A memoir.
I’m old now, my days of being useful to anyone are almost passed. Injuries from my old work on rigs have left me broken and in pain, soon the pains will get worse. No need for medical science to tell me about myself; I know it just as I know my own name even if my wife - wonderful woman - coos in my ears, when rubbing the ointment for my back, about how much she misses our rumbles in the jungle and how understanding she is I just can’t rise up to the occasion as I used to. We’re too old for that anyway.
My back has hurt increasingly since a work incident that killed two men. The people of medicine told me I was lucky to walk at all. Taking that in stride I sucked up the pain and always smiled answering,
“Yes, never been better.” when asked about the pain. Five years ago it became so bad I had to use a walking stick. They found a way to retire me soon after. I noticed some swellings around m knuckles yesterday and through that evening worked myself into the idea that before my brain goes demented, soft I should do some writing and what else do I know but to write about myself!
My wife has been generous enough to let me use her old notebooks and pencils. Pencils are the ultimate mascots for memory. Lines drawn in lead long, thick, wavy, thin all can be erased, retraced, manipulated just like memory. In my time I have seen the with how much whimsy people recall objectively terrible times or rationalizing an assault or accident they caused. There is no real malice in that though, we are all human. It’s just a human thing. My mother said when you get old enough all your memories get clearer and you can even call back memories as far back as when you’re a toddler. I can’t remember that far back yet or perhaps I’m not old enough.
One memory that has stayed with me through my whole life, since it happened, was the first time I loved a girl. No, it wasn’t my wife. She feel into my path fifteen years later. I told her a joke I heard from a stand-up comedian and she laughed, really laughed. Toothy and carefree. I’ve loved her since that day.
The girl I first fell in love with also laughed at my jokes [don’t let my wife know] and she had beautiful, supple skin, the kind that spoke of a life private schools and and an army of servants but for the month I knew her she was just plain, normal, plump and cheerful Linda. I was a shy undergraduate arriving late for a leadership training camp in the South West [I can’t remember which state it was anymore but it’s of little importance to this tale now] and we met at the hospital on our first day when she asked me for something. I was winded and croaked an answer. It must have been enough because she started saying hello to me in class after that. In a social environment that had an uneven gender disparity of 3 boys to 1 girl the hunt was fierce and to get that kind of attention after the third week was a surprise.
We eventually started speaking properly over music, taste, genres whatnot. My family had this small radio that used to be tuned to stations blasting American hip-hop and tuned percussion music. We don’t have those anymore, radios went died out by 2065. I used to listen for hours and arrange my talking points to speak to her about it. I remember it was a lot of fun for me, just talking about music I genuinely liked and I came prepared for our chats. We took walks, talked [about other things than music] and shared food together. She was genuinely interested in what I wanted to say and rubbed my arms occasionally? Would you blame me for falling head over heels for a girl like that? Would you blame me for pointing a gun at the man I caught her with at night?
Imagery is a beautiful thing, I learnt it from reading poetry and the best poets don’t just tell you how they felt when they took up pen to write. A true master of poesy would catch and hold your attention with such deft accuracy of words that make you feel more like a participant than the audience member of a reading. I am no poet by any measure but I can imagine the image in your mind: boy meets girl, they get on like a house on fire and she jilts him for an oversexed stud. Maybe you even think I fell far too easily. For that I make no apologies.
What I will apologise for is misleading you, if a bit. I retrace this period with a small tinge of regret and amusement. It’s expected for my brain to convince me I was the victim of some injustice but that’s something I’ve grown older than - deceiving myself.
Linda was a nice, friendly girl. She was friends with someone in every group of tired students that trudged out of the halls of learning. Flitting around like a butterfly she joked, guffawed and strutted around radiant everyday. She had no time for me except a few conversations. My roommate, Kluivert, used to make jokes out of it. He would say,
“Maybe she’s just a friendly girl,” and throw his head back and laugh.
I didn’t mind as every time we spoke she was all there. No distraction, no other thing or person mattered. We had conversations short and passionate and with every passing one I couldn’t wait until I saw her again. We did talk about music but it was no meeting of the minds. It was just me telling her what I thought. I guess I should have known, no?
She invaded my dreams. My heart skipped multiple beats when I saw her walking. It seemed the Baader-Meinhof Syndrome became true for me. Once I saw her I never stopped seeing her. Wherever I turned she existed in some form. Her laughter, hand waving hello through the crowd of heads. A picture of her still exists at the back of my eyes from all those years ago. Her right arm is raised over her head and the sleeve of the blouse falls just so you can see a bracelet. Was it silver or rose-gold? I’m not sure now but that image has been a comfort all these years. A souvenir from my youth, in more ways than one. I wanted to hold her hand and sniff the perfume on them and I wanted her to call me her own but I couldn’t voice out my feelings. I just did not know how to make her fall in love with me. Being so close yet so far made me ache and I turned in bed, night after night thinking about the possibilities.
“Would she even like me?”
“What if you go and funk it up like you did at the Cecelia incident?”
“I wasn’t to blame for that.”
“But it happened anyway. What can you say that won’t leave you feeling like a clown?”
“What’s the worst that could happen?
“She knows many people. They will laugh.”
So it went.
I was a shut-in during my teenage years. I learnt the basis of socializing from tv shows and the radio without thinking that real life was a different arena with a lot of the social ways of communication existing in the realm of the non-verbal. There are conversation lines that will only make sense in a tv show, you cannot cross the road hoping the cars will stop, you don’t have a gun on standby, etc.
My education suffered a bit and that’s also when Kluivert introduced me to the smoking vigilantes.
The local vigilantes used to hangout at an office on the campus, which was only that in name as it served as detention center cum firearm storage cum meeting point. Kluivert, who was a smoker, was friendly with some of the guys there and we got invited to smoke a few times. We’d gone there about five times when one of the vigilantes, his name was Mukhtar, asked me to walk him buy some food.
I agreed because I needed to stretch my legs and we walked into the night. We went to a store at the end of a poorly lit street. After the glow of one of the intermittent streetlamps that lined the street we walked into the darkness of a into the shade of a tree under which there were two shapes holding hands. As we walked closer we made out the shapes of a man and a woman. Muktar and I laughed when we heard the man fumble with his belt. The couple walked back the way we came and I saw who the girl was. Her bracelet twinkled faintly from the lamp. Mukhtar couldn’t understand why I wasn’t able to speak to him for the rest of the walk.
I tried to rationalize what I saw, to deny the truth that had crystallized in my mind since I had first seen the shape of a man and woman.
“You know she is a really friendly gal”
“Yeah. They’re just talking like friends.. Friends can get that close, right?
“What right do you think you even have, you lounging unimpressive conceited piece of impotent meat to care who and what a woman does with her time?
So it went. When we got back to the office I tried to join in on the banter but I couldn’t even complete my sentences on account of the jackhammer that was going through my chest and the weight that had somehow been placed in my throat.
Around eleven I got tired of being together with loud men smelling like yesterday’s sweat and went out for a cigarette by myself. One thing I appreciate my wife for was she made me quit tobacco, then after smoking the first one I didn’t feel nearly comfortable enough so I decided to walk again. Now, I remember the whole scene like yesterday probably because it felt like something out of the most contrived plot writer’s mind. There were bats zooming around the streetlamp every which way. There was a gentle, chilly breeze that made me grateful for the sport jacket I wore. I clutched it closer and pulled out another cigarette. My preoccupation with smoking did not let me pay attention to the seat under the tree until I lit the cigarette. The flame burned hot and bright orange in the darkness, lighting up my face and three feet around me enough for me to lock eyes with Linda dealing with a mouthful of a convulsing man’s genitals.
“What were you expecting, young man?
“Is it the cigarette smoke that’s making your eye water?
“Shut up!”
“What right do you think you even have, you lounging unimpressive conceited piece of impotent meat to care who and what a woman does with her time and body?”
Love comes with such passion and sweetness, eve for an infatuation unrequited. It burns with the fervor of Hell tempered in the exuberance of youth. It’s a joy to experience as much as it is a torture to have your daydreams punctured my sharp realities. I got back to the vigilante office and vomited. I saw a Dane gun and felt a white hot jealousy course through my veins but I fainted before I could pick it up. They told me they thought I wanted to commit suicide that night. Maybe I was. That was as far as it went with the gun.
I told my wife this story when we met and after laughing - a good-natured giggle - she shrugged and said that was how life is. It just is.
“Did you learn from that,” she said.
Such a pragmatic woman. I don’t think I did because I loved all of her from our first day for much the same reasons. That joke paid off well, maybe I’ll talk about in the chapter of our own story.
This is as much of the story my wife knows. She doesn’t know of the weeks I spent mourning a love that never existed. I was as feeble as a convalescent always looking at Linda from afar but never meeting her gaze. I walked around, hovering and hoping but always cowardly. I would have remained in that dank pit of despair until I found somewhere else to be, invented new hobbies to keep my mind and body busy so I never had too many minutes to thing about that night. I never went on another walk until I graduated from the programme but I still smoked with Kluivert and he understood enough to make the jokes fewer and fewer. He’s been dead for twenty six years now. Car accident took him before the tobacco. Good for him.
I never spoke to Linda again. We all finished our programmes and probably thought - I did - that it would be healthier if we did not speak about it. I assumed she was embarrassed and avoided me because of that or she thought I was creepy.
I won’t ever forget her assertive voice or the soft feel of her breasts brushing against my arms. Time has not taken the need to smell her perfume one time. Maybe it would smell like oranges or maybe it would smell like an aggregation of floral scents or maybe it would be too strong for my nose. Maybe.
-H.
had a very strong need to post this. i have stifled myself too much and allowed the wrong things to matter. i enjoyed writing this but i know if i don’t put it up now it’ll be lost to the graveyard of edits and second guessing so i’m asking you forgive some amateurish and meandering parts and misspellings that you may find. i’ll find them, eventually. regardless, anthony jollof will return.
- A. Jollof, 3/24
