My First Time
When Ola visited one day and told me about her intentions to get back with her ex-boyfriend and if I had any suggestions on what she could do to fasten the process, I told her straight up that I did not think it a good idea. I was speaking from experience. She was my younger sister and as such was very close to my heart. I genuinely didn’t want to see her get hurt, but the thing with being honest to someone hell-bent on doing a thing is that, whether or not you are speaking from experience, they just consider you an enemy of progress because, at that moment, they’d rather you egg them on. Just like the moth’s excessive attraction to light that sometimes ends it in flames.
During my third year at the university and finally, I finally met wild and free women. They were my roommates. Before I even became a university student, I had always been warned at home to be wary of the wild girls and since year one, I had only met the studious and churchy ones, even though I never really got along with them. I had always been curious though. In fact, I was beginning to suspect that the whole thing about university wildness was a lie.
While it did not mean that I was eager to experience the wild stuff, when wildness eventually did come crashing at my doorstep, I gleefully let it in. I was curious. Probably too curious for my own good. Better still was the fact that I had never experienced affection from ladies like those ones showed. They gave me peace like I never had since my university journey. They made wild beautiful. Where’s the fun in being domesticated anyway? As far as I was concerned, I was finally experiencing life.
I had a boyfriend though whom I had been dating since my first year in senior secondary school. I and Osaro were classmates though in different arms. Naturally, we graduated together. We applied to the same university and very luckily gained admission at the same time. Although we were studying different courses, the duration was the same. We didn’t need to make any plans. We were the plan ourselves.
In fact, it seemed there was some invisible blueprint we were naturally working according to. He lived off-campus while I lived in the hostel reserved within the campus. We often visited each other and shared our deepest thoughts. We were what could be described as close or so it seemed. We fought every now and then, but our fights were the definition of “love quarrels are like cutting water with a sword.” A lot began to change though in that third year.
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Third-year. It was when I had my first bouts with a whole lot of things. But most memorable of all was my first clubbing experience. Throughout the first semester, my roommates and their friends had relentlessly preached the gospel of clubbing to me, but I was too apprehensive to try. In the home I was coming from, any event that happened later than 7 PM outside the house was strictly prohibited. So, although they made clubbing look so attractive, my default settings were still in place. But by the second semester, I had already become thoroughly psycho conditioned by their continuous talks about their experiences that I began to yearn for the experience. Just the thought of escaping into the night thrilled me. So eventually, the night inauguration came.
Every single piece I wore that night was borrowed. I especially remember that because it would go on to be a memory that greatly embarrassed me. My wardrobe did not measure up to the expectation at the least. The gown was particularly memorable. It was very tight and ended just at the bottom of my rump. For a busty girl, it held my breasts so tightly together that I felt they were going to explode. It took me back to Tyler Perry’s Temptation, where Ava tells Judith, “…You don’t breathe in Hervé.”
I told Aity that I could not wear it and that I felt naked, but she smiled sweetly and said, “Don’t worry honey. It’s like that the first time.” Actually, it’s like that the first few minutes because slowly, I began to adjust to the clothing and I didn’t feel as awful as I did in the beginning. At a point, it all felt so natural. I was no longer pulling and dragging. It was the strangest thing ever.
Aity was short for Itohan and she was the person I was closest to in the room. Funnily enough, she was not even my roommate. She was the best friend of a roommate. But she slept in the room quite frequently though and we got along. She was beautiful, smart and one of the most creative persons I ever met. Above all, she was sweet and I naturally gravitated towards sweet people. She was like my little mother and when she smiled, it felt like a neon sign reading, “Safe. Safe. Safe.” She was a public relations personnel at the club we were gracing that night, so we got to ride in one of the club’s shuttles.
The club was a number of kilometers away from campus. I had earlier been introduced to alcohol by Osaro, so I first got comfortable with that. The music was loud and the hype man was exceptionally charismatic. There were a variety of inhalants and I was not too much of a prude to know that I was already passively participating in the smoking. The other girls in my company were dancing and since I was not a very good dancer, I just sat down, drank, and watched. A number of guys came along and made advances, but I just focused on my drink.
A little while later, Aity came and sat in front of me. She asked how I was doing. I told her I was alright. She smiled sweetly and handed me a wrap of weed. I told her I didn’t think I was ready for a smoke, and her reply was, “Make dem no hear am oh! Sey you enter club and you no knack roof?” It was meant to elicit laughter and we laughed together. Then she said, “There’s nothing to be scared of, love. But there are certainly many things to get used to. All you need is one try for your life to change.” And she was right. Push morality to the other end, as often as I remember Aity, she was almost always right. Her words were usually applicable to many practical situations.
So, with some hesitance still, I accepted the weed from her, held it between my index and middle finger, and placed it between my lips. Even though I did not know what to expect, the thrill was rushing through me like water from a broken faucet. She produced a lighter and set me on my first trip to the high. I sucked the smoke and coughed. Aity’s face broke into a smile as she threw words of commendation and caution my way. “Way to go, girl! Easy now though. You definitely want to take it easy on that baby.” At the time, I didn’t know what she meant, but I smiled anyway. I would later find that she had served me the most potent stuff available in the marijuana market in that vicinity. But I did take her advice. I took it slow.
At intervals, she would reach out, take a few puffs of the weed, and pass it back to me. And just when I thought the smoke was lost in her lungs, I would see them escaping through her nose even while she was talking. It was like I had never seen before. I thought it amazing the way her nostrils made ringlets with the smoke. It was definitely something I wanted to try. As we both did justice to the marijuana, we talked about trivial matters and laughed a lot. In fact, our jokes and laughter got lousier by the minute, but nobody cared. We were all tending to our different businesses as we deemed fit. It was really loud and we had to lift our voices to really hear each other.
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In a while, a fog gradually began to envelop my vision and it seemed I was hanging in a hollow between two unfamiliar places. Suddenly, Aity looked around seemingly involuntarily. Then, she turned to me and asked, “Alright girlie! One last package for the night. Look around you. No need to be shy. Which is your pick? Mama’s gonna get him for you.” Her reassurance did not subside my shyness though. The corners of my lips twitched unintentionally as I reached for my drink. But she kept her gaze fixed on me. When I realized she was not budging, I took a huge gulp of the beer then transported my eyes to the hype man. Again, Aity was wearing that sweet smile as she said an emphatically sibilant “Nice.”
I woke up the next morning in an unfamiliar bed, with an unfamiliar head, with an unfamiliar man. Even holding my head in both my palms did not help it from feeling like it would roll off my neck at any moment. I felt like throwing up, but nothing was coming out. It was a very terrible sensation. When the guy beside me woke up, I was too dazed to comprehend anything he was saying to me. But I vaguely remember he took my phone for a moment. I did not know what for and I did not ask. It was the least of my problems.
I and my company got a ride back to our hostel on campus. Luckily, it was Saturday. No classes. I stayed indoors and slept throughout the day. When I woke to the pangs of hunger later in the night, I saw that I had missed several phone calls, most of which were from Osaro. When I called back, he was really upset. He asked where I had been all day and I told him that I did not feel very well, so I had my phone in silent mode and went to sleep.
He wondered if I had had any drugs and I lied that I had taken some. I could not dare tell him about my experience the previous night. I had absolutely no plans to ever let him in on any of it. He sympathized with me and tried to pull me into some small talk, but I was in no mood for that, so the conversation ended somewhat abruptly. I didn’t quite realize it then, but I was slowly overtaken by guilt.
Throughout that week, the hype man kept calling me via my cell phone. Even though I blocked his number, he did not relent. Instead, he called using other numbers. As often as I blocked him, he called me still. At a point, I was too irritated to answer any calls from unknown numbers, so I stopped. During that same week, Osaro invited me over to his place for the weekend and by Friday afternoon, I was set to go. The timetable was usually flexible on Fridays. He told me to take a cab since he could not come to pick me up from my hostel. He promised to pay.
I got to his house early in the evening since my classes had ended in the early afternoon. He did not have any classes that Friday, so he had stayed home to prepare for my coming. He had prepared a meal and as we sat to eat it, I asked him in mock annoyance why he had not come to pick me up. His reply was that he was too lazy to drive. We ate amidst conversation and laughter, after which I retired to bed.
Usually, when I was at his place, we held vigils watching movies. So, since I was familiar with the drill, I did not want to sleep off on him in front of the television. So, I set my phone alarm for a certain time when I felt I would be well-rested, even though I knew Osaro was going to turn it off before it even got the chance to ring.
When I did wake up, my boyfriend was seated at the edge of the bed. So, I reached for him and excitedly wrapped my arms around his waist from behind as I took a peek above his shoulder to see what he was looking at. As if I suffered an electric shock, my arms snapped from where I had positioned them and my palm was over my mouth in a second. He turned around, looked at me, and said with an overwhelming dose of hurt, “Please, just tell me this isn’t you.” My eyes began to well up as I searched for a place to pin them on. I could not dare look him in the eyes.
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Apparently, that hype man in his desperation had sent a sex tape of a stoned me and him. His intention was to blackmail me. But the major trouble was that the message had come in while I was asleep and Osaro came upon it before I did. His curiosity got the better part of him and so we broke up that night. Aity was right. It may have been a joke when she said it, but my life had surely changed. After the incident, I did not go to a club again, at least, not while in school. I never really got over the devastation of losing him, but I managed to keep my head in the game.
I confided in Aity a lot. Even when I got to final year, we were still friends. Now that I think about it, there was not much she said about herself, so I knew very little about her. Still, she was a terrific listener. She told me that I did not have to fight for what was mine and that my property would always find its way back to me. So, by the time I met Osaro again after graduation, I was reassured of the inescapable fate we shared. We exchanged numbers again and I was out of my mind with excitement when he was the first to call me and suggest that we try again. A second chance? I was certainly not making any mistakes this time.
But second chances are not always about righting the wrongs of our first encounters. Sometimes, they are about starting all over again on a clean slate, taking a dose of our own forgiveness first before we expect it from others. Unfortunately, it was after six months when we broke up again that I realized this.
I kept noticing how Osaro no longer told me he loved me the way he once did, the way he was all scrutiny and unready to give me any benefit of the doubt, let alone trust me. It was not his fault though. There was only an extent to which I could blame anything on him. In fact, though I had promised myself not to mess up what we shared a second time, the weight of my guilt was weighing down more on our relationship than our commitment to each other.
Even though I did not go into detail when I told Ola not to return to her ex, I was really hoping she would listen to me. Also, I did not know what made them break up initially. Still, there was only so much I could say and a lot less that I could do.
The sky is so wide after all, and all birds do not go in the same direction.
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