
The first time we met, you asked me why I always seemed lost in thought with a faraway look in my eyes. I laughed your question off the first couple of times, and then one day I just blurted: “I am a walking memoir of everyone I’ve ever loved and lost, and some days I don’t know how to forget that they’re gone. I don’t know how to be alive. So whenever you catch me lost in thoughts, please talk to me so I remember to live.” And every day after that, whenever you noticed the look in my eyes, you reached out and placed your hand lightly on mine. It always brought me back. It reminded me to live.
You knew about the nightmares from the first night I spent in your house—I woke up screaming as usual, and it startled you, but you got over the initial confusion and tried to calm me down. Soon, the nightmares didn’t come whenever I was with you, so I stayed more and more with you. I learned to build my life around you because I felt safe with you, but someone should have already told me that I can’t make a home out of a human. Someone should have told me.
And when you started getting busier with work, I tried to understand and I channeled my energy into my art. On nights when I would stay up waiting for you to call, I would sketch or continue a sketch I was previously working on. That’s how I finished two sketches after working on them every night for five days. On each of those nights, you promised to call and didn’t. And on each of those nights, I worked while waiting for the call that I should have known would never come.
When I was younger, I read a fancy book of a boy and a girl. The boy liked the girl, but the girl didn’t want to be with a boy, so she refuted all his attempts at getting to know her. And because the boy genuinely liked her, he kept trying until he won her over. She was happy; he was happy: they were in love. Until they weren’t. I don’t know it’s a curse, but the boy fell out of love with her, just the way it’s always the guys who fall out of love. Like us, Ekene. Like us.
The boy left her like you left me, and she was devastated. I didn't understand the story then, because I was still young. But growing up and experiencing it made me understand that the ones you love the most would hurt you the most. And that's okay. Because even though love can be painful, it's still a beautiful thing and everyone ought to experience it at least once in their lifetime.
You're gone now, Ekene, but not fully gone. Your lessons on how to live in the moment would always stay with me. I might not know what to tell Buchi on days she comes to comfort me, but I know I will not sit in the water for too long. I know that one day I'll wake up and not feel like dying, and that the sound of Maybe by Matthew Nolan would no longer cause me to hyperventilate. I know that one day I will go over our memories and be happy I met you, but for now I will grieve.
Ekene, I will grieve.
