...all I can do is cry and look forward to that day I'd see you next. My heart is breaking into a million pieces; I'm trying to study and I can't concentrate...how did one text I sent bring me so much happiness and pain; Help me keep this love alive, can't do it on my own.
A message from Jay to me, Tuesday at 5:40 a.m., probably January, 2014
Remember my rant from chapter one about shorthand? Well, I wasn't always that way – in fact about 5 years ago I'd use and abuse shorthand in all kinds of ways that are frankly deeply disgusting to me now when I read some of the stuff I wrote. Back then I always knew I wanted to type better, to stop typing stuff like 'sumfn', 'u' and 'iz ' ('iz' is just the dumbest, it's like the word is two letters, 'i' and 's', how hard can it be to type both of them correctly), but for some reason I kept on doing it. Then one day I was messaging this girl who I'd simply call Teni for the sake of this story, and that was the last time I ever typed the ugliness that is shorthand – she corrected me about something I typed in shorthand and subtly told me not to be that way, like I could and should do better. For some reason, that stuck with me and I never looked back.
So, this Teni girl; we were in school together and we had many mutual friends – we had a couple of platonic conversations in the company of said mutual friends but never anything more. I knew a good amount of stuff about her from all the friends we had in common and I'd always wanted to know her better but never came around to it. Teni is a fighter – she has been through a lot of difficult things that would put most people down and take them off their desired trajectory in life but Teni kept on pushing and has been able to get past all the setbacks and make lemonade from the lemons life threw at her. I say all of this like I was there for everything that happened to her but I wasn't, I was almost twice removed from it all and only knew about it from a mutual friend. Most recently I stumbled upon some news that Teni won this writing award for young African writers and I couldn't be happier for her – I've always known that she's got mad writing talent and I'm glad she's getting the accolades. She's also a female rights activist and has done a TED Talk (a really good one from what I gathered, though I haven't seen it) on the topic.
The reason I didn't include Teni among the five girls who never message with shorthand is because I've never been close to her, which is what I was alluding to above.
Cute coincidences
Today is June 21st; my birthday is in 3 days and being at this point of the year forces me to go through a journey of introspection (as it should everyone) – this story is about Jay not me, so I won't talk about what I've been ruminating on; one thing I would like to tell you about is coincidences – you know, those weird, pleasant coincidences that just happen completely randomly and make you chuckle; like for example a few days ago when I noticed that in my movie folder, that's supposed to be ordered alphabetically, Shadow Dancer and Ex-Machina, both starring Domhnall Gleeson, were next to each other, as if my laptop ordered them that way because I recently re-watched Anna Karenina (also starring Domhnall Gleeson) and it wanted me to watch more Domhnall Gleeson – clearly that was just a coincidence; either the files in the folder were ordered by some criteria other than alphabetically or the actor's name was included in the movie's meta-data and my OS was reading that.
...or, my OS had become sentient and we are not far away from the computing singularity expertly foretold in the classic cautionary tale that is The Matrix; Clearly not, just mere coincidence.
Another one is how 2 weeks ago someone I hadn't spoken to in a long time told me that she now has a kid named Aviella – what's curious about it is that when she told me her daughter's name,
