Prose

      When I met Amanda for the first time, I
knew she couldn’t make a good soul mate because I had been made to believe she
couldn’t  but I was young in some ways, I
didn’t know what my heart wanted most in a girl.  Though she had sat before me many times, her
eyes telling me she loved me, I had never observed sincerity in her blue eyes.
All I know was that Amanda was a girl whose eyes scanned your pockets first
before she put her hands around your neck. 
 Guys said If you found her seated
alone in the reading room or under one of those luxuriant trees in the school
compound, pale and stressed then you knew she had some money problems, that her
problems were endless, that one, every boy at Gilen high school knew it well. I
had heard some little boys calling her zakariya, I didn’t know what it was
until a friend told me that it was a nick name for anyone who had a strong love
for money. So everyone knew her as girl interested in fleshly materials and
that was one of those things you couldn’t stand if you were the one dating her.
One day I felt like breaking all the promises I had built between us but it is
one those difficult decisions you can’t make quickly when you have been soaked
in love. I struggled with dilemma until I learnt that it was wise to write her
a chit for a meeting.
      I went up, sat on the balcony and started
thinking of how I could end the relationship without being rude, of course a
small chit could do me everything I wanted but I came to realize that I needed
to tell her the stand of my abrupt decision. I plucked a small plain paper out
of my note book and started jotting down all the dim reasons any young dude
would use to chuck his girlfriend, as I started forging them down, I felt
guilty from the top to the bottom because my hands were writing nothing but
lies. How could they write that Amanda was that girl wanting to buzz with every
nice looking dude? From the central part my heart I’ve known Amanda as girl who
thought I was the only boy made to fit in her minds. I knew she knew no one
else could make such a fine compatibility of her life but that’s we humans, we
yearn for true love yet we when we get it, we turn way, that way the game goes.
 
     As I was still struggling with my
forgeries, a majestic figure stood tall in front of my desk, beautiful as she
had always been, I hadn’t heard her feet pounding on the floor as she walked to
where I was, I tried to hide the chit in my jumper in a great humiliation and
her eyes caught me with sort of mixture of both love and hatred.
      “I just like it when I see you hiding the
truth from me” she said mockingly, something seemed to broke her throat so that
she spoke like a patient about to die from her sick bed. “I know you know how I
feel when you smuggle that trouble thing I have seen with my eyes into your
jumpers, any fool would sense this treacherous. It is worth a trouble to all we
have protected for all these years” all this time, I felt my heat freezing
inside my chest and my eyes narrowing to nothing, all I know was that a girl I
had tried to show my manhood was going to start questioning my maturity.
         “Well” I said finally “I will let you
know what it is” then I pushed my hand gently into my jumpers and pulled out
that crazy chit.
        “Take it slow darlin’, I was just
kidding; this is what we bad boys do when we want to chill stress a bit. We do
lots of crazy stuffs here and set our minds at ease” she looked at me, then at
the chit then at me again and said “so you are that boy playing with pieces of
paper when you know there is something else you got to do”
She took a
seat just one metre before my desk and got her eyes on my face, for a moment,
she kept mute and now I could see that there was anger slumbering in her eyes.
“Simon!” she
called me in a tone I have never liked in my life. “What is it like for you to
follow your own heart, I know you love your gang, you look to them for every
small matter between us and sometimes join them to scorn me in my absence” she
then bent her head upon the desk she was sitting on and started crying. When
she lifted it up again, tears were running down her cheeks. I seized her neatly
with my eye; I saw that she was more beautiful than I had ever thought; she had
combed her curly hair so that it fell upon her back, her queenly dimples formed
a showy wave as she tried to control her tears, her precious studs hanging from
her well formed ears, I had several times thought how I came to be her choice
from a thousands of loaded guys at Gilen High and now before this beautiful
thing, I started thinking of how stupid I was to deny that I wasn’t the
luckiest thing under the sun. indeed I was stupid in the way that I couldn’t
understand how my peers struggled day and night to get my Amanda out of my
hands: they did this and that, when they failed they talked this and that,
sometimes I believed them because I thought they knew much about these girls;
if you wanted to know which girl had recently aborted, you might ask Joel-my
roommate, then if you wanted to know which one had sneaked out of school to
meet a sugar daddy, you might need to ask Philemon-my closest friend. These two
had proved to me they could be the future CIAs. Even if you didn’t know that
the headmaster had the previous day taken the school’s prettiest girl for a
diner, for they already knew of it. So they were just boys meant to spoil every
kind of good thing they felt jealousy about. That one I came to realize as I
saw tears running down Amanda’s cheeks because now I could wonder how could she
cry for something she never wanted or could she feel hurt for losing me if she
had loved me for my money not my love? After all I wasn’t anywhere near the
loaded guys that had always tried her.
         All this time, we gazed at one
another, each waiting for another to break the silence, for I knew I needed to
apologize first for being stupid and not able to identify things that spoil
relationships but it seemed to be that difficult thing any boy wouldn’t do. How
could I tell her that my friends had influenced my decision of calling off the
relationship? Couldn’t it make me look a puppet or a castle built on sand which
when strong wind comes, carries it away to where it wishes?  We just stood starring at one another, each
waiting for another to speak.
               “Let her speak first” I said to
myself. Then she might have thought I wasn’t going to say anything, so she
bravely cleared her throat and said, “I don’t care what you have done it for,
all I know is that love is nothing without tears”
            By now, her eyes had stopped
producing tears and I secretly prayed in my heart to see them stop. I wanted to
say somethin’ but my heart told me to wait for her next sentence and she kept
quiet until I lost my hopes. There, I cleared my throat twice with that manly
cough and said.
   “Darlin’ I don’t know what I have done it
for, I just can’t figure out how I started putting that nonsense on a sheet.
Sometimes I don’t know how I turn to be a crazy chap”
     “You can’t say you don’t know how it
starts with you when you know you have surrounded yourself with a bunch of
crazy kids” her voice had now lost the element of anger and sadness and she
smiled a little to show me she had forgotten my childish acts. I now knew this
was the right time to get her into the game again but never was I going to tell
her the root of my wild behavior. I had played a wrong game in which I couldn’t
score a single point. That was all with it, now I knew I got to fix things
alone and continue with my way.
        For a moment, I kept my mouth shut, my
minds active and my eyes open to the limit of their width and Amanda scanned
the invisible calculations that were being forged in my small head. She knew if
she could bother me before the completion of the process, I might tell her what
the matter was without thinking of the consequences, with that, every wise girl
learns it the moment she starts business with men: she can study you from the
flesh to the bone, from the hair to the toy. That way they acquire powers to
keep guys on their heels.   In what
sounded provocative to me, she said
      “There you are again, thinking of
something new to lie to me. Boys think love and lies are twins so that when one
goes missing, the other feels hurt”
“oh my God”
I said to myself “she has me now” though in a short time, I had piled up my
lies, one top of the other arranging them in the way I knew they weren’t going
to contradict or betray me and  now see
how she sneaked into my minds and destroy everything. What was she? A witch,
prophets like one those days when the world was still at good terms with God?
         “Well” I finally said “let me tell you
how it came, you know I loved you against their will-”
       “Whose will?” she interrupted in the
tone that produced some kind of confronting element in such a way that if I
hadn’t been calmed by my own guilt, I would have reacted negatively. “Don’t you
dare tell me those thin legged things you call companions”
      “Exactly that’s them, I’m sorry that I
have been following every toxic word from their ugly mouth but now I want us to
fix things and live free lovers for the rest part of our life.”
      Then I raised my face that I had bent in
great shame for bending low to a girl. I felt stupid for reporting my buddies
in favor of love. My eyes looked straight in hers, I spotted her facial
expression starting to change, first, I saw that a smile was brushing over her
cheeks like the wind sweeping over grasses on the hill, her sparkling eyes
narrowing like the sun does as it sets off beyond the hills. She stood and I
watched her as she came to me, then she gave me her hand, she didn’t say
anything except looking at me with her eyes full of love and assurance. The
hand was tender and warm as if it had been placed over burning coals, it was
soft and smooth like that of a newly born baby and I know if it was you holding
it, I don’t think you would have denied that you weren’t the most privileged
thing that has ever lived on earth.
“Believe me”
she whispered to me, “you and I were made to fit, there can be words to destroy
us, there can be rules to separate us or even wind to blow us away but non
shall do… for were like dolphins and the seas” still holding her hand, I had
voice speaking in me, telling Amanda was the only girl I had to trust with my
heart and that how I came to learn that she wasn’t she who the bad boys
described as a money lover.