HeartBroken
I have loved four men all my life. I have also had my heart broken by all four men at different stages of my life, each one hurting less than the last.
My first heartbreak was a real killer. I really thought I was going to die from the pain. I was 15 at the time and he was 16. Then, our love was unriddled with the pretenses of modern day relationships and it worked great for us. He thought I was really cute and I thought he was cute too, and somehow, that was more than enough reason for me to decide that I was going to be with him for the rest of our mortal lives. Our love was pure, as close to pure as we could get and he made me smile.
He called me pretty in front of the other girls and helped me tuck my hair behind my ears when they refused to stay put. He would immediately stop playing with his friends when I walked into his classroom and we would walk out amidst mock jeers and teases from his classmates. Everybody in school thought we were going to get married and have lots of babies. Even our school teachers encouraged us and would tease us in class whenever they had the opportunity to.
I was perpetually in cloud nine, always walking to school with an extra bounce in my step. An extra sheen to my lip gloss. But little did i know that my bounce would soon turn to a slow, laboured trudge. Ade, that was his name, left. Like, he just up and left. Usually, every morning, we would meet under a tree directly opposite the school gate. The whole idea was to walk into school together, holding hands. He would have his family’s driver drop him under the tree every morning and I had the school bus driver do the same, with a lot of persuasion and cute school-girl begging. He was an old grandfather, so he literally could not refuse my pleas.
One morning, Ade wasn’t there. We didn’t have phones then, so there was no way I could reach him. I waited longer the next day, and the next, and three more days after that until I thought I was going to run mad. The day I resolved to find his house, no matter what it took, was the day I found out he had travelled. Not to his grandma’s bungalow in the village, or his uncle’s house in Abuja. He had gone to America. AMERICA!
I struggled to believe it, not until I saw his father’s Mercedes pull up to school without Ade. My friend who assisted the Principal’s secretary said Ade’s father had come to collect a bunch of papers. She swore she heard the word ‘America’ enough times to know that Ade was no longer in the country. And that was how my 2-year relationship ended at 17.
I’ve always been the one to hold tightly to whatever kind of relationship I find myself in, begging the other participants not to leave me. I have real abandonment issues and whenever it seemed like someone I had spent so much time with was going to be less available than usual, I went straight into a panic attack. Ade’s abrupt disappearance was almost too much grief for me to bear at such a young age.
I had grown so reliant on his presence that I didn’t know what to do with myself after he left. I didn’t know how to study, because we always did that together. Even making new friends became a chore, and I left secondary school a sad, secluded self-appointed widow of some sort.
My first rendezvous with university romance came in the form of a well mannered Kenyan boy, who had a smile that could easily compete with the brightness of the stars. Eli’s skin was as dark as night but it shone like black crystal. I always made fun of his complexion, telling him to always remember to open his teeth wide so he could be easily traced whenever he got lost in the dark. Like Ade, he made me smile.
He called me Nzuri too, seeing as Adesua was much too stressful for him to pronounce. He gave me my first kiss; a sloppy, honestly overrated experience but i was grateful that he was graceful about it. He had had a lot of experience with his Kenyan girlfriends and I was his first Nigerian woman experience. I made it a point of duty to represent my sisters well, to show him what it felt to be loved by a Nigerian girl.
Unfortunately, it stressed him out. My clinginess and insatiable need to be by his side even when he had classes made him weary of me. He tried to be polite, to tell me to get off his back in as sweet a way as he could manage but when I refused to take the hint, he eventually told me off. In a strongly worded text. He ended the text with ‘mjinga damu!,’ a swahilian phrase which translates to ‘bloody fool.’ Over the years, I’ve had more reasons to call myself that, way too many times than is normal. But that’s how that went…
I thought I had had my own fair share of disappointments and heartbreaks and that the universe would finally deem me worthy of a happily ever after. It is that stupid-faced optimism that makes me repeat the same mistakes over and over like a mjinga damu that led me to Abel’s arms. Oh, I suffered. I really suffered.
After the breakup with Eli, I decided to take some time off for myself, to find my own footing and focus on my life without relationships. I kept it going till final year when I finally met a guy I was willing to break all my rules for. Abel was a masters’ student while I was in final year.
With every single man I have dated, there is always that one little thing that I can never forget about them, no matter how much time passes. With Ade, it was the way he tucked my hair behind my ears as a reflex. With Eli, it was the way he called me Nzuri and kissed me on the forehead at random times on campus. With Abel, it was the way his face always cracked into a full-faced smile the moment he sighted me. It was the way he loved to rest his head in the hollow in my neck and sniff my perfume like a loyal dog welcoming its master. With him, it was a lot of little things.
Abel is arguably the most beautiful man I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. He is the most mature too. When we met, he was already a grown man. He had very different priorities from those of the school boys I kept meeting. He was intelligent, focused, articulate, and just plain wonderful. But he had no money. At 28, he was still living on a monthly allowance his mother sent. He still lived with his parents and four siblings in a cranky two-room apartment in the city.
Despite this, Abel was a proud narcissist. I didn’t learn to label him this way until I took the time to look at his behaviour without rose coloured glasses. It baffled me too because there was literally nothing for him to be proud of, but he was proud anyway. Always throwing his degrees around and the fact that the only reason why he didn’t make a first class was because he refused to sleep with the Head of Department.
He made me feel stupid when I was too slow to grab a point. He never forgot to remind me to be grateful that I had my beauty going for me, else I would have had little or no value. He made me feel small, and battered my self esteem with a sledgehammer. He took my money too. Well, saying it like that makes it seem like he stole from me but he didn’t. I always gave it to him, willingly, even when it wasn’t convenient. He knew when my money came in and always had a way of telling me about something he really needs without asking for the money outright. One time, I even had to lie to my parents that I needed N100,000 to settle a school issue when it was he who needed the money to pay off some of his debts.
Somehow, despite all of these, I remained. I stayed with him. Well, until I got pregnant. The day I broke the news to him was the last day I saw him with my two eyes. He pulled a disappearing act and I never saw him again. He destroyed his sim card too and so, I couldn’t call him. He called me three months later with a strange number to ask me what I did about the ‘issue.’ I was too exhausted to be angry, stretched between trying to prepare for my final exams and recover from an abortion. I thought those would be the darkest days of my life, but I was so wrong.
Life still had a bit more in store for me. I relocated to the United States for my masters, in hopes to start afresh, on a clean slate. It was going great until I met Keiran, an African American man who gave me the world, including a child. A baby girl, Sasha. But unfortunately, it seemed like I missed out on subscribing to a lifetime package because it only lasted for a little while. Well, until I found out he already had a family – a wife and three kids.
So, here I am now. Sitting in my balcony on my 40th birthday, sipping champagne from a little glass, wrapped up in the robe my 10-year old daughter got me from Amazon, and wondering if maybe finding true love isn’t written in my stars.
All pictures are from Pexels and and no attribution is required.
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