Coffee.

When I fell in love, I fell hard.

And when it ended, it ended badly.

I didn’t understand what it meant to be with a woman like her, a woman who was already owned by someone else.

Belonging to someone who belongs to someone else is a curious thing.

It’s like being the extra link in a chain that isn’t tethered to anything, like a feral dog fed scraps from the hand of a fair haired child. The sun is shining down on you, but only for a moment.

My evenings with her reminded me of my classes in Unilag, the figure studies. Those classes were rare so we relished them, the auditorium packed long before the lecture even started. The subject was always young, paid before hand, a kind of prostitution. She would drop her clothes and stand before the horde of eyes, with nothing but hair to hide her face. We would dissect her, each person stealing intimacy from her with each scritch of their pencils. To draw a figure study of a human body, you must divest it of its humanity, that’s the only way you avoid becoming proprietary, claiming ownership of a body that will never belong to you. The subject never got to see what we thought of her, the part of her body our eyes had latched on to, the parts our hands had to tried to immortalize. All we had was a drawing.

I laid myself bare, I told her, “If you saw me 10 years ago, you wouldn’t recognize me.” and showed her pictures to prove it.

My pimply 21 year old self, wearing long sweaters from years of cutting. She traced the mat of criss-crossed scars on my forearm, kissed them gently. Told me I was too self deprecating, that I needed to appreciate the work I had done on myself. She told me she was proud of me, even if I wasn’t of myself. 
She picked up the ugliest photograph and stared at it and said “I think you were beautiful, you were always beautiful.”

But she didn’t stay the night.

No matter what I said, what I revealed, how thorough I upended myself for her, she never stayed the night.

She was open enough. On some temporal plane she liked, no, loved me. She gave me things, not grandiose acts of gift giving, like bottles of wine, or cuff links, or an unexpected lunch of freshly made pounded yam and Okazi soup while I was at work. But small things, little acts of thoughtfulness that meant she saw me, she really saw me. She told me jokes and made funny faces, even though I knew she hated her gums and always tried to hide them behind thin lipped smiles. She started keeping mints in her bag because she knew I was paranoid about bad breath. She went back to him with my scent on her, a small act of mercy.

They were soul mates, but they weren’t happy.

I wanted to make her happy, I would have made her the happiest woman in the world if she let me. I asked her, naively why she was doing this, even she had admitted she wasn’t the type of girl who cheated on her boyfriend. 
I asked her, “Why can’t you just choose?”

She looked at me, long and hard. Like she was seeing me anew. Then she sighed, it was the sound of life leaving a body.

“I can’t give you what you want.”

It wasn’t the answer to my question, but it was an answer, the kind that opens a door and lets itself into your house, and haunts you for the rest of your life. 
I stocked my shelves with tea; green, chamomile, oriental, earl grey. I put on a pot every morning and let it sit, just to release the aroma, to aerate the gloom from my house, to bathe myself in her scent. Though I was the one who asked her to leave, who begged her, because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to control myself. I would become one of those people who grovelled in fear of something that hadn’t happened yet. I had conquered depression, I had conquered myself, I would do it again.

She didn’t cry. I would have hated her if she did.

She told me after, that she wanted to. She told me the day she called say he had broken up with her and in retaliation she had thrown our ‘affair’ in his face, used its sharp edges to dig into his chest and lacerate his heart. A part of me was horrified for him, disgusted with her, but most of me was glad that she still knew my number.

“I knew you were doing the right thing, and if I cried, no matter how badly I wanted to, it would have only made things worse, made you change your mind.”

I mumbled something barely coherent in response.

We let silence hang between us after for the appropriate period of time, like genuflecting reflexively during mass, a requiem for the conversation that should have followed.

“You’ll be okay.” I lied.

“I will.” She lied back.

I stood in the kitchen after, letting tea I would never drink brew, and convinced myself it was just as well. I put off the stove and poured out the tea. I made myself a cup of coffee.

— — — — — — — — - — — — — -

This piece was written by my friend Edwin. I think it is the most fitting end to the series. Please read part 1called Tea, and part 2 called Wine.

I’d love to know what you think.