What if I told you that on the night the police threw me into that minivan at Dolphin, cold steel kissing my back as they bundled me to the estate’s station, I felt less chaos than what I experienced in the last five months with you?
By Jerry Chiemeke
When do you know that the love you once had for your man has waned? Is it when you send a 3-page-long text detailing how you are sick of the sound of his very breathing, refusing to afford him the dignity of a physical conversation, slamming the gavel with no room for an Allocutus…
…or was it long before that? Between the night you crawled from his arms in the middle of a sleepover to put his friend’s todger in your mouth and the afternoon you yelled that you hated chocolate cake in response to his Valentine’s Day surprise, your affections had long walked out the door. You put up a good show in those final 60 days – Viola Davis would have been proud – but a hundred copper pieces do not make an ounce of gold.
***
What does it take to fall out of love? No, the question should be, what does it take for curiosity to have run its course? It means bludgeoning me with questions as to why I commented on a lady friend’s Instagram post, it means responding to harmless texts sent to me by numbers saved with female names, it means crashing into me with kisses after a late night out as if coitus was the soap to wash away the guilt of tasting the skin of another.
What does it mean for you to stray? It’s bumping into me at a soiree and unwittingly talking about how I share the same fragrance as Bruce. Do you know how intimate you have to be with another man to be familiar with his cologne?
What does it mean to be absent?
There are a dozen responses to give when your lover complains about having an anxiety fit twenty-two hours before he’s to compere a major event, but few would conceive a statement along the lines of “fuck you and your anxiety, you’re not the first to be diagnosed.”
Love loses its meaning when all that drives it is control. Didn’t you admit to winding me up just so you would see if I would hit you, just so you could hold that over my head? Didn’t you enjoy how I chased you from Yaba to that radio studio at Ikoyi? I remember the sound of your slow giggles behind the door on that moonless Saturday evening as I pleaded with you to hear me out.
It’s not like I’ve always covered myself in glory. Maybe that trip to Ibadan should have never happened, but then I was locked in a room for two hours by a scorned woman, so there is that.
***
When does love become a weapon of war? It could look like an alarmist message to your soon-to-be-former-beau’s father, whom you know has a history of high blood pressure, but whom you decide to put in harm’s way just to get one over the man you once claimed to love; when you told him that his son “stormed out into the city darkness by 11.00pm” and that you “didn’t know where he was going”, were you aiming for a heart attack at the other end of the phone?
…or it could look like changing passwords and access codes to websites you built together, and sending a vicious poison pen letter to his father when you see that he is not grovelling as much as you’d have wanted.
Do you know what it feels like to be the last one to know that the key to the padlock has changed?
Our parents and older relatives love to tell us about how we shouldn’t burn bridges. They fail to consider the possibility of certain overpasses leading back to Gehenna. A shared love for true crime documentaries doesn’t quite cancel out the sting from words that make the dismissive “there’s nothing like depression, just have more sex” utterance by that doctor at Oshodi seem kinder in comparison.
***
Should you have gone to Tarkwa Bay while switching your phone off for a weekend? Should I have refrained from heading to the strip club that Thursday night? Was it necessary for you to switch the Quetiapine with Haloperidol, even when you knew it would make me groggy for at least a day and a half, because I opted to buy lunch for the librarian? Should I have been more supportive on the day you moved your luggage to Cole Street without seeking my input? These things matter little now.
I wasn’t fibbing about that Fadeyi commute or the film club that November afternoon, I promise. TinTin was having successive panic attacks and it was hard to tell if she would make it through the night. Being accompanied home by the man who elicited the most laughs from her earlier in the day seemed like an easy decision…okay, maybe I lied a little: she probably didn’t have to tell me about the IUD, or ask me if she tasted like watermelons.
Hamlet staged a performance just so he could see Claudius’ face contort in guilt. Were those tickets for Girls’ Trip and Acrimony subtle digs at our financial dynamic? Didn’t you just love being at the wheels?
You didn’t have to be spiteful to that bespectacled woman at Ozone. We were both waiting to get movie tickets, and we were just having a few wisecracks. Did it irk you to see someone else being receptive to my harmless wit, the same wit that once “warmed your insides”?
What if I told you that on the night the police threw me into that minivan at Dolphin, cold steel kissing my back as they bundled me to the estate’s station, I felt less chaos than what I experienced in the last five months with you? What if I said that you made me miss the bedbugs at that counter? I’d have traded two evenings with you arguing over saltless macaroni and phone calls to old friends, for five nights on that cold bench with the same Africa Magic Yoruba film on repeat.
Incarceration is a relative term; sometimes it’s lying on a mattress that no longer feels like home, for one hundred and fifty-two mornings. I don’t think I will ever fully recover from those conversations; the flashbacks have a way of finding me at 6.37pm on random Wednesday evenings. Try over-extending yourself for thirty-seven months of your life because you internalised a page’s worth of diatribes from the one person who once claimed to love you.
Take me back to that January. Time machines only exist in movies and sci-fi novels, but maybe if I had a little peek into the frosty civility we share now, maybe I’ve have treated your texts a lot differently, maybe I would have phoned it in that first Tuesday night just so you wouldn’t come back for more, let alone four consecutive weekends.
But how do you measure the ardour in a first kiss? Thermometres can’t curate the temperature in a room where two people are discovering each other. I knew you’d be back, even before I scooped cranberry juice off you the following morning, even before I tried out your lotion.
Scrutiny saunters in when the glasses fall to ground and lose the rose tints. Now I’m wondering if you even really cared about that five-track run between “Broad-Shouldered Beasts” and “Hot Gates” on Mumford and Sons’ Wilder Minds, or if those short story drafts actually spoke to you like you said they did.
Now I’m thinking you only pretended to tolerate those music history and mental health tangents. At least I’m honest enough to admit that the Kevin Hart specials didn’t enthrall me as much as they did you, and that Eddie Vedder’s vocals are insufferable even though Pearl Jam makes good music.
Cloudberries have no business with stalls in Onipanu, but that’s a tad different from the way cigarettes have no business with petrol stations. How could we not see the dimensions to which we were unhealthy for each other? Did we miss it between the restroom and car seat trysts, between you vilifying all your previous lovers and me constantly alluding to needing my own company?
Oh well, hindsight is 20/20…or at least that’s what they say.
Jerry Chiemeke is a Nigerian-born writer, film critic, journalist, and lawyer based in the United Kingdom. His writing has appeared in Die Welt, The I Paper, The Africa Report, Berlinale Press, The Johannesburg Review of Books, Afrocritik, Culture Custodian, Olongo Africa, and elsewhere. Chiemeke’s work has won or been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Ken Saro Wiwa Prize, Diana Woods Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction, Best Small Fictions, and the Quramo Writers Prize. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed short story collection, “Dreaming of Ways to Understand You.”
Cover photo credit: Furkan Elveren