Ensnared!
Some say it is only when you dwell on a curse that it affects you. You’d have to believe in it to give it life. I never gave one thought to that curse Mansa put on me; not until I met Nunya; Nunya with his intense, silent stare and his few but significant words. And yet here I am a living witness to what Mansa gleefully calls my one great love and what I call the most bewildering experience of my life.
I find myself sitting and watching him, unable to tear away my eyes for a second and when he catches me in a stare I just smile because he smiles at me first. He knows I watch him. He watches me too and it’s the most beautiful feeling in the world to know someone you are deeply attached to is just as attached to you.
It is in these moments of bliss that I also feel the most intense fear. Because discovering how happy I can be also reveals to me how devastated I can get if this feeling should somehow be lost. If this is what love is then Mansa and all those who have told me of how wonderful it is have grossly misled me. No one ever mentions the tumultuous sea of emotions you are bombarded with every single day; the anxiety, the uncertainty, the self-doubt (this amazing person wants me? why? Never mind that you’ve been telling yourself your whole life how ‘wantable’ you are), the powerful joy that threatens to cause your heart to explode because you think you can’t contain it. And let’s not forget the constant need to speak to the other, see the other; be in each other’s personal spaces; be so close that you want to enter them, be a part of them.
I feel most at ease when I am by myself. I enjoy solitude, always have. It’s the time when I get to think, uninterrupted; a time when I feel whole. But lately, even when I am alone, I do not feel alone. It’s this persistent knowledge somewhere in the recess of my mind that someone, somewhere is there with me. I can only explain it as having a telepathic relationship. That even when we are apart and not talking, we’re having long winding conversations and when we meet and do talk we’re just continuing where we left off in our minds.
Our relationship moves at lightning speed like its making up for lost time. Like somehow we had been marking time until we met each other and now that what we were waiting for has arrived there was no need to tarry. That makes me happy until he says to me once “It feels like I’ve known you forever; it took me months to feel for my other girlfriends, half of what I feel for you after two weeks.”
I smile but inside I am torn because even though he means it as a positive thing, all I hear is “our relationship will age in dog years, and soon, we will reach the end.
Nunya is amazing! I am not saying this because I’ve been “blinded by love” as Mansa and Ayitey would like to believe. Anyone who meets him knows he is something special. He's a gifted artists. "Artist with no barriers" he calls himself. He paints, sculpts, plays the guitar, writes, weaves, prints; everything artistic. he is well-read and has travelled the world on art scholarships since he was in university. He has a propensity to learn things and once he learns them he is hit over and over again by how unfair and unbalanced and hopeless the world is. He is burdened by the feeling of powerlessness to overcome the things that ail the world and this unsettles him.
He has moments when it all becomes too much and it over powers him and he transforms into a shadow clinging to darkness and solitude, indiscernible; wanting only to disappear into nothingness.
The first time it happened on my watch, I thought it was something I did or said. After three weeks of unspeakable happiness together he disappears on me without a word.
I am plagued with three lonely, sleepless nights until on the morning of the fourth day when he calls me. In the time he was away I still felt him there, in my mind. Our physical relationship might have been put on hold but telepathically, we still connected and still had our conversations.
The day after he physically comes back to me, we meet up and head out of town to the mountains for a picnic at his suggestion. Sitting on the blanket in the grass with two glasses of sweet Bordeaux in between us, he assures me that I had nothing to do with his withdrawal. He explains to me his inner despair with all life. He questions the purpose of life; of his existence. He shakes his fist at the big bang (he is an atheist) and wishes it had never happened. He understands how humans can create for themselves something to worship, a life after this one; something to give our existence meaning. However, he sees the futility of our efforts especially since these imaginary gods can't seem to quell our incessant desire to be hateful towards each other.
I ask him, “But if we have created this mechanism of religion and spirituality to help us get through why can’t you?”
He replies, “Because I know it’s pointless, this lie has been told over and over again for so long, that humans actually believe it to be true.”
I am at a loss as to what to say to him; how to help him. What a burden for one man to carry. This is such a new problem to me. Of course these questions have crossed my mind but I always will them out of my consciousness as my mother suggested I do. At barely 10 years old, I had asked her how we know there is God if we have never seen him. “Shh, don’t think about these things. We just know, we had to have come from somewhere,” she had replied.
Now as I sit with Nunya discussing his problems, the thoughts and questions come back.
“I’m sorry. I should have told you this earlier. It’s just that I’ve never felt this way and I thought I wouldn’t need to withdraw, not with you,” he placates and looks down at the wine glasses.
“It’s ok. You’re back now. Just let me know when it’s happening again so I know what to expect. This being in love thing is new to me.”
He looks back up at me and smiles his disarming smile. “You love me?”
Oh dear! Mansa said to make sure I don’t say it first. “There are rules governing this relationship thing, you know. You don’t want to come across as desperate,” She had said.
“And if I do what will happen? “ I had asked her.
“One of two things; he’ll either say it back just to be nice or just to get what he wants from you or he won’t say it back, probably pretend he didn’t hear you.”
Things aren’t going as expected.
Ah well, what to do? the truth is already out. “Yes, I do,” I reply, looking him straight in the eyes. I don’t feel desperate and somehow I feel he doesn’t see it that way. There’s something beautifully abnormal about the way he thinks. It’s quite unlike the way the men Mansa is used to think and I’m happy with that.
He leans in and kisses me softly on the lips, then on the nose. “It’s funny you should say that because in the time I was away, you kept popping up in my thoughts and all I wanted to do was tell you that I don’t understand the concept of love, I never have. But I think if it could be anything at all, it is what I feel for you.
That’s why I think we should end this. Because I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t want you to ever feel dissatisfied with our relationship; with me. This will happen again and again. It’s who I am. You deserve a normal man who will do for you what normal men do.”
I cut in then, unwilling to fully grasp that he is breaking up with me.
“Normal men want me to dress like a harlot; they want me to act like I have only basic desires and intellect. Normal men do nothing for me that I care for. You grip my imagination and set my body on fire and you take my intelligence out for long walks along beautiful, unchartered paths - you don’t try to lock it up in some societal prison for women.”
I hold his face in my hands. “You do for me what no normal man has ever done and you’re the one I’m in love with.”
Love; a notion I never thought was real, and here I am throwing the word about like I’ve been familiar with it my whole life. That’s how he makes me feel, I realise. He makes me feel like what we have is real, like everything I’ve thought about myself is not just in my head. You can believe in yourself all you want but it takes someone else voicing it out on their own volition to give your beliefs life. He gives me life.
How strange that someone who sees no point in life exudes it without even trying.
“I’m not leaving you,” I tell him. “If this is a ploy to put me off you then it backfired. You succeeded in intriguing me all the more.”
He smiles and kisses me again. “I was hoping you’d say something like that.” Then he laughs and repositions himself so he can put his head on my lap, looking up at me.
I smile down at him and say, “It’s just human nature, isn’t it? We see danger looming and instead of running away from the problem, we first want to find out what it is so we end up getting so close that it’s easy for us to get hurt.”
“I will never willingly hurt you; I need you to know that.”
And I do; somewhere deep inside I know that. So when he disappeared again a month later, I knew he didn’t willingly want to hurt me. Instinctively, I also knew he wouldn’t be back this time and I couldn’t reach him telepathically anymore. So on the night of the seventh day after he left the second time, after the feelings of dread had welled up inside, I broke down. I opened the dam and let the anguish of facing a life without him, which had magically turned into millilitres of salty water, spill over.
No comments:
Post a Comment