I'm high on you, you're worse than pills...you're equal parts sweet, dangerous and intoxicating.
I'm not entirely sure why I started to write this story; all I know is that I have to tell it. Something did trigger me to begin to type the words though – I was watching 21 grams, a movie directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu (he's noteworthy in that he has directed at least 3 movies nominated for the Academy Awards in some category – and his directing gave Leonardo Di Caprio his first Oscar for The Revenant) – the movie stars Naomi Watts, Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro and there is this scene in the movie where Naomi Watts' character calls Sean Penn's character at 2 am for him to come over; he gets there and she starts complaining to him;
" You had me thinking all day; I haven't spoken to anyone in months and I barely even know you and I already need to talk to you...there's something the more I think about the less I understand...why the hell did you tell me that you like me? Answer me because I really didn't like you saying that at all – you can't just walk up to a woman you barely know and tell her you like her, you can't, you can't do that...you don't know what she is going through or what she is feeling..."
A quick summary of the plot is that Sean Penn's character was terminally ill and needed a new heart, on the day he goes to the hospital to see if there is a heart available, Naomi Watts character's husband and 2 daughters die in a car accident and Sean Penn's character gets her husband's heart on recommendation from the hospital; he decides to look into the person whose heart he got and discovers that Naomi Watts' character is married to the man whose heart is now keeping him alive – later in the movie there is a scene where he tells her that she shouldn't worry or be scared of him, that he isn't there to cause any trouble...and that he has got a good heart (literally and figuratively) ;-). If you haven't seen the movie, you should...it's worth every minute of its runtime.
There was something about that scene that got my synapses firing and I booted up MS Word and began to type. I watched that scene over and over again, there was just something about the way Naomi Watts' character said what she said, it let me live vicariously as though I was Sean Penn's character. I later discovered that Naomi Watts was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in that movie. Good stuff.
It's about 1pm as I'm typing this chapter and nibbling on Mentos; earlier today while I was up and about crossing things off my to-do-list, I passed by one of those places that remind me of Jay – there are several of such places you see, and each of them has become something of a 'flashback trigger' for me, a mind portal that takes me back 5 years to when I was living this story.
So back to the story but first I'd like to apologise for a few things, first of which is that I'm not a writer and I've never had or developed writing talent so forgive me if this story doesn't make for good prose. Second is that I have absolutely no intention of making anybody look bad or calling out anyone for anything they might have done in the past – the past is the past; lastly, I'm sorry for the numerous movie references, they just help to tell the story in a more fun way.
Let's skip some days and go to the day of the second message for a minute – the "I got it" message; you see I just landed in Abuja and Jay was in Abuja (3 days before that we were both in Lagos), and I was really irate and sad at the same time. If I could sum up this story in one simple phrase it would be "living and letting go" – and that's why I felt that way, for the first time ever in my life I had completely let go, I didn't try to control the outcome of the situation (which I usually do), I just let things unfold – I was invested and I liked it. As I typed angrily and began to call her out of her name, all I wanted to do was see her; I felt like I was losing my mind – I dragged my luggage and trudged through all the checking till I got to the guy who had come to pick me up.
