Loneliness

It’s often difficult admitting that life can be a bit lonely sometimes. It’s all going great, career, side hustle, finance, and the prospects of living the life you always wanted.

In two or three years, you will be leaving your job to run your own business. You are only there for the contacts and the experience and most of all to formalise yourself with how things work here.

It’s even more difficult admitting that you are sticking with him because you are scared of ending up all by yourself. So you make excuses for him. Even excuses that he couldn’t cook up given he already has a great deal of expertise in the subject already. He naturally isn’t a romantic, or he doesn’t know how to be in a relationship.

Well that’s what he tells you.

Or he is used to having his own space and less we forget the favourite of them all, he doesn’t know how to trust anyone. So there you are spending your days proving to be trustworthy, giving him ample space and time, he calls the shots, again to prove that being with you isn’t that difficult and with you it should be nothing other than a blissful journey.

A voyage of immaculate and telekinetic unearthing. A kind of post modern romance you tell yourself. You both care for each other dearly but still you have separate lives.

You are a modern woman you say, you have a strong sense of self so you can joyfully be united in separation. He will appreciate you more. Apparently that is the thesis. You have beauty and brains with lots of ambition too. You’re articulate and sociable. You are cultured, well that’s important. You know your Shiraz from your Cabernet Sauvigion and you know your Sirloin from your Rump. You are home grown and international like a very muddled up a la carte menu.

Remember how many times you and the other girls hung around the round table dissecting and chastising Chika for sticking around. Aggressively, lampooning her for allowing herself be treated like a doormat and modern slave. She cooks for him and waits on him and he sleeps around. She accepts it though. She has even come to some kind of diplomatic resolution with his Unilag floozy.

It’s cool she says, “as long as he comes back home to me”. At the end of the day he knows what he has here. It reminds you of a former stripper turned a hip-hop wife.

It’s down to their insecurity you yell, because you happen to have had a quickie emancipation tutorial in the free world. Your foreign degree has bought you a ticket into social mobility. So you are different from them, incapable of falling prey to this culture of degradation.

But you can’t come to tell yourself you can’t do this anymore. You can’t admit you are scared. You can’t deal with the questions of what went wrong afterwards. It’s best to deal with the devil you know, that’s what it says in the books, ahh yes there is the other one, “no one is perfect” too.

So you start to redefine things. Maybe you have been modeling your situation based on other people’s ideals, maybe your utopic delusion has come to its ends width, maybe your case is just different, maybe you have it good and you don’t realise. Just maybe you have to tell yourself the truth. You are a woman, with breasts, ovaries and a heart. It’s already broken to pieces and you want to feel again.