I could not admit to my sister
that she had hit the nail on the head. What then would she think of me?
I wasn’t supposed to be jealous
of my twin.
I shook my head, indignant. “How
could you think something like that, Taiye? What are you insinuating?”
I had come to learn the act of
going on the offensive if you wanted to wriggle out of a potentially explosive
situation.
But then I had forgotten that
this lady was another me, we were cut out of the same cloth so she could always
see through me...
I shifted my eyes from hers,
uncomfortable with the way she was looking at me.
“If you say so, Kay,” she finally
said. Then she opened her arms and enveloped me in a hug. “I’m sorry I haven’t
been there for you sis. I’ll try harder. “
And just like that I was awash
with guilt. I hugged her back with fervor, resisting the urge to cry.
When I got back home that day, I
found my thoughts wandering towards Biyi. What would it feel like to be loved
by him? By someone again?
I knew it was wrong, to seek love
without being willing to give it. But then i’d been dealt that hand before and
it was only fair that I didn’t make the same mistake twice.
I didn’t want to do the loving
anymore; it hadn’t paid me in the past and so I had become one of those who had
given up on the idea of love.
I won’t let anyone come close.
Men are supposed to be playthings because that’s how they saw and treated
women. I knew I had become a cliché, one of those women who’d been hurt and
cowered away from life but I really didn’t care. No one had the right to tell
me anything when they hadn’t worn my shoes.
When I first propounded this
theory, my friends thought I had gone crazy. Behind my back, they had called it
Left At The Altar Syndrome. They didn’t know I knew what they called it and
that it hurt me to hear it.
They thought it was a phase that
would pass, I knew this wasn’t just a phase. This was something more; a
definition of something, perhaps a definition of a new me. I also knew they
won’t understand. How would they when they had love lives to be envied?
As I sat at my work table,
marking the classwork i’d given my children today; my phone interrupted with
its loud GodWin ringtone.
I had been promising to change
that ringtone but somehow, I had grown fond of it. It gave me hope that in
everything, God Win.
I froze as my eyes settled on the
caller ID.
In a million years, I wouldn’t
have expected this call. He had not called me once since he left me at the
altar without a word. Almost two years and he hadn’t called, so why now?! To be continued
-Mimi Adebayo
Credit: PRIDE Magazine
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