A LONG TIME AGO.
By Darlington Chibuzor.




She said she loved me a long time ago. She said it was my eyes, or nose, or both that made her smile like a dumb head. She said my softness - a mixture of my slow speech and listening culture made her have a sense of belonging, a sort of invisible connection to love, to happiness. She said I made her feel love and at the same time lonely. She said I had created an irreplaceable place in her heart, a place in the depth of her soul, without even knowing, without having a clue how important I had become to her. How in the four years of our university friendship she had grown to love me without a reasonable reason. She said the days we spent together, in the warm school field, on the thick gathering of carpet grass underneath the yellow shiny sun had not escaped a bit from her. She said all memories of me remain safe - in a place where no other is able to reach, maybe inside an iron locket hid secretly in the membranes of her brain.

She said she wanted me, that she longed to be mine, that she dreamt of me and her in a circle of birds singing songs of romance, songs of love enchantments. She said she dreamt of sex - fantasies that featured me locking my lips on hers, grasping her lower body, pushing myself into her, making her moan silently, begging for more. She said I was the one she wanted, not him, not them, not anybody else. She said she watched me smile to her like all was okay, like I didn't feel something for her, or perhaps had something to say to her, something that would have saved her life, something that might have stopped her from meeting the monster, something that might have stopped her from marrying him.
She said she would have told me, that she wanted to. She said she carried it, heavy on her neck, nursed it like an infant baby resting in the warmth of his mother's arm, covered it with smiles and unending care for years, she said she wished I understood, that I got the message openly hidden in her hugs, her smiles and her twitchy attitude towards me but I didn't because I couldn't for once see reasons why she would be been in love with me.
She said she couldn't spill it out, that she couldn't let it go because of what people would think, what I would think. She said our side of existence spits shamefully on women who prophesy their love first to another. They call it a taboo. So instead, she let me go. She let me slip away, she let me out of her, free like a bird caged for so long. She watched me fall into the arms of another. She watched me blush and dance joyfully to the question "will you marry me?" not to her but to another. She watched me say the vows before letting the ring slide down to my finger. She said she should have been the one, that I should have been the one she spent her wedding night with, that I should have been the one to unlock her womanhood since I already had the keys to her heart. Me and not him - the monster.


She said many other things to me, like how she had pierced his heart deeply with a kitchen knife, how she had left him to bleed of it till his last blood dripped on the floor. She said he raped her several times, almost everyday, that she couldn't open her legs for him, because he wasn't me, because he wasn't the kind she liked. She said she couldn't just do it, that each time she saw him, she hated him more. She said she was tired of it all, that marriage without love was like pouring water into a basket and expecting it to stay. She couldn't stay, so she killed him.

That was her freedom.

Even as she said all these to me in the tight visitors corner at the local prison, I could tell how free, weightless, fearless she was. I could feel her words piercing into me like a sharp sword. After these many years, I realized I wasn't the only one who felt unnoticed. I wanted to tell her too, but... but I couldn't. It was odd. We were odd.
I shared the feeling there with her, like we were both alone in a mutual world, a discriminated world of odd love. I felt a lump, a heavy stack of what I think is pain leaving me in form of the air I exhaled deeply. I realized I was free, finally the words I held back was out and had found its way. I felt like pulling her and kissing her like I had always wanted to - only if she wasn't in chains.
I watched her speak in silence, I looked away. I knew it was late. She was going to spend the rest of her life there, in prison.

As the prison wardens dragged her back into one of the dark cells, she left with me these last words alongside a cold goodbye, she said : "Lizzy, send my greetings to your husband. He's a nice man".

THE END