On: The woman with the peace sign
This article is best enjoyed whilst listening to the song "Black Books" by Nils Lofgren https://youtu.be/zDljVXS9RHE
Her name is...Nah, what does it matter? Her name is her name. I've lived long enough to know that as often as I fall in love, as numerous as the women are, their names just seem to blend into one hauntingly peculiar phrase - the one that got away.
But she, she would be the exception, not because she didn't get away (obviously she did, else I won't be writing this instead I’d be calming my nerves in her ample bosoms) but because, for the first time in a very long time, she made me feel that all too familiar and dreaded emotion that I, sadly thought I had left behind in my hay days at the university - hope.
I reckon anyone reading this would be curious, a little bit, to know why I consider the emotion, hope, as dreaded. Well, if you haven't read any of my works before then I completely understand the curiosity. First off, hope is beautiful. It is surreal. It is redeeming. It is intoxicating. And just as much as it is all those things, it is also dark. It is also misleading. It is also damning. And I know these all too well. My love and relationship’s past is littered with hope inviting me in seductively only to push me out in tatters. My first ever heartbreak was in the form of a hopeful love letter that told me how incredible I was only to shatter my heart at the denouement about how "Jesus was more incredible than me." Pfft
Indeed, my many run-ins with hope have literally made me less hopeful about its great qualities and more cautious about its not-so-great ones. But sadly, hope is the ultimate seductress because it is still able to weave a thread of deceit around your caution that soon enough you find yourself wrapped in its warm but scalding embrace, waiting on the respite that may never come. And with my experience, I should have seen this deathly hope coming when I met her but I didn't. I instead saw the beautiful seductress hope and was drawn into her elusive splendor.
In no time after meeting her, we had gone from harmless and joke-infused Twitter DM exchanges to long calls at night where I'd laugh and cry and then recharge my phone twice just to be back speaking to her. She was perfection to me even though the one time I said this to her she rightly responded with "Mifa, nobody is perfect". But she was wrong. She was not perfect but she was perfection to me. Her flaws and whatever chinks in her armor appeared to me like engravings of a deified beauty, tingling my senses. Her low monotone voice sounded like siren whispers in my ears. Her body - woosh...he body was Eve's reincarnated, but without the distorted sensibility of the serpent's apple. Her mind, lordy-lord...for someone so young (25 years old by the way, because I am not a creep), she was ageless in her thoughts. She floated from sensual to intellectual discourse without losing the allure of brilliance. She was the first person I could remember in a long time that made me excited for the next day or more so made me feel less shitty about a shitty day. I adored her even without ever physically meeting her. I was lost in her aura. I was in love.
But, as I am sure you guessed, hope was never one to allow anybody to enjoy anything, less so myself. So, it was no shock (although heartwrenching) when she told me "Mifa, nothing can ever happen between us. I am sorry" I smiled and shrugged it off and went on a long lecture about how I think I can manage without anything romantic ever happening between us as long as she kept laughing at my jokes and referring to me by her favorite nickname for me “ashewo”.
In fact, I began to convince myself that the hurt I felt for being rejected for the umpteenth time in my adult life was not because of her words but because I knew she was right. Slowly and surely I began to do what all men my age do when the possibility of a romantic tryst is cut prematurely before it can properly sprout, I began trying to replant seedlings in the same garden. I began working towards becoming that good friend she needed with the silent hope that someday she'd get to a point where the seedlings would have germinated into a beautiful flower of love, whose beauty would take her by surprise as she realizes that I was the one she needed all along. So, I took that ever-so-familiar route of familiarity and friendship. She made sure to reiterate her stance about nothing happening between us and I made sure to nod and act coy, holding on to hope. I continued on this path until one day our conversation steered past the usual and into her very recent grief.
"My dad was my best friend," she said "and I miss him so much" she added.
I remember not thinking much of these words beyond the usual. I was aware she had lost her dad and as a good friend, I wanted to be the shoulder for her to cry on. And I genuinely believed I was doing this with my many "pele’s" and heart emoji rhetoric but in my blindness trying to be there for her, I lost sight of just how profound her pain and grief was.
Here she was, a young woman, at the prime of her youth, trying to navigate through the ever-revolving and reviling jungle of adulthood and life, and in one fell swoop, the one person whose shoulder she was always welcome to cry on and didn't have to worry about him having any ulterior motives was taken away from her. There she was, a young, vibrant woman, looking and envisioning a future where this one person would someday walk her down the aisle with a proud smile on his face or maybe watch from the stands as she accepted a prestigious award for her intellects, only to wake up to the painful memory that this person was no longer physically present to ever share such hypothetical milestone moments with her.
And then there I was: a two-week-old male friend from the streets of Twitter, dripping with lust and devious lecherousness, all smeared in the guise of love, coming to seek her companionship and brandishing my semi-worthiness without acknowledging the fact that no one else besides her father would ever be worthy of the kind of affection she sought after. And the worse part of all these is that in my attempt to plant seedlings of emotions that would sprout love, I did the one thing every man claims not to do when spurred by the overwhelming feeling of lust and love - I never listened.
Of course, we spoke for hours on end but in all she said, I only heard echoes of my own desires. In her telling me about how much she missed her dad, I only heard the sound of an opportunity to fill a void in her life. In her telling me that there was nothing that could ever happen between us, I only heard the reverberation of a woman who only needed some time to adjust to my presence in her life. I never heard her for what she was actually saying or how she was actually feeling. How every waking day for her was a reminder that the one person in her life she loved so dearly that she felt at peace with was no longer by her side to comfort her on the days when life's many worries tend to be too much to handle.
I never heard any of these because contrary to what most people believe, listening isn't always about staying quiet and hearing the next person speak, it’s much more than that. Anybody can listen and stay still but it takes a really loving, caring, and selfless person to actually listen to understand. And the sooner I came to the realization that her late father was possibly the only man who had been able to do just that the sooner it dawned on me as to why her saying "nothing could ever happen between us" was a profound truth that I only listened to but never tried to understand.
Painfully, now I do.
A week ago she posted a picture of her and her father and in it, they were both brandishing the peace sign. It made me smile as I looked back on some of our chats. I noticed that she too was always fond of brandishing the peace sign in almost all of her selfies and I remember telling her in passing that I believed this trait was something she must have picked up from her father. I remember her laughing and seemingly agreeing with me. And I also remember calling her "The woman with the peace sign".
It's been a week plus since my last message to her via chat. Life has happened and the lust has dwindled from my eyes. Nevertheless, I still think of her often. I still imagine the possibility of, maybe in some alternate universe, her falling in love with me and running up to meet me in the rain like they do in those romantic Hollywood flicks, just to declare her undying love for me and say "Mifa, I was wrong, you are the light in my star" or some shit, and then we’d both share a passionate kiss and then go on to have cute babies and take picturesque photographs in exotic locations and shit.
But whenever my mind drifts to those reveries, I am drawn back to reality by those haunting words of hers "Mifa, nothing can ever happen between us." The only difference is that now it doesn't sting as much as it did at first. Truthfully, as much as I would want to, I could never be there for her as she would want because in never having grieved for a loved one, it would be almost impossible for me to understand how she feels. And nothing breeds more discontent than the disconnect of experiences.
So, this one is for you, the woman with the peace sign. If you're reading this, I'd like for you to know this: I understand better now, and as painful as it is to say this, I too have to admit that indeed, nothing could ever happen between us. Why? Because what could have happened already did. I met you and I fell in love with you. And for what seemed like a very brief moment in my life, I felt at peace. Now, what more could I ask for from the woman with the peace sign?