Don't Weep For Me - by Oluwatobi Kolawole

I don't know which one died first. Me. Or the people I once loved. The adventures books give you is what makes reading bearable. An improved verbosity arrives without asking. It seeps in, those conversations. The decision to start from a particular point. It shows. I considered the exact coordinate of my unapproachableness, and it became clear that I can’t relate with people on many levels. The way I live oozes out, and when some taste it, it comes as bile. That it is not a sustainable thing to find an abode in, as an adult first, and as a human being afterwards. A plain account of the things I love causes anyone to sigh. The irritability of the one who observes me is akin to the effect of black soot on the eyes. I abhor recent productions on streaming platforms. Little effort goes into such stories. But I like old stories. Those that made nomination lists at the Oscars. The ones people like me call classic movies. A colleague once asked if I was a classic man, and I thought her probing was moot. Something to toss away as filth. To stretch the bounds of my reasoning, being a homebody has not done me so much good in meeting people. The odds are stacked against me, even though I have good intentions. That only happens two percent of the time. I don’t always have good intentions. Alicia found her way through anyway. She says it’s in the way I look at her. When she flicked her pen my way today for me to put some words on the paper I had in my hands, I stared back for a moment, before she broke it off. She didn’t plan for it to happen the way it did on that first visit. Worthy of note is the travesty that comes to life when we belittle our desires. I’m mortal enough to not immortalize my emotions. Writing about it should achieve that, and boastful statements when with friends haunt me while I’m in the silence of the place I call home. I leaned in, then she kissed back, and every other thing that erupted blurs into oblivion. We looked happy. However finite it seemed. We had desires. And it was enough. I said it out at the office today, with people giving me all shades of side eyes. In a way that puts me as predictable. At first glance, I appear as someone of rectitude in soft demeanor that accompanies the stares I give to people. Everything I do is deliberate. I said it out, then spent the rest of the day replaying the exact pitch of each side eye I received. I’m not a principled person, and I’m not morally correct most of the time. Alicia had me in a state of limerence, and all the codes I once recited and made flash cards for in the name of understanding attraction at its most crude form went to waste. We belittle our emotions. I do too. I play down the intensity that comes with finding someone who draws out the affectionate side of who I am. It’s not the safest thing to say that on the back of a terrible breakup, and the gradual peeling of sanity that came with it, the kind where you check your phone for a message from someone who has already told you, clearly, that they are done. It was a measure of self preservation that made me say within myself that it’d take a lot more to get down there again. I never intend to be that guard-less. The minute that kicked in, it was easy to see it in others. The way they shrink back after rejection. The way people won’t let themselves get undone completely in the moment because they feel it’s not something to give away, yet. I saw it in others, but I was looking in the mirror too. I located the same sensations within myself. Similar triggers. Overflows of disappointments gotten from a life we once built for ourselves. Some days back, at a location I’ve come to know as a hiding place, in a bid to not stay on the queue at a more popular shopping mall, I maneuvered my way into a woman’s store just to get snacks. The issue. I knew this. Like the back of my hand. Was that those snacks always tasted bad. But what was happening was the impatience, the quick victory of consuming something that’d hold space for me till a later time. The question really. Was I hungry? Or was I hungry enough to wait for something that wouldn’t taste bad. One is desire. The other is the same with a large amount of quality attached to it. The chewing. The contour in my face. The irritation. The woman’s face. The glass that held everything she had. That picture lingers in my head as the water trickles into the bucket here. My butthole tells a familiar story. Same story. Same old story. I was there. Five or I think it was eight weeks ago. Before the threat of failure. Before all that I’ve seen people go through. I remember complaining to myself on decision making. A friend laughed. I did too, but for a shorter period. Was the one at the popular store not worth waiting for? Did it have to always be me and that woman? Knowing I’d not be happy after all? But that’s not what left me undone. Did she know that a store below hers sold me some stuff better than everything she’d ever sold me? Hers is an unusual case of hurting people who need what she doesn’t have. I’m playing devil’s advocate by saying she doesn’t know that the toilet in my house knows the taste of her shitty snacks. Perhaps, if she did, she’d recommend that I just patiently take my pangs, lace it with the virtue of patience, and wait in line. But I’m the woman too. No matter how much I miss people, or the moments we once shared, everything I sell them hasn’t helped. I need that sales revenue, but the dough I use, and the useful life of what I sell is just about thirty to thirty nine days and they all start asking for quality on the fortieth. And I look. Unable to say or name it. Staring down their eyes with an ineptness that vocabularies can’t always permit. I can’t tell them to go to the popular store. But people know. The patience at it is better than the one here. Alicia saw it, and made every involuntary desire I expressed come to nothing. She knew I’d not be sorry for my transgressions, and that there would always be a place in her that was meant for me. Now a hole, and she was willing to live with it. Even if it meant a ridicule to my limerence.

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