By Glory Edozien
“You’re deceiving yourself Glory.
There’s no step by step with guys like this, it has to be surgical. You
cut him off, like a bad appendix. Pull him out, like a rotten tooth.
Turn away and don’t look back.”- Omo
It started during the Occupy Nigeria
movement. While the whole country was embroiled in a bitter struggle
over fuel subsidy increase, I was involved in a different struggle of my
own. Boredom. So in the evening, my cousins and I, took a trip down to a
popular spot on the Island, sipped on a few glasses of alcohol as we
looked into the Lagos skyline. That was how I met him. He was a friend
of a friend and as soon as my eyes caught his, I felt like a deer
trapped in headlights. I couldn’t stop staring, and as the night
progressed my eyes would linger for longer than required on him. His
small eyes, the way he squinted them and tiled his dark well shaved head
backwards anytime he laughed or the way his bottom lip pouted ever so
slightly when he smiled.
The night ended and we exchanged
details. The following afternoon, I received a friendly text from him, I
replied and before long we had arranged to meet the following day. And
so began my voyage into the abyss of reckless abandonment. Phone calls,
bb chats, dinners, house visits, augmented with my day dreams of him and
the lingering sweet memories of our previous visits. Without knowing
it, I had leapt into the wind without a parachute, I was free falling
without any indication of a soft landing underneath. And as with all ill
thought out plans, only in the midst of chaos do you begin to realize
how vulnerable you’ve let yourself become.
Perhaps it was somewhere in-between the
soft kisses he planted on my forehead or the way he would put his hand
on the small of my back or how he would gently place fraying stands of
my hair behind my ears….or maybe it was the way he looked at me after
the first time we kissed, I am not sure, but somewhere in between these
saccharine drenched moments, I had lost myself and if I am honest I
wasn’t particularly sure I wanted to be found. The only problem was, if I
had bothered to stop long enough to allow my brain to do any thinking
besides counting down the seconds to our next meeting, I would have
realized the truth. I had emotionally invested in a venture that didn’t
exist. I had put a down payment on a fictional relationship, that only
involved one party – ME. Slowly I began to realize that I was the one
doing all the communicating, always asking when next we would meet,
always wanting to know how his day was going, always wanting to be part
of his day, and him never really committing one way or the other.
Perhaps I should have seen the signs when he showed up 6 and a half
hours late to our date, or the time we had planned to meet up one
evening and he casually forgot or the fact that he only called me once a
week – on Friday nights.
The truth is, he isn’t to blame. He had
been honest with me about where he was emotionally, but I didn’t hear
him, or maybe I did, but choose to believe something else – I am unsure
which it is. But after the last two weeks of emotional ups and downs and
staring at my phone waiting for any pittance of communication from him –
I realized the inevitable “he just wasn’t that into me”. Those are
literally the 6 most painful words any woman has to admit to herself.
But if we are honest, and can manage to look beyond the veneer of make
believe romance we have concocted, we would see the flashing neon signs
ahead of time. I know what it feels like to have a man interested in
me-he usually calls me frequently, doesn’t show up late to dates neither
does he casually forget pre-arranged dates.
So after the dissipated euphoria of
seemingly great conversations over good food, the unfulfilled
expectations of weeks of day dreaming, and the steady increase in the
painful knowledge of unrequited feelings, I decided to speak to my
trusted confidant Omo. At first I thought I called Omo because I wanted a
step by step guide on how to come out of this emotionally bankrupt
situation but in reality, what I was looking for was another man to
validate my experience of the last month. I wanted Omo, to tell me to be
patient, to wait it out, that somehow ‘my man’ would come around and
everything would be okay. He didn’t. Instead he gave the same advice
doctors give smokers who have discovered a malignant lump on their lungs
– Surgery. In order words, cut him off or be prepared to ‘die’ from the
consequences sooner or later.
So here I am, my fingers flirting with
the delete button as his contact details stare me boldly in the face.
The procedure is clear, cut him off and move on but as any smoker knows,
going cold turkey is probably harder than performing the surgery
itself. Like an addict, I want one more drag. One last phone call, one
last kiss…. one more day and maybe tomorrow we can have the surgery and
I’ll be strong enough to finally quit.
This is dummy text. It is not meant to be read. Accordingly, it is difficult to figure out when to end it. But then, this is dummy text. It is not meant to be read. Period.
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