Say You Love Me
By: The Kalahari Review
Tags: Nigeria, African Literature, Onuchukwu Joseph Chimezie, Fiction, Unrequited Love

Say You Love Me

I

Chioma, your cousin, is looking at you as you choke on your hiccupping tears and vibrate with sorrow on her bed. She keeps looking at you from her reading table that is on the opposite side of her bed, shaking her legs as if to prevent her impatience from exploding while trying and failing to pay attention to the pile of Law textbooks before her.

‘‘When you cry finish, you tell me wetin dey worry you because I don tire to ask you. I know say na Frederick matter sha so you just let me know,’’ she says finally, her voice erect with a crushing indifference. So you lay there squirming, drowning your fat balls of tears in the fluffiness of her pillow, tasting the salt of your tears as her words hit your back. She keeps talking about Frederick and you can’t take it anymore so you face her, your tears coming to a halt when she calls him a player.

‘‘You know perfection is myth right, Sister Chioma?’’ you said, charged.

‘‘Your point being?’’

‘‘Erm, you know we can’t expect garri to taste like cornflakes. It’s not only crazy but it’s gross. We should take people as they are.’’

‘‘Even if they make you cry?’’

You stay quiet, your lips pursed as though in supplication. She relaxes her back on the chair, her hands cross each other and lean on the chest. Then one hand scratches her thick braids.

‘‘See Debby, misery loves company, demands it sometimes. He has put you in this position for a reason that is so obvious. These guys don’t make us, they are merely additives like stew to a jollof rice. They do not complete us. How can you not even see it?’’ Something rancorous was rising in her eyes that seek yours.

Your phone vibrates.

II

Before you met Frederick, you had been exposed to love, showered in the basin of its watery composition, dried in its resplendent room that is fat with sunshine, spanned the breadth of its bed that is butter soft with warmth. So it wasn’t like you didn’t know what love was when you met him. You did. In its entirety. But being away from home does something to you — creates an eternal and uncontainable void. At home, love was water. It was easy to recognize and acquire, it was colourless and tasteless so that you did not even need to think anything as you splashed in its bracing sea and drank from it. You were raised to have the world at your feet, expect everything and everyone to bow, kneel, and kiss your love-coated flesh and anything that didn’t abide was destroyed or, if human, discarded like an empty sachet water. So you knew what love was.

You had met Frederick at the University Sport Complex in a river of student bodies who had come to cheer their department in the VC Cup Competition. The sun was setting behind the tall trees that governed the field, dust was floating everywhere and a wild throng of people was jostling around you toward the stand. He sat somewhere up at the stand that overlooked the sandy pitch, earphones plugged in, disconnected from the world and reading Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns which was odd to you because guys loved football so who was this nerd sef?! You approached him and asked if you could sit next to him and he shrugged. If you like. You sat down. A player was down injured and the department in red jerseys were screaming at those in white, the referee trying to sow peace in the field of chaos.

‘‘I thought all guys love football. I never knew they read too,’’ you said, suppressing a chuckle and trying to be visible to him. The game had resumed now and you pretended to be lost in concentration at what was happening in the middle of the pitch where the dust was dense and swaying this way and that way as if in the middle of a dance.

He dogeared his page and looked up at you. ‘‘Sorry?’’

‘‘Oh, I was just joking,’’ you were looking everywhere but his eyes before blinking up at the translucent sky, so the shame wouldn’t slip out. He jabbed you and you smiled softly, meeting his eyes — the faint buzz of chatter and music drifting to you both. He smiled and his face took shape. You saw how beautiful he was — letting your eyes trail from his multi-coloured ankara shorts, up his well manicured fingers, up his crop of brown hair that stood confidently in an afro and ending at his impossibly smooth face that insisted on being looked at and sat like a self enthroned king on his neck, his full eyebrows were adorably apart from each other, his nose which was attractively curved and pointed like an bird’s beak was flagged on both sides by dimpled chin that looked like they were punctured by God’s playful fingers. He was a tidy miracle, a boy in the full resplendency of his beauty. He said his name was Frederick, a 500 Level Petroleum Engineering student. He enjoyed reading and writing and went to the Creative Writers’ Workshop meetings on Wednesdays. His interest in football was weak and he was only here because of his best friend who was the captain of his department. Politically, he was a moderate liberal. His grades were not bad and they weren’t entirely good. He almost never studied for exams as he spent most of his time chasing inspirations for stories, but he never failed a course because he really listened to the lectures. He talked about himself with an unmistakable pride, perhaps to prove he was so brilliant, like he was filled with it.

‘‘Ah, fresher?’’ he said, beaming with surprised delight and then he continued, ‘‘So what is the name?’’

‘‘Deborah. Even though I am used to people calling me Debby.’’

‘‘Oh, so no one has ever called you Borah?’’

You two collapsed in giggles. He asked for your number and promised to call. You smiled as you made to leave. The Sport Complex was settling into repose.

‘‘Can I walk you a bit?’’ he asked.

‘‘But you came with friends.’’

‘‘And you came alone. Who knows if God is trying to speak to me by swinging you my way?’’

You dismissed him teasingly, in the gentle manner that you dismissed things, leaving one not convinced whether you were in agreement or not.

‘‘So, goodnight Deborah. I’ll give you a call,’’ he smiled, pronouncing your name with so much kindness so that it began to sound like something holy, something shiny. You blushed, a certain encouragement simmering in your eyes.

It was a fairly easy ride after that day. Some calls in the morning, a few others at night before you sleep, long midnight calls interspersed with laughter when you woke up to read, strolls with him to your hostel after classes and you could not do without him already. You looked at his peaceful beautiful eyes and you knew you were in love, a love within reach. It was as if it was meant to be, without scuffling to exist like a well nurtured plant. At midnight, you were up smiling hard into WhatsApp messages and giggling at the voice notes from him as he rambled about his day, talked about his poor first draft on a story he was working on and told you about how Davido’s album was really good. It was supposed to be your medical books keeping you up but Frederick was online and nothing else mattered as you had nothing but time and love for him. Even as he went offline, you stayed up scrolling through your past chats with him, listening to his voice notes again, relieving the animation in his voice and staring at his picture smiling at you from your phone’s screen, a smile creasing the corners of your lips. For this is what it means to be in love — to be able to create light in a tunnel of thick darkness with the sun of happiness rising on your face like a fiery furnace, for you to sit still on your bed and be surrounded by stubborn brightness even when morning is yet dark as it is the darkest place that the light of love shines brightly. Love gives us a safe place in this noisy, miserable world. Love is complete. So you slept that night, light as a feather and afloat in the waters of your desire.

But it happened — the withdrawal, the hurt, the burn and the return-to-leave-again-after-getting-what-he-wants moments. He showed you what was inside of him, like a teabag drowned in water. You now lived in fear of his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he ghosted you and sometimes came back with polluted apologies and sometimes not. Before that, there had been a shared intimacy. He had asked on WhatsApp that night if you would kiss him and you replied with a ‘‘Hmm.’’ He told you to forget it and you immediately said yes, that you would very much love to, that you longed and ached to kiss him while pleading to God he wasn’t angry.

‘‘Come into the school, will you?’’ He said he was in school trying to finish up a story.

‘’Isn’t it late?’’ you typed, visibly shaking.

‘‘Let it just be like you came for night class then,’’ he replied, adding a laughing emoji.

It would be your first kiss. Not that you hadn’t looked forward to it anyway. And it would the first of your many kisses with him but who forgets a first? The first time he kissed you was at the back of an uncompleted building that was to be a new faculty but had become house to chirping crickets, the buzzing flies and the symphony of the sounds of the students reading at night and geckoes, spiders and birds in the daytime. His lips had met yours slow and uncertain, like a glance from a stranger trying to start a conversation. In truth, he was wondering why you stalled. You kissed him back, not tasting any plump sweetness at first and you felt it was same for him because your lips meeting was like two souls in two bodies travelling through space and time on two separate planes of existence, reaching towards each other. And on closing in on themselves, tried to discover newness on fleshy blankness, searched for acceptance and compatibility somewhere around their buds. And with your lips thoroughly lost in each other, the intensity magnifying at each suckling, your entire body pulsated to replace the stifled clocks that had ceased to account for time or maybe your heart was drumming a beat that blurred out the sound of everything else. So your lips danced, trying to match each other’s growing rhythm measure for measure with your heads rotating left, then right. Then right, then left as if trying to position the lips properly for the fleshy mating. Left. Right. Right. Right. Left. Like an awkward dance. You released yourself from his grip on your head and lips, as if to breathe and be sure it wasn’t a dream, your eyes were thoroughly lost in each others and the way you had looked at him on that first day had only magnified. And then you smiled before your lips smashed each other again but this time they glued as they were sure of each other, acquainted with their heat so that they joyously lean against each other like a sticker on a car and warm themselves the way two cold hands warm each other.

The second time was at his place and there was sex, too. Your place. His place. Your place. Your place. Your place. His place. It continued like that, your relationship with him still undefined like some mathematical answers.

Until one Valentine’s day on your bed where you two lay naked discussing things you loved, knitting dreams of happy conclusions as your hand warmly squeezed his and you asked him as if picking up from an old conversation, your full eyebrows raised slightly in expectation, ‘‘And, do you love me?’’

You blinked your heavily kohled eyes at him. He stood up and wore his briefs, leaving you mouth-open shocked and dissolving the sparkle in your eyes. You followed him up almost immediately, your five-foot-five-inches frame draped in his shirt so that it looked like an overall on you. His back was facing you so you dug your elbow into his waist, steered him so that you were face to face each other with your lips almost meeting. ‘’Do you love me, Fred?’’

He looked at you with wistful eyes so that you were almost convinced he did. You swallowed and embraced the clenching and unclenching of your intestines. But you would not be ready for his recoiling instead of unfurling. You would stand, disoriented, as he retracted from your reaching hands as if they were leprous. You stood still, bereft and painfully smiling into a void his leaving had created. You shrunk inside like a lab specimen being experimented as he passed around you to completely dress and leave — silent as you were the night at the cinema he angrily left you for taking pictures with your course rep.

You wobbled outside staring at the drizzle as the chill birthed a shiver that ran down your spine, listening to the loud quiet as you gazed into the nothingness of the midnight with tears welling in your eyes. The cold air was ferrying the whisper of you are simply not good enough into your ears, left and right and a current of infelicity rippled through your body so that a dejected softness sat still in your eyes. But you told yourself it didn’t hurt even though the pain was sharp, like a market woman’s tongue. The rain became vicious, pouring in heavy torrents and flipping the roofs of houses and shops like half opened pages of Frederick’s novels. The words his eyes spoke echoed and rippled, ran down the hollow chambers of the emptiness inside you and being amplified, brushed up against whatever it was that had refused to dissolve inside. A boy is allowed to express his love but a girl is required to express that same love, you told yourself as he busied your call for the umpteenth time while failing to realise he had sown unworthiness in your garden of self-esteem that had grown tall and strong, made you discard your pride in the manner you discard wastes, made you comfortable with being left by him, being shrugged off and swatted like a perching fly. You closed your eyes at this realisation, tightly, restraining the tears but no one can stop a sorrow whose time has come. So you cried, again. Just like the night at the cinema where he zoomed off in an Uber while you stood there, frozen in the soft darkness as tears cleaned part of your makeup. But he apologised, a text. I’m so sorry, Debby. It’s just that I got a personal call and it messed up with my mind. Family stuff. Let’s start again? This was before he had intentionally left your chat on read, two bold blue ticks stagnant at the bottom right corner of your text messages. You had told him no sex, you weren’t ready, you two should wait. ‘’Lol, smh,’’ he wrote back. You would spend the next two weeks seeking his attention on WhatsApp, begging for him to pick your calls, making excuses for him, reprimanding your misery — he isn’t obligated to reply, hell it doesn’t require a reply, at least he reads my messages, it’s just an hi and goodnight and good morning — because he shone in your memory crystal and complete, a character without flaws. The days he ignored you when you studied for your test were so hard you built a huge room of excuses for him to lay — maybe he was sleeping, eating or without his phone at the moment even though you could see a shirtless picture of him smiling with some screenshots — of girls drooling over that picture — being uploaded every minute. You waited, jumping at every beep from your phone. By this time, you had read the same line in your book a couple hundred times. But it was one of those days, you believed. It all mustn’t be rosy. Was it not yesterday he called you his Jewel? Or promised to stay by you through thick and thin while running his hand through your hair. You kept looking at his profile that read online, groping for more excuses for him as if to reassure yourself that you were alive to him until you surrendered to sleep. When you finally agreed to have sex with him, he asked if it wasn’t because of pressure. Of course not, you said. You love him. He started saying some rehearsed lines of poetry to you in bid to explain how he wouldn’t do anything to put you under pressure or hurt you, how he needed to be sure you both were sexually attracted to each other. He didn’t scramble for words. The more sincerely he tried to explain things, the more a fog of insincerity came to hang over everything but of course, you wouldn’t see it. Not in your pair of glasses that was resistant to fog. You apologized too. When he finished with Let’s start again?, you breathed a sigh of relief and went on to wrap him in a hug.

Before the night he left, you had seen some creepy WhatsApp conversation on his phone with a girl whose name was saved with a love emoji beside it. He said Dera was his best friend and childhood neighbour. They grew up together and had spent most of their lives seeing each other every morning and before they retire to bed at night at home. His smile drew out a smile from you. You believed him. You gave him a surprise visit the next day and saw the girl in his shirt, cooking. Hi. He went out to get me some cakes. It is my birthday. You watched her rant in embarrassed surprise. Oh, Debby the girl he is helping settle in school. I’ll tell him you stopped by. A smirk nestled in the corner of her mouth, as though she took a kind of guilty pleasure in all this. She rested on the wall scrutinising you, weighing up your beauty, and gauging whether you were a temptation for Frederick. Clearly, you were not pretty enough by her standards and that was why she floated past you to the kitchen with that same smirk, promising to tell Frederick about your visit while singing to Lewis Capaldi’s Someone You Loved blaring from the sound system in the room. You wanted the ground to swallow you or, sensibly, to fall on the tiled ground but you fear breaking like an egg. But he said she was just his best friend and even with the smell of fried rice wafting from the kitchen in his slender room full of light and literature, you cut him some slack, watered down your expectations, tucked your anger at him in your pockets and you got angry at yourself for not seeing how the force of your love may be too much for him. He was only saving himself by drawing back a little, by having a best friend, by being too busy with his writing, by trying to catch up with his syllabus, by going to watch a football match with his best friend on your birthday even though he hated football. Two best friends, one male and one female. You looked at the girl when she came back to shut the door on your face, tempted to suck in your tongue and throw out a waft of spittle from your mouth into her lensed eye in one burst as you remembered it was her pictures crammed in Frederick’s gallery and on his lock screen with her hands flung over his shoulders and head thrown back in laughter. But you stayed still, tried not to attract attention to yourself, suppressed the rage inside of you. The camouflage only works if you don’t move because the snakes will move on if you just remain silent and resist the urge to run or attack them. So no reason to be angry. Not at WhatsApp messages ticked blue devoid of replies, and missed calls even when you knew he was with his phone. Stop being ridiculous and wait for him to come explain things. That was what your love became, making frail excuses for him like an incarcerated rapist blaming the devil for his acts. It said — He isn’t nonchalant, he just loves differently, he ignores me most times because he pays too much attention. He doesn’t like to express his love but he loves me. He was at your place the next day, head tied so tightly in a durag so that his skin was pulled toward his temples. You saw the reluctant crow’s feet crinkle around his eyes when he forced a smile as you both stared at each other with hands on your hips as if ready for a brawl, the silence in your room hung heavy like a washed jean on a rope. I am sorry for yesterday. It was just damn busy. He was hitting his hand on the wall — all the things men do to show they care. Because to be present isn’t the same as to be seen, you made your emotion a muscle and you relished in training it every day in every way, stretching it, making it stronger. But all those muscles of emotion became fats when you met his eyes, malleable. With him, the pulsation of your heart slowed to an almost-halt. But you pretended, hardened your face in a false way you didn’t know was obvious. You wanted to tell him you didn’t want it anymore, that you were tired, that you both were like unnecessary extra seasons of a show, Riverdale and Empire heavy in your mind — that lost its substance, easy humour and still had characters who lost their shine a long time ago, that he should go back and never come back, that you were tired of feeling broken bones even before they happened like the time he felt something like shame to introduce you to his friends and when he left you in his room after sex telling you to drop the key under the foot mat when you leave. You wanted to tell him that you would find someone to match your crazy love. But when you met his eyes that were gentle with a plea, you folded those words into rumpled pieces and tossed them in the sections of your mind where courage never reached so that they started to burn like paper in an ocean of fire because with him, now and tomorrow were never too apart so even with your bones all fired up you asked him a less accusatory than bewildered why with concern folding the skin between your eyebrows as he leaned against your door frame. He said it was nothing, with the urgency of one making jokes. She can be crazy sometimes, you know. She was just teasing you. You allowed him, even with his heavy smell of feminine perfume you didn’t own as he drew you to his chest and ruffled your hair.

And now he just scurried from your embrace like a prey fleeing from a famished bull, because of your innocent question.

III

Chioma tells you to listen to her and drop your damn phone down. Her voice has lost its sweetness now, a voice of please, sorrys and thank yous. Now it deepens with command and frays at its edges with husky frustration at you being stupid, not getting her, not seeing the whole picture, not realizing that your wishes are to be acquiesced to because you matter too and that you are fit for kings like your mother would say. Chioma says you are more than the stood-up dates, the calmer of his sexual urges and the texts not replied. The recklessness of her voice has emboldened along with the swelling muscles on her forehead and her words loosened the bitter truths in your chest like the fact that you needed to be focused on school and the fact that Frederick won’t change for you. You knew his changing, his loving you back as fiercely as you did would be an equivalent of the tectonic plates shifting but love is messy. In the garden of your heart, you have allowed him move, strut, stroll, saunter and even perambulate. It is his for the taking, he has acquired an easy citizenship even without professing his love for what has been given to him. He doesn’t even need to move because it revolves around him. It is all his, no sharing. Never again, you say to yourself baffled by how the love that gave you so much joy could also cause you so much pain. Chioma tells you it is one thing to love someone and another thing for the person to requite the love because how can you say you love a song when you don’t feel the lyrics?

This is before you listened to his voice notes, audios and WhatsApp messages of how sorry he is, of how the death of his mother still affects him, of how you both will never go out of style in Taylor Swift’s perspective, of how he doesn’t want to give up on what you both share. He doesn’t say he loves you, though but his voice is breaking so he must mean it like that last time and the one before that and it made your heart frail to stand on its own. You push on through the storms against which Chioma has warned you, the reality of your situation staring straight in your face yet you row your boat in the ragged sail, reaching for transient hope, searching buried treasure that is his heart instead of your GP. You ignore all his faults, all the hurts he has crested on your body like a tattoo and you wipe his slate of sin clean, burnished it until it’s blinding to everyone including you. It is in that moment you discover you love him the way children love toys growing up — merely because they were toys, that it is love because it is mystifying.

Okay, let’s start again. You texted him back and with blue flames of fire dancing into life in your heart, you tuck yourself into the sheets and look up at a smiling Chioma who is proud you have learned.