Story of a player

It started during the restive days of the initial Boko Haram movement. While the whole country was embroiled in a bitter religious crisis, I was involved in a different struggle of my own. Boredom. So in the evening, my cousins and I, took a trip down to the street with no destination in mind some days we hung on to different bars hoping to catch one of dem chics, sipped on a few glasses of alcohol as we looked into the Calabar skyline. That was how I met her. As soon as I saw her, I felt like a deer trapped in headlights. I couldn’t stop staring, and as the night progressed my eyes would linger for longer than required on her. Her small eyes, the way she squinted them and tiled her preety face backwards anytime she laughed or the way her bottom lip pouted ever so slightly when she smiled.

I didnt need an angel to tell me to walk up to her and involved her in  a chat and before the night was over we had exchanged contact details. The following afternoon, I sent her a friendly text, she replied and before long we had arranged our next real date. And so began my voyage into the abyss of reckless infatuation. Phone calls, bb chats, dinners, house visits, augmented with my day dreams of her and the lingering sweet memories of our previous visits. Without knowing it, I had leapt into the wind without a parachute, I was free falling without any indication of a soft landing underneath. And as with all ill thought out plans, only in the midst of chaos do you begin to realize how vulnerable you’ve let yourself become.

Perhaps it was somewhere in-between the tender kisses of her lips or maybe it was the way she looked at me after the first time we kissed and told me she had never met a better kisser, I am not sure, but somewhere in between these saccharine drenched moments, I had lost myself and if I am honest I wasn’t particularly sure I wanted to be found. The only problem was, if I had bothered to stop long enough to allow my brain to do any thinking besides counting down the seconds to our next meeting, I would have realized the truth. I had emotionally invested in a venture that didn’t exist. I had put a down payment on a fictional relationship, that only involved one party – ME. Slowly I began to realize that I was the one doing all the communicating, always asking when next we would meet, always wanting to know how his day was going, always wanting to be part of her day, and she never really committing one way or the other. Perhaps I should have seen the signs when she showed up 2 and a half hours late to our date, or the time we had planned to meet up one evening and she casually forgot or the fact that she never called me except when she was in a financial crisis.

The truth is, she isn’t to blame. She had been honest with me about where she was emotionally, but I didn’t hear her, or maybe I did, but choose to believe something else – I am unsure which it is. But after the last two weeks of emotional ups and downs and staring at my phone waiting for any pittance of communication from her – I realized the inevitable “she just wasn’t that into me”. Those are literally the 6 most painful words any man has to admit to himself. But if we are honest, and can manage to look beyond the veneer of make believe romance we have concocted, we would see the flashing neon signs ahead of time. I know what it feels like to have a woman interested in me-she usually calls me even when i am too busy to call, doesn’t show up late to dates neither does she casually forget dates.

So after the dissipated euphoria of seemingly great conversations over good food, the unfulfilled expectations of weeks of day dreaming, and the steady increase in the painful knowledge of unrequited feelings, I decided to speak to my trusted confidant, Catherine. At first I thought I called Catherine because I wanted a step by step guide on how to come out of this emotionally bankrupt situation but in reality, what I was looking for was another woman to validate my experience of the last month. I wanted Catherine, to tell me to be patient, to wait it out, that somehow ‘my man’ would come around and everything would be okay. Shee didn’t. Instead she gave the same advice doctors give smokers who have discovered a malignant lump on their lungs – Surgery. In order words, cut her off or be prepared to ‘die’ from the consequences sooner or later.

So here I am, my fingers flirting with the delete button as his contact details stare me boldly in the face. The procedure is clear, cut her off and move on but as any smoker knows, going cold turkey is probably harder than performing the surgery itself. Like an addict, I want one more drag. One last phone call, one last kiss…. one more day and maybe tomorrow we can have the surgery and I’ll be strong enough to finally quit.