She Is Blind

Chapter Twenty-Two: A Broken Heart

School work had me a little bit distracted from my heartbreak until that Sunday afternoon, when my mind resurrected the question I had been asking myself, together with a new one, if she still loved me deep inside. I decided to call her, for the last time, to know where our relationship stood. I rung her line, hoping she would pick up and let her beautiful voice filter out to me again, and hoping she would give me enough audience to be able to reach out to her heart again. But when the call did go through, it was as if someone had picked it up by mistake, because I could only hear two voices in the room.

“Mon Bébé, dans ta cécité tu réussis encore à faire tellement de choses," I heard a male voice say.

"Je t’aime aussi, et ainsi tu peux me dire combien tu m’aimes en me donnant ce que tu sais que je veux."

Gift's reply in French stunned me for a while. I felt nostalgic and happy to hear her voice again.

"Que voulez-vous?" The male voice asked again.

"Tu sais ce que je veux."

"Un baiser, ou un peu plus?"

"Un baiser, et un peu plus.

Fortunately my phone had recorded the conversation, and I quickly scoured the web for a suitable verbal translation app. The tempo of my heartbeat doubled and somehow I wanted to chicken out and stop the translation, but curiousity killed the cat, and soon, the app was decoding the audio.

A blue line showed on my phone screen, with an icon that popped up and read “translating…”, and soon the words began to show up in sync with the words being spoken.

“Baby, in your blindness you still manage to do so much. How can I tell you how much I love you?”

By now the app seemed to have problems decoding Gift’s French, because even I could tell it was badly spoken, but the app translated it anyway.

“I love you too, and so you can tell me how much you love me by giving me what you know I want.”

“What do you want?”

“You know what I want.”

“A kiss, or some more?”

“A kiss, and some more.”

I switched off my phone, unwilling to hear more, but I still heard her excited scream because the audio could still play somehow, and then I switched it off.

‘If you have left me behind, Gift Izuchukwu, then you won’t find me where you left me. I will be miles away.’ I said, wiped the tears that had streamed down my face in the three minutes I stood dazed, and went back outside to find Winifred, whom I was bedazzling with my sugar-coated tongue every day.

Academic work seemed to be getting tougher, and by the time we were writing tests I could tell I had emaciated badly. There were dark circles under my eyes caused by a recent lack of sleep, and Ayo had even stopped bringing his women to the house, so as not to disturb me. Although I appreciated this, the house felt too lonely for me at times.

I had not attached any real feelings to Winifred, and I started keeping away from her during this period. Yet she stuck to me like glue, which irritated me at times and made me regret ever flirting with her excessively. All I was avoiding was another relationship, wanting to be single like forever and flirting once and again when I had a choice, but with no real plans of being a playboy like Ayo, and so I did not like how she had started introducing me to the other girls from the other compounds around as ‘her baby’.

I started calling Peter around anytime Ayo was not around so we could read together, and Peter was someone I was glad to have as a friend. He was smart and intelligent, handsome, and shy around some girls he wasn’t used to. That day, he visited me on a Saturday, and his narration of when Amina, the girl who had dropped us at home on our Orientation day, visited him at home two days before was hilarious.