Nineteen Days - Episode 2

 

LUFTMENSCH (Yiddish)
Someone who is a bit of a dreamer; literally an “air person.”
ANAVAMI
I grew up in a bubble of my own dreams. I spent a lot of time thinking up fantasies and drawing up imaginations. I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up, and it wasn’t because I had problems interacting with people. In my neighborhood, it was because my mother restricted my movement to only within the house because she was afraid what I could get expose to . At school, it was because I got some privileges with being a sickle cell patient and didn’t get flogged with the rest of the class. It made some people dislike me and I was pushed out of every circle I tried to be a part of. Eventually, I settled with hanging out with my sister and her best friend, Prisca during school breaks until I got tired of Rafiqah rolling her eyes at my every attempt to be funny.
My dreams turned out to be my only friend. They became an escape for me, a way to get away from the contempt my classmates had for me, to get away from Rafiqah’s tantrums whenever Mummy asked her to do work I was considered too fragile for, to escape the sad reality of my life.
I was never suicidal. God knows it never crossed my mind to slash my wrists or drink Otapiapia

All episodes of this story can be found here >> https://www.ebonystory.com/story/nineteen-days

. However, I wanted a different life. I spent a lot of time creating fantasies about a life where I did not have the Sickle Cell Disease, or my father hadn’t left, or I even had a boyfriend like the other girls, like my sister, Rafiqah.
I found out about Rafiqah had a boyfriend two years after I’d left secondary school. She had been 15 at the time and it had surprised me to no end when I heard Prisca ask her if she had made up with her boyfriend after their last fight.
“I’m not talking to him”, I had overheard my sister tell her best friend.
“Rafiqah, we both know that you’re just being childish. He was only joking when he called you a bad kisser.” Kissing?!
“Prisca, your boyfriend was there too. Kemi, C2 and Daniel were there. That was a highly inappropriate joke.”
“Rafiqah, you are just bothered he thinks you’re a bad kisser.”
“What? No, I honestly don’t care. He’s not much of a great kisser himself. My ex, Tayo was phenomenal.” Ex? I had been 18 at the time and I hadn’t had my own first kiss or even a first boyfriend to start with.
I didn’t sleep that night. I kept tossing and turning on my bed, burning with curiosity. Rafiqah already had an ex and a next and I still wasn’t good enough to be looked at twice. It’s not like I wasn’t deserving of one. While Rafiqah had been unarguably the more beautiful sister, I had a greater body with my slim waist, well-rounded hips and nice butt. The boys never noticed me because I usually wore clothes two sizes bigger than me, under the excuse that I felt more comfortable in those when really, it was just a way to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. I never wore any make-up because I didn’t think I really had any need to.
I asked Rafiqah about it the next day. She had looked up from the book she was reading, rolled her eyes and turned in the opposite direction. I had tugged the book from her and asked her to tell me about the fight I overheard her discuss with Prisca. She told me then of how badly her boyfriend treated her because she didn’t want to have sex with him, and how, the reason the bad kisser joke had gotten to her so much, was because he always looked for an opportunity to make jokes at her own expense when they were in the company of friends. It had been easy then, to tell her sex wasn’t proof of love, to tell her he didn’t deserve her if he couldn’t wait for her. I would later look back on that discussion and realize how hard it was to say no to a guy you were in a relationship with, and hopelessly in love with, but at that moment, I had told my sister what I felt every 15 year old should have heard in that situation, and then, she’d made me promise her I wouldn’t tell our mother.
Our mother found out about Rafiqah’s boyfriend a few weeks later. It wasn’t from me though. She had overheard Rafiqah’s phone conversation apologizing to him for getting mad over the ‘bad kisser’ joke.
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DAY 1
 I met the man I loved for the rest of my life, a few weeks ago on a breezy evening on campus. It had been a little past six p.m. and I had gone to get powder from the only cosmetic store on campus which happened to be just in front of the male students’ hostel, quite ironically. He had been there too, to buy some perfume and had asked me to help him make a choice. 
He had walked me back to the hostel, and we had talked about nearly everything; cars, politics, books, music, obsessions. When we got to the front of my hostel, he had asked me if I could deduce anything about his character from the conversation we’d just had. I had said he seemed nice just to hold myself from saying how I thought he was such great company, knowing a little of everything and making my evening.
“Well, I think you’re a bit of a dreamer”, he had said.
I laughed and asked why.
“You read a lot of romance novels. A lot of your favorite songs have a very romantic flavor to them and there’s the way your eyes light up when you talk about Ed Sheeran. Everybody knows Sheeran’s music is for the romantic at heart”, he had explained.
I had laughed, hard and asked him how it made me a dreamer.
“When you’re the kind of person that indulges in all these romantic everything, you’re wrapped in a bubble of expectations from love and you find yourself hoping for the impossible. You become the type of girl that starts to see herself in a wedding dress every time a guy says hello. You become the kind that cannot stop making up scenarios of meeting, and falling in love with the stranger she bumped into on her way to the lecture theatre.”
He left me that night after we had exchanged numbers and he promised to call.
And he had called.
We saw each other the next day.
And then the next.
And the next.
And so, every other day, until today when he had asked that I be his girlfriend and I said yes.