WATERCOLOUR
I
was as innocent as I could not perceive naivety, and I wanted to believe I
understood what it meant to feel, and want to know someone forever.
I suppose this begins as how the story of
every great childhood crush goes. The moment when you look at a person and see
them not for how their facial features align like the ruggedly handsome hero in
the movies, but by how you feel their presence even when they are not there and
how they affect your life forever like a Quentin Tarantino movie.
You know the funny part is that I cannot
remember what he looks like. I do not know if he was handsome or painstakingly
ugly, but I remember the baseball cap he always wore and how he always smiled
and how the eight-year-old me wanted to listen to life spring from his words. Of
course, at that age I didn’t understand physical attraction (A thing I’m still
getting the hang of to this day and age) I only understood laughter shared and
stories told and gifts given. For it was an unlikely friendship as he was a
student in the university and I was just in my third year of primary school.
I cannot claim to remember the exact day I
met him and even as good a memory as I possess somethings often fade with time.
But I do remember that we met when he was a customer and I was the girl behind
the counter, although that would not be the day our friendship would begin.
My family owned a small provision shop in
the front of our house back then and I sometimes had a shift after school. Probably
due to the less obvious age gap between he the eldest of my brothers soon they
were friends. Soon he was friends with all my brothers because I suppose it was
hard to know him and not understand how interesting and captivating his
personality was.
I
was and still am a curious person, and as a child I would ask questions
ceaselessly until nothing bothered me at that moment. Perhaps it was how it
began. The more he stood on the other side of the counter and smiled his
friendly smile and made his funny jokes and answered my tiring questions, we
grew into a friendship.
It was a curious moment in my life, a new
territory. I had never had a friend that old and that unfemale. He inspired me
with his words and his experiences and I listened and asked more. I showed him
my laughable attempts at drawing and painting with watercolour and lamented on
how I hated the way it easily wetted my sketchbook and sometimes sank through
it. He told me to keep practicing using less water, that I needed to master
painting with watercolour to move from It. We laughed at the exaggerated noses
of my characters that looked like chicken asses, noses I never could get right
but he insisted I keep trying anyway, that I would grow into it and he was
right.
There were a lot of things I did to impress
him. Having a friend who was older than you yet didn’t talk to you like he were
intellectually superior or like you were a child made you want to ignore both
truths and believe him. I stopped reading story books and picked up African
novels and Wole Soyinka’s plays, I listened more in Yoruba class and tried to
hold simple conversations with him which mostly ended with laughter.
I ended up liking watercolour because he
wanted me to. And one evening I painted a portrait of him when the air was
laced with the sweet smell of edible soil, the kind that danced in the air when
raining season was looming. I showed him the portrait, the edge jagged from
tearing it off my sketchpad. ‘It’s you’ I said to him. He inspected the picture
keenly and I watched him, watched as his eyes scanned through every detail and
glazed over with an emotion I couldn’t quite place. Then he finally smiled and told
me it was remarkable.
“Remarkable” I turned the word over in my
mind that night as I laid in bed, savoured the pride that swelled in my chest
cloud-like. And it almost felt the same as coming first position in class and
having to watch people’s eyes cloud with various emotions that made me feel
like I was floating.
A few days later on my ninth birthday, I rushed home from school panting with exhilaration and dashed into the shop, eagerly waiting for him so I could characterize with glee how my friends in school tried to drench me with water and how I outwitted them like Speedy Gonzalez. That day, he gifted me with the first Poster-colour set I ever owned, his face cherubic against the white fluorescent bulb hanging in the ceiling and told me to never stop imagining life differently. And perhaps that was the moment I began to feel it, that feeling. The feeling where I wanted to talk to him every moment of every day. Tell him about my weird dreams and discuss with him everything I did not understand in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. We talked long into the night that day and I felt the glowing warmth in my chest grow continually so.
I do not know how long our friendship
lasted, I do not know how many days I sat in the shop on the other side waiting
to see the baseball cap on his head, or listen to the faint Yoruba accent
underneath his slightly exaggerated phonetics. I do not know when I stopped
waiting.
It was the most devastating thing my young
mind could comprehend. I felt as though fragments of my skin had warped and broken
and peeled off leaving patches of raw flesh so unbearably painful I did not
know what to do. It was like this person whom you saw every day and shared so
much with just varnishes without even so much as a goodbye. But what I did not
realise then was that he did say goodbye just not in those words, and I had
desperately wanted it to be in those words so I would have braced myself for
the impact of his absence. My ninth birthday would be the last time I ever saw
him.
I was too embarrassed to ask my brothers
about him because I knew they would tease me. So, for the first time ever, I
found his apartment in the neighbourhood, turns out he had been living with his
married uncle. And the strangely fluted Hausa man in his charismatic accent
where he pronounced P as F and F as P in his words made sure I understood they
had moved out and he was the new gateman. Of all the things I forgot, I
remember that I did not cry, but was rather filled with anger. And in that
moment, I realised I never ever saw him anywhere else but from behind the
counter, never shared a handshake or a hug, nothing. And angry as I was a
stupid part of me still wished I had reached out and touched his face that night,
but the distance across the counter and my fear of what touching his face would
mean had deterred me.
As time passed and I immersed myself in
more pressing issues like continually making top of my class and avoiding the timekeeper,
a senior who had made the habit of calling me his wife. It caught me by
surprise when one of my newly made friends Grace mentioned in a conversation I
cannot remember how it led to him, that he was her uncle and had moved overseas
and asked If I wanted to give him a message. I had just blankly stared at her
and wondered what it was that I was feeling at that moment. Never did I even
remotely think that this chance would ever come and here It was and I was
ambivalent for whatever reason I did not know. I remember staring straight out
the window at the bougainvillea tree besides a junior block wondering why I had
never attempted to climb it.
And even then, I realised how delicate and fragile things were. How ephemeral the nuances of life presented themselves to us in their variations. I understood that ours had been born of such a plight and I laughed thinking of watercolour sinking though the thin leaves of my sketchbook. Laughed at how my brows would furrow in anger and frustration as I tried to salvage it. I laughed because watercolour would forever remind me of a fragile kind of laughter, the kind born of moments.
I like to believe that I understood everything with time, understood why he came and left the way he did. Why I still leaned across the counter often then and played our conversations in my mind. And why instead of holding on to anger, I was instead consumed with gratitude for those fleeting moments he was standing there with only the shared barrier of a wooden platform between us offering nothing but his friendship and asking for nothing but the same. But when I found myself comparing every friend to him, weighing my interest in conversations based on the ones I’d shared with him, battling with myself on whether I was allowed to associate memories of him with fondness instead of anger or even try to understand if I liked the memory of him and not him as he was, I knew I needed an end to our story to find closure.
As the slithers of rainfall skewered into
the gullies on the open road, I remember thinking about his life in the UK, if
he was married to a pretty white woman (Because it was quite popular at that
time) and had a tottering child already. If his dreams and ambitions were a
reality at that moment and if he ever thought about the young girl on the other
side of the world who once liked his baseball cap and his smile and his
friendship, I hoped he thought about her. And I knew the story had ended when I
touched my face and realised I was smiling. Whomever he had become, whatever he
was doing and whomever he was doing it with, I was truly and in the utmost
parts of my heart happy for him.
To the lovely
and exceptional people who indulge me, ahinya. I cannot express my gratitude.
This new category has been included to share true-life events that anyone
desires to share on this platform. The procedure is quite easy. Just have the
description of your story in details sent to my email address and I will be
sure to go over it and in the best of my abilities tell your story. Anonymity
is respected when requested. Whatever you have experienced, no matter how
unconventional or horrid will go a long way in helping a lot of people in
different ways, more than you can imagine.
Thank you.
Watercolour
art by Ene Ijato.
2 comments
Took me a while to get around to reading this...... ...... but when I finally did I actually got lost in it (I was actually on my feet next to my bed all through the first reading)
ReplyDeleteFor some reason I'm the first commenter, but I hope that doesn't discourage you from posting more
'If you build it, they will come'
Thanks, this means alot to me, and I'm glad you enoyed it. X Ene.I
ReplyDeleteEager to hear your thoughts!