As Long as You are Yours by Mwinji Siame
He admired her too much she had told Fola. “How can a man admire you too much?” Fola had said, setting down her glass of wine. Fola would always set her glass down when things were about to get deep and raise it back to her lips when she was about to make fun of whatever affair they were discussing. But of course that day, the day Chichi had told her about the businessman she had met while on a flight to Abidjan, and how he had first simply asked why she was tired, and how she had surprised herself by saying something about her husband, Fola simply nodded. Chichi smiled, marvelling at her, because it was rare to find a friend who had no judgement. She knew that Esther would have asked her what she was doing what with being married and all, and that Tamela would probably have called it an abomination. David, her older brother and only sibling — well she would never even have told him at all. Fola, on the other hand, did more than tolerate this new voyage. She had a prurient interest, and perhaps at times a sort of arousal since they were so close that usually they felt what the other felt. She was sometimes (honestly speaking, often times) curious about what it might be like to be with another man other than her own husband.
“He’s really wonderful. He’s a wonderful guy and he makes me happy.” Chichi turned her face away as she spoke and fixed her eyes on something in the distance she wasn’t sure of, something that may not even have been there. The sea is so expansive she thought. How did all those pink surfers manage to wade so far in with their boards? And those fishermen who sailed even further than the pink surfers and stayed out there for months, how did they manage being so far away from safety? The endless possibilities of how everything might end began to rage in her mind. The possibility of an ending at all, of being so far away from this moment overwhelmed her.
“You’re looking too far into the future. Come back here my friend.” Fola leaned across the table and squeezed her friend’s hand.
“But tell me also, I think there is something else you are not happy about with this guy?”
Chichi shook her head and then rested her hand on her chin like a child, her dark eyes still glazed with wonder. With Fola there was something that made her feel like a child again, like life was in fact filled with infinite possibilities but in a way that, unlike the sea, soothed her.
“Well what about you? Enough of me. How is life, are you happy?” Chichi asked as she broke away from their across-the-table embrace and her trance. She was beginning to feel that she might give an honest answer about the state of things and she did not want to or was not ready to share the swell of emotions that were causing her belly to stir.
“Oh my God, I’m sooo happy.” Fola spoke through her nose, dragging the end of every word until it ran into the beginning of another, until the meaning and joy of each was lost forever.
“You know today, she came to me all the way from her office at the institute of whatever just to tell me she’s writing an article on Zambian market women’s experience of blah blah… I can’t even properly remember the title because it was just too bull shit. But imagine, all the way from across campus, in Good Hope wind just to see the grateful look on my poor African face.”
There was a pause at first, Chichi resisting the joy her friend had knowingly offered with her honest account, but then Fola looked at her and they both burst out into laughter.
At this moment, the waiter came. He grinned as he scrambled for his pen and pad. And his eyes grew wider and wider in amazement and confusion as the two women continued to laugh, barely noticing his presence. Then after some time they stopped and turned to him to give their order. Fola had another glass of wine while Chichi opted for water because she was still drinking, and enjoying, her first glass and had not eaten anything that day and so would definitely have been drunk if she had another. After the guy left they returned to their cocoon except this time it was steeped in something final and heavy, like some sort of conclusion they had arrived at in the short time they had already spent together. Their anxieties always seemed to swim in the same direction and whatever the different things they might be experiencing, there was always something in common at the end. Like when Fola got pregnant just a few months into her marriage and was not filled with “life changing love, ”and Chichi’s failed attempt had left her with a morbid sense of hollowness partly because she could not, by something beyond her control have the option of having her own children whatever that “own children” business actually meant, but mostly because of the shame she felt that the actual fact of not having a child, hers or adopted or fertilized like her doctor had recommended, did not fill her with longing. So neither of them actually felt they had failed but had only felt a pressing need to feel so. Of course this was enforced by aunts and mothers back home, who ended phone conversations not with goodbye but with noting that they would be praying for an abundance of more children, for Fola, and the restoration of fertility for Chichi. Their husbands on the other hand did not seem to mind and even if they had it would have made no difference to either of them.
“We should just marry each other — that would be quite an ending!” Fola exclaimed through their thoughtfulness.
“Or a beginning?”- Chichi was more serious than her friend, her voice glazed in a tender hope.
Mwinji Siame is a Cape Town based Zambian-born graduate student of sociology, and feminist. Mwinji’s work has been published in Brittle Paper Magazine, Bluestockings Mag, Afridiaspora, Minola Review (forthcoming). She is currently at work on her first novel. When she is not reading or writing she plays guitar and goes on adventures.
