Goodbye Femi🍃 - by Nomshu Writes✨

I Saw Femi Get Married I wasn't supposed to cry at Femi's wedding. I had rehearsed this moment in my head several times. I would walk in, greet the people I knew, congratulate him, admire his wife and go home. Simple. Except nobody tells you how difficult it is to watch someone marry the person they get to spend the rest of their life with when you once thought that person would be you. I was standing somewhere near the back of the reception hall when they played their first dance song. Femi was smiling. God, he was smiling. He looked handsome in his suit, the kind of handsome that makes you briefly forget all the reasons you stopped loving someone out loud. And then I saw his mother. She spotted me from across the room and immediately started making her way towards me. "Nomshu!" I smiled. "Aunty! Congratulations!" She hugged me tightly. For a moment, she didn't say anything. Then she held my hands and looked at me. "My daughter." I almost lost it. She had always called me that. She asked how I was doing, whether I was eating properly and how my family was. The usual questions. But there was something in her eyes that made me realise she remembered, too. She remembered the girl who used to sit in her kitchen with her son. The girl who helped her arrange food during Christmas. The girl she once jokingly told to start preparing for marriage because Femi was taking too long. I excused myself to use the restroom. I stood in front of the mirror for a while, staring at my face. My makeup was still intact. Thank GOD. I wasn't going to ruin my makeup over a man who was currently dancing with his wife. I laughed at myself. Then I cried anyway. When I returned, Femi was standing near the entrance. He saw me. I saw him. And for a few seconds, neither of us moved. He excused himself from the people around him and walked towards me. "Nomshu." "Femi." He smiled, but it didn't quite reach his eyes. "You came." "Of course I came. Congratulations, Femi." "Thank you." There was an awkward silence. Then he looked at me and asked: "Are you happy?" I almost laughed. Not because it was funny, but because of the audacity of the question. Here was a man whose wedding invitation I had received, a man whose wedding I had dressed up for, a man whose future I had once spent hours imagining. And he was asking me if I was happy. I looked at him. "I am, Femi." He nodded. "I'm glad." Someone called his name from behind him. Before leaving, he leaned closer and said something I wasn't prepared for. "I still think about you sometimes." I looked away. "Femi, please." He nodded immediately. "I'm sorry." And just like that, he was gone. I watched him return to his wife. She held his hand. He smiled at her. And I stood there, holding a glass of Chapman, trying to understand how a person could be both a stranger and one of the most familiar things in the world. I left before the reception ended. On my way home, I opened our old WhatsApp conversation. Four years of messages. Voice notes. Pictures. Arguments. Good mornings. Random complaints. Pictures of food. Messages that made absolutely no sense to anybody but us. I scrolled until I found one from three years earlier. Femi had sent: *When we get married, I'm not allowing you to stress yourself in the kitchen. We'll just order food.* I laughed. Then I cried so hard I had to put my phone down. Because the thing about Femi was that he wasn't a bad man. He wasn't somebody I needed to recover from. He was somebody I had to learn to live without. And perhaps that was why losing him hurt the way it did. But I'm getting ahead of myself. You see, before I stood at Femi's wedding, before I congratulated the woman wearing the ring I once imagined on my own finger, before I learned how to smile at a man who used to call me baby... There was a time when Femi and I were absolutely certain we would get married. There was a time when his mother saved me a seat at the dinner table. There was a time when I knew exactly what he was going to order at our favourite suya spot. And there was a time when, if you had asked me who I was going to spend the rest of my life with, I wouldn't have needed to think twice. His name was Femi. And I loved him. This is how we ended.

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