Tara: A Baker's Adventure

005

BUSY STREETS WITH CITIZENS WERE as normal in Lagos as breathing was to man. It always amazed me how the people were awake and already busy as early as 5am. It wasn't even just people trying to get to their places of work on a daily basis, it was also little children trying to get to school. What time did the kids wake up, then? I don't think I could ever understand it.

"Abeg, what's happening in this place? It's like people never sleep," Uche had said during his first days in Lagos, and this statement, I'd seen to be in fact, true, when I'd gone to the bank early one morning and was met with a long queue of people waiting to get one thing or the other done. The bank was full and noisy, as people seemed to run around asking to borrow pens to fill in their forms. No one ever came to the bank with their own writing materials, and that alone was a mystery. In fact, if I were to make a thousand for every time I had lent my pen to people at the bank, but never gotten it back, I just might be a millionaire by now.

Kasope had been one of those people. Dressed in a black sweatshirt on black shorts, with a black baseball cap— which he had later revealed he had worn because he didn't like the haircut he had gotten— I'd never seen anyone dress so casually to the bank but still look so good. The first time I saw him, he had maintained a calm demeanor even though the two people standing in front of him seemed to be arguing. Next thing I knew, he was right beside me, a fresh scent following him, with a piece of paper.

"Do you mind if I borrow your pen quickly?" He asked.

"Yeah, sure," the shrug I gave was mindless, as if I was scared that he would see right through me and find out I had been eyeing him like a piece of candy earlier.

"'Yeah, sure', as in you don't mind... or as in, I can't have it?"

I couldn't help but crack a smile at the common mistake I usually tried to stop myself from making often. "Sorry. I don't mind."

I watched him through the corner of my eyes as he filled the form carefully, his eyes going over the words on the paper as if he'd had a bad experience with filling forms wrongly before. It turned out that he had, and this was something we had laughed about at the end of the day when he told me the story after he caught me staring at him. Throughout our discussion, he held onto my pen, and I, still in awe of his beauty and feeling a bit intimidated by him, didn't ask for my pen back.

He didn't leave the bank without getting my phone number, and few weeks after that, we had formed a friendship bound by shared interests, daily phone calls, and a few hangouts. When he told me he would like to pursue a relationship with me, I was already completely head over heels for him, and I could argue and say in my defense, that this had completely blurred my sense of judgement, despite all the red flags I'd seen. Red flags like how he might start with "not to brag", but still go ahead to brag, how he seemed to objectify women, how we had different opinions on way too many things— but a part of me thought I could change him and his way of thinking.

"You thought you could change him. Are you a rehabilitation center?" Mommy had asked me when she walked into me in tears the night of me and Kasope's breakup. It was over the phone and I hadn't seen it coming. "That is God's sign that he was not the one for you. Now, it's on to the next."

"The next? The next guy?" I raised my eyes up to her in irritation, not bothering to wipe my eyes and my running nose. She made it sound as though there were a line of men waiting outside my door; as though I could point out to the one I wanted to date next. 

"Yes. Abi, won't you date someone else?"

"Mommy, my boyfriend literally broke up with me few hours ago—" 

"Which now makes him your ex-boyfriend, isn't it?" she shrugged before repeating, "It's on to the next."

Withdrawn, I rubbed my forehead which was now starting to ache. "Leave me alone."