You’re back home. Finally. You’ve been thinking about the note all day. The words floated around in your mind as you struggled to concentrate at work. Your eyes twitched repeatedly. You took several bathroom breaks. You needed it. You needed your note. But you’re back now. As you open your room door, you make a beeline to your dressing table, and open the top drawer. There it is — your poison. You lie on your bed belly-down, make yourself comfortable, and hurriedly open the note.

Isn’t it unfair, Ugoyibo? The way you frolic in the fields of my mind every minute of every single day? My heart is a beach with sands of longing, and the only footprints engraved in it are yours. Isn’t it unfair to have my entire being enveloped with thoughts of you, Ugoyibo? Isn’t it unfair that I love you this damn much? I love you so damn much, Ugoyibo.

You’ve read that note ten times. Every day. For the past 2 years. You know it word for word, but you still read it every day. Reading is the first thing you do in the morning, and is last thing before you go to bed. It’s almost like you need it for sustenance.

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. But Kamharida’s absence doesn’t just increase your affection for him, it has extremely heightened your need to have him lie next to you. They say death leaves a heartache no one can heal, and love leaves a memory no one can steal. Maybe that’s why losing him made you a user. A crackhead. And your preferred substances are memories of him. You overdose on them every day. This is deeper than nostalgia; it’s psychedelic. Daydreaming is one of your pills, and it lets you relive the day you met at the Uyo e-library.

You see the handsome bearded man with a furrowed brow, working furiously on his laptop opposite you. You hear his soft voice mutter, “I’m sorry,” after you glared at him for saying his frustrated thoughts too loudly while you were trying to study for your upcoming seminar at work. You smell the flowery perfume he wore that you thought didn’t match his appearance. You smile the same amused smile you put on when he introduced himself later as Kamharida. He said he was a backend developer, and that his disgruntled noises were because of a particular bug which he just, for the life of him, couldn’t seem to remove. You see his impressed smile when he asked what you did, and you said you worked as a product manager at a fintech company. You feel your heart flutter the same way it did when you both had a long conversation, and exchanged numbers.

You’re not sure when it happened. When you fell in love with him, that is. It took 3 months. Maybe 6. Maybe after the 5th date when he said, “I think your company is my favourite thing ever, Ugoyibo.” You don’t recall. But you know that every long phone call at night left you in dire need of more of him. You know that somehow, he slowly reached into your pockets for the keys to your heart, and he let himself in. And just like that, you wanted him to be yours to keep. You knew he was what your heart needed and desperately wanted to cling to. That your entire being came alive at the thought of him, and that he was the only one who made you experience what it felt like to die small blissful deaths. That when he went on one knee and asked you to be his forever, your answer would be obvious.

He died on the way to the church for your wedding. An accident, they said. You remember laughing at the irony of losing him an hour before he was supposed to say, “Till death do us part.” Talk about poetic injustice. You also remember feeling yourself die inside; your sanity strangling itself into inexistence. Your world instantly crumbled beneath your feet, and you were floating in a space of confusion.

The days that followed were spent secluded in your parents’ guest room. Alone. Cut off from the world, and away from the condolences. You didn’t go through the 5 stages of grief in their right order, no. You would accept the loss one day, saying losing a loved one is like holding a block of ice in your hands, cherishing it with everything in you, having it suddenly melt one day, and helplessly watching it trickle through your fingers. But the next day, you would take a deep plunge into a pool of anger and depression, and drown yourself.

You didn’t cry at his funeral. Not for any symbolic reason, not on purpose. You just couldn’t will yourself to cry. You just stood there transfixed, as his eulogy was read, and his body lowered into the ground. You didn’t cry when the ambience — the choir singing a solemn hymn, and other mourners descending into a symphony of wailing — was set for you to. But you cried when you were woken up one morning by a white pigeon repeatedly knocking on your window, and you remembered how he would always laugh and say, “My guy doesn’t know he’s fighting his own reflection.” You cried when you heard someone reference The Godfather. Because you remembered when you were both watching Family Guy, and Peter Griffin said the 1972 movie insisted upon itself. Kamharida agreed.

You cried when you ran into the delivery girl that had come to your office on Valentine’s Day, bearing a package from him to you. It had a note containing the sweetest words that had ever been said to you. You loved him too. So damn much.

You still read that note ten times, every day, for the past 2 years. You’re still a user. An addict. You still inject the veins of your broken self with all the bits and pieces of his memories that you could possibly find stashed in your mind. Maybe you do need it for sustenance. Because nothing else fuels your will to live.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash