Did I really love Jay? Jeez I don't know, I'm certain that I cared deeply about her, I'm certain she left me looking like a character in Sleepy Hollow, headless, after she blew my mind away with how stunningly pretty and effortlessly alluring, she is – as for the L-word...
Excerpt from this Chapter
14.2.14 – Ghosts and Silhouettes.
Riddle me this – What do you call a long-lost Rembrandt painting found in a chest on the bank of the Amstel River?
Rare and special, and most people are just not that.
You see most people are really more alike than dissimilar... contagiously bland, frighteningly unremarkable, clustered together in their ordinariness, adhering closely to some mean line... plain, in a non-classic way. Back then Jay was everything but unremarkable, she was a firecracker, a fire-starter, every inch of her was something special...something to be wax-modelled then savoured and admired, to make you stop and stare, and say to yourself...perfect, just perfect.
Right now, all of that didn't matter much.
Flames had become dust and whatever bond we had between us was now rust, withering away into nothingness.
I could no longer hold on to the immaterial, and now the distance, trivial to her but insurmountable to me, had finally pushed me to the brink, and all I could do was turn a blind eye to her fading silhouette.
February 14, 2014. I remember that day so well, as if it happened yesterday.
It was early afternoon; we were on the top floor of the central library in school...outside there were probably noises of birds chirping and wind whirring and inside definitely the dopamine-inducing sound of phones chiming with message notifications.... everyone ignored the keep phones on silent rule, maybe they felt it applied to calls only.
The central library in school was a great meeting place when it wasn't full – back during school days my friends and I would go there to read when we had serious exams, but also to run into people...and by people, I mean girls; the irony of it, that at the place where I had met several girls, was where I was when I was leaving a certain one, who very often, felt like several. That morning I was having a meeting with a few people – I had made arrangements in Ekiti that allowed me to be absent from service for the most part save once a month when I had to go there for clearance...they called it ghosting, I was a ghost.
To Jay, for the few days leading up to that day I had certainly been a ghost – I didn't respond to messages, didn't call, and worst of all, I didn't bother to explain why...I just went missing.
Listless
I couldn't do it anymore; the desire to keep trying, keep messaging and checking had all but dissipated. Days before that my mind was fraught with questions; I kept asking myself if what Jay and I had was worth having.
" Where is this all going? What exactly am I doing? Jay is gone and we'll never be able to compensate for the distance..." I wondered and pondered.
I simply could not justify all the time, energy and emotion I was putting into her, especially when I knew that the chances that we'd end up together were slimmer than Keira Knightley...bordering on anorexic. It all felt like too much work for something that was largely undefined and uncertain – people say that when you believe in something you should keep on going and eventually you'd see the light at the end of the tunnel...I'm a tech entrepreneur so trust me I get that, that's like our mantra and it's probably good advice, but with Jay I wasn't even sure there was an end of the tunnel to get to, it felt like we were heading in no particular direction, the tunnel could turn out to be a labyrinth with no way out save where we came in through, or an abyss...with nothing to go toward; so I decided to go forward, without her.
