Was it hard, letting go?

Tosin Onikosi
Jul 21, 2017 · 4 min read

I found the love of my life at fifteen.

We met in the office of our Uni guidance counselor. We didn’t speak, just waited in the reception, him pretending to sleep and me reading a book, pretending not to notice one another.

A few weeks later, I saw him on my way back to my residence, he was walking in the opposite direction across the road. He lingered, waved at me, and walked on over.

He smiled and asked me what my name was.

“Tosin Onikosi,” I said.

He nodded. “Hello Tosin ,” he said.

And just like that, I fell in love with him. All of him, all at once. He was sixteen and a Mass communication student, with no particular aspirations other than buying desert boots and sunglasses.

We got together and talked a lot, we fought a lot more. The whole business lasted about three years .

We’d agreed to never speak to each other again when we broke up, because it was impossible to go back to what it was before. And it was only too natural, when life’s disasters hit, to reach out to the person who knew everything, who spoke a secret language and who had seen you at your weakest.

He was always there. Once, when we were broken up for about half a day, I thought my heart was going to give. I was like an addict and he was my drug of choice.

I was always a talker. I talked about everything with him, every detail of every day. He would always interrupt me to say that he didn’t care but I knew he was lying. He knew just what to ask to get me talking on days I was feeling low. I knew he loved that he could switch me on like an endless podcast whenever he wanted to, he often used it to escape having to answer my questions.

For a full year, I couldn’t let go. This situationship we cultivated was at times, a masquerade with vague boundaries, made worse by the fact that I continued to say I loved him, both privately and in public to everyone who cared to listen. There was absolutely no point denying it.

The last time we said goodbye forever, the time I thought I couldn’t live loving someone from whom I drew my entire sense of self-worth, we promised to never speak. This was by far the worst and most damaging incarnation of my existence.

For about a year, we didn’t speak. It was a year filled with unanswered phone calls and subliminal messages on twitter. He saw other people and so did I, but like a magnet to iron, we found ourselves speaking again.

“He’s like family,” I said.

A new boyfriend waited in silence on the other end of the phone. “Do you still like him that way?” he said.

“Well, he’s a beautiful, wonderful and extraordinary man who made me very happy, but we can’t be together. It just doesn’t work.”

What we had, I convinced myself, was a friendship that defied traditional limitations. Something beyond family. Something eternal.

Basically, I thought he was my everything. He was my personal brand of perfection. And he never gave up on me, even when I had given up on myself. At my lowest point, thinking I was the scum of the earth , he came to find me and bought me ice cream. I started to compare every new guy I met to him, and inevitably, they couldn’t measure up. It couldn’t be helped.

It was hard for us not to be best friends. We sat in his room watching the new James Franco movie while eating snacks and laughing at and about something stupid every five minutes, and I did my best not to cry when he put his arm around my shoulder.

The way I loved him was painful.

When our birthdays rolled around last year, I drew a line between myself and the past. No more calls, no more faithful exchanges of “I love you” at the end of every conversation, no more reminiscing on the evergreen good times that we shared. I was done hearing about how the love of my life loved me but didn’t want me and otherwise torturing myself for old time’s sake.

So it stopped. I embarked on a regime of burying myself in work everyday, the goal was to get through a day without thinking about him. That took six months.

Even now, he is woven into my life in ways I find hard to eradicate. Ghosts of our relationship linger at every major street corner of Oniru Estate, the palms and the Ikeja Mall, no matter how often I try to write new memories in their place. Through some bizarre twist, every man in my life wants to go where we went and do what we did.

I haven’t fully dismantled the monument I have built to him in my mind. I still describe him in saintly terms. But I’m talking about another person. I’m talking about the past.

What we have now is nothing, I smile and hold back a tear when I pass by any of the places we constantly shared, But nothing more. If life were a film, we’d have jumped into a flying car long ago. But life isn’t a film. And my ex isn’t my world . He’s a guy I had an incredible experience with.

And, for me, he will always be that.

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