The Methodist

Part 2

This is not a love story. Well, not the kind you’re used to anyway (every story is a love story). but this is not a conventional love story. No, this is not about Chaney and our heroine. He won’t leave his wife to come back to her in the end, and they won’t meet sometime in the future to have a sordid affair.

Our heroine will fall in love again though. And though not in the way you expect, it will be the way that matters most, with the one who she should have fallen in love with a long time ago. The one whom, if she treats right, will never leave her.

Our heroine falls into fitful sleep at 4 a.m. after tossing and turning for hours. She’s lying on a students mattress she brought along with her from her mother’s home. After only 30 minutes, she is awoken again by a sound she cannot identify. She feels the sleep slipping from her grasp and she shuts her eyes tighter in a futile fight to hold on to it but she fails and ends up opening her eyes slowly to appraise the ceiling.

The empty room is dark except for the light on her ceiling cast by the streetlight outside. It’s thrown a shadow of some rustling branches from the tree near it. She watches them dance slowly in the early morning breeze and sighs.

This will not do, she thinks to herself. I cannot curl up and die. I paid good money for this place. I cannot let it go to waste. This isn’t the first time I’ve been left and it definitely won’t be the last, she thinks bitterly. What are you going to do, break down every time? Very soon there’ll be nothing left to break.

There’s got to be an easier way to deal with this, there just has to be.

It is getting light outside and the early birds have begun to chirp. She gets up off the floor and heads to her bathroom. She turns on the light and she stands at the mirror and looks at herself intently for minutes. she’s read in books about characters who cut themselves with sharp objects just so they can feel something, because they feel dead inside. I want the very opposite; not to feel. feeling is the bases of all human suffering.

She feels a split second of self-admiration at her epiphany, but even though it was severely brief, she was able to also feel a tiny relief from her deep sorrow. Too minuscule to warrant notice but she did; it was there. she closed her eyes shut, tried to regain the moment of suspended grief.

Although she couldn’t, her answer came to her. That’s how to beat this; make her life an outer body experience. If her heart causes her pain, she’ll remove herself from it. In order not to feel, she’ll have to dissociate herself from her pain; make it a separate entity something-she can face squarely.

But how exactly? She voices out to her reflection in the mirror and waits, like she really is talking to another person.

Back in secondary school, her friends always called her weird; she would literally get lost in her thoughts right in the middle of conversation, sometimes even while she was speaking. She’d say one word that would trigger another thought and just like that, she’d be off.

Her thoughts were mostly about what could have been; how differently her life would have turned out if her father was a responsible man. What will be; She’d be made by 30, have her own house, get her children and treat them better than any parent ever has.

She rarely dwells on her present circumstances, only looking behind or straight ahead; far ahead. Perhaps that’s my answer, she breathes. She leaves the bathroom and goes back to lie on her student’s mattress on the floor. My answer is to be in the present.

But wouldn’t that mean dealing with the pain? No, more present than that. like paying attention only to whatever is in front of me within any given second. people usually say to others in pain; “take it one day at a time.” What if I take it one second at a time?

She gets up again, turns on the bedroom light and goes to her box containing her belongings from the office. She digs through and finds an A4 sheet , a black marker which she used for their brainstorming sessions back at the office. technically, it is company property but what the hell. She also takes a roll of sticky tape.

In her work life, she has always felt the need to plan every little detail. She wrote almost every thought down and ended up with a step-by-step approach to solving her problems. It was her carefully crafted way to not show how panicky she was inside when she faced a new challenge. sometimes, what she wrote made no sense at all but she would keep writing and soon, she’d have something to go on.

Her subordinates called her the Methodist because they only ever saw the order she presented to them and not the chaos that would be her thought patterns. Nothing happens in a vacuum, she’d tell them. Everything leads to something which leads to another which leads to your end result. This line of reasoning, strangely had never crossed paths with her personal life. She had always just let things happen when it came to her romantic involvements. for some reason, she always considered herself powerless in that regard.

She spreads out the 8 sheets of A4 on the floor and writes boldly in her best calligraphy hand, DO EVERY LITTLE THING LIKE IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO YOU.

THERE IS NO YESTERDAY, NO TOMORROW, ONLY THIS MOMENT

She sticks them together to create two separate banners and pastes them up on her wall. Then show looks around at the emptiness and decides that she has to make it a live-able space.

She finds her phone and checks her bank account balance with her bank’s mobile application. Whatever she has should be enough to cover utilities for the month and get a bed and kitchen stuff at least while she looks for another job. Her phone vibrates; the app is showing her bank balance; she has only GHC1,200 in her account. IN this economy? Oh dear!

The Methodist

Part One

When it rains, it pours and it would be perfect (a cliché but perfect nonetheless) if this scene could be set at night in the pouring rain; except, in Ghana, the rains are not prone to just show up (or down) unannounced and more so because this scene happened one dusty afternoon, smack dab in the middle of the dry, disheartening Harmattan.

There might be no rain drops to mix in with our heroine's tears and wet her hair so she looks like a dejected soaked rat (that wouldn’t work anyway since her afro would defy gravity and evade the look altogether). But the lack of easily recognizable visuals does not take away from the gravity of the pain she feels in this moment.

In this moment, she is standing outside her workplace and not lying in a disconsolate heap on the ground only because her brain retains only enough function to keep her on her feet. She works (used to work) at a big name advertising firm that is recently losing ground and customers to newer, smaller, quicker and invariably cheaper advertising firms. She works in Campaign Strategy, which is a department she almost single-handedly built for the firm when she joined 3 years ago.

It was a department solely meant to research the best strategy for a product and test it on a small scale before presenting it to the client. She headed it with three subordinates and together they researched, interviewed, planned and executed. The problem was that most companies came in on the spur of the moment and always wanted things “done yesterday”, failing to understand that the best results take time.

There had been rumours going around the office about the downsizing due to the low client turnout and general downward slump of the economy. She shouldn’t have been so hard hit by the news of her forced indefinite leave. It would seem that she feels it all the more because of the heart-breaking events of the previous night.

She dares not process that news for fear of losing brain function altogether. There is only one thought making the rounds in her head; “how do i live now?”

She had just paid the last of the felonious two year rent advance on a two bedroom apartment and the next two month’s salary was supposed to go into kitchen essentials, furniture and other necessities. But the next two month’s pay is now just an idea.; the company could only manage half a month’s severance pay and promised the other half by the end of the next month.

Our heroine is a woman of tears (they show up at anytime for any number of reasons; she could be doing laundry and encounter an especially stubborn stain which would bring tears to her eyes or she could see a random person helping a school child to cross a busy road and well up with tears) but very few people have seen her cry. The certain square of her shoulders and the almost non-challant line of her back belie the tumult of emotions that constantly rage just beneath the surface. 

People prefer the nonchalance. They find it easier to deal with because it is in tandem with her lean, poised physique. She learned to keep it in the fore when she discovered in secondary school that nobody knew how to handle the sobbing, lonely mess that she is inside.

The woman she has become will not allow her to show her panic so she quietly hails a cab to take her to her new, empty home which is quite close to her office because she wanted to be able to get to work earlier without losing sleep. The best laid plans...

In her apartment, she stands in the middle of the emptiness that would be the living room holding a box of her belongings from work; probably the only things she now owns. Going back to her mother’s home is out of the question. She wouldn’t even if they begged her; her mother and her step-father. He always made her skin crawl and she couldn’t have left the house fast enough when her mother finally married him a year ago after two children and over a decade of courtship..

She understood that her mother needed a companion (why this particular companion remained a mystery to her).

Her birth father is not dead but she doesn’t know where he is and she doesn’t really want to know. She has always felt alone, being the only child from her mother and father’s union and living with her mother and step-father’s children who were almost a decade younger than her.

Loneliness is a comfortable space for her; she had, in fact, reached a point where she craved it. Well, that point no longer exists. Not after she met Chaney, who is the first part of this rainstorm.

Chaney with his understanding eyes and his gentle heart. Chaney who seemed to be the manifestation of her every wet dream and her every requirement. Chaney who is at the moment about to get married to his childhood friend because in a moment of passion, he got her pregnant. Chaney; a part of her life for a split, glorious second, and a near miss to reminisce about for the rest of her life.

The thought of Chaney with another woman while she stands alone in an empty 2 bedroom apartment is her unraveling. Finally, her strong mind buckles under the weight of her sorrow and she falls into a heaving, sobbing mess on her bare, would-be living room floor.

No family, no money and no companion. How is she going to live now?