...The sweetness that you know is feeling like you have known this person all your life even though you started talking a few weeks ago; the feeling that gets you thinking, "You had me at hey."
O wrote that.
(Remember O? She's one of those five girls who never message with shorthand).
She probably can't remember this but it's an excerpt from this short story we tried to co-write called 'His and Hers' which never became anything as we both suddenly got really busy – I changed the original 'hello' to 'hey' at the end of the sentence for the sake of this story, even though Jay's message from chapter 1 starts with 'hi', 'hey' just rings better.
I love O, and I tell her that often - I never quite allowed myself to do anything about it because she used to date my friend back in school and I'm still loyal to the bro-code, even though I almost told myself 'fuck the bro code' when we had a moment a few years ago – I'm happy I didn't fuck the bro-code, O could never be fling or rebound-material, she's golden...another thing I say to her often.
Whenever I'd say that to O, she'd always retort with something along the lines of..." I'm sure you say that to all the girls..."
Just you O, just you.
Jay had me at 'hey'. If I could describe the whole time with her in one movie scene it would be...
A guy and a girl on a New York train heading to New Jersey, there's no one else in their coach, they're listening to the same song (Royals by Lorde), they both missed their stop minutes ago, they don't care, the night has been perfect so far and they're just going along, waiting to see where it would lead them...
The scene above actually happened in October 2015 – with a few differences; first the song wasn't Royals by Lorde, it was Save Me by Gotye, the coach had a few other people in it and Chika was......
I'll get back to the train scene in a later chapter.
It's 8:31pm on June 6th and I'm sipping Ribena – in the 19 years I've spent in Nigeria I've never met a girl who doesn't like Ribena...even Jay did, does? Not sure which now... but it's her birthday in 3 days and I just decided to drop a message for her on Facebook Messenger – I sent the message a few minutes ago and her profile says...
Born writer, God gave me words and put them at my disposal... Food lover, I throw down in the kitchen...
That she does... throw down in the kitchen, which is one thing about her I haven't mentioned – she's got mad culinary skills, so much so that her handle on Instagram was @chefJay last I checked (which was years ago); she always talked about loving food and trying out different dishes, I also remember her giving someone what you might call nutrition advice on the phone one day when we were seating in the car.
I wasn't sure about the 'her birthday is in 3 days 'part as I typed it, but then I checked her Facebook and I was right, June 9th, 15 days before mine. She used to tell me that we're both Cancerians and she'd go on about what the Zodiac says about Cancerians – I don't believe in astrology and all that Zodiac stuff but I like the idea that we are both Juners... that's how I termed it.
Speaking of mad culinary skills, there's another person in my life that's got those in abundance... my baby sister; she's not that small, she's 19...I just put it that way because it sounds sweet - she's light-skinned like Jay, very smart (she's got the best secondary school result of us all and is in Med School) and looks like... so imagine if Maisie Williams (Arya Stark in Game of Thrones) were black and a notch prettier, that's my sister.
