Family Matters•••[COMPLETED]

Chapter Twenty-Three

Aatikah's POV

I wasn't feeling too good.
It was 4:25 am on a Monday morning and I'd not even gotten enough sleep from the night before.

The kind of heartache I was feeling, felt unreal.
It wasn't something I wish for others just so they'd know how I was feeling, not even my enemies.

It'd been almost two weeks since Jibreel announced he was getting married, and I hadn't heard a word from him since then, and with each passing day I felt the pain in my heart become more and more intense.

I'd cry myself to sleep every night and I would wake up thinking it was all a dream that I'd finally woken up from, but then reality would kick in and I'd just begin to feel miserable all over again.

Sumayyah always always tried to reassure me that all would be well, and that Jibreel had a perfectly good reason for whatever he'd gotten himself into, but I highly doubted that.

All everyone was doing was to tell me what they thought I wanted to hear, rather I was convinced that I had lost Jibreel to some other woman already.

When I was little, I'd always dream of getting married to the one person I had a serious crush on, I always had crushes, at least most of the time.

There was the cute biology teacher in secondary school, Mr Bello, whom almost every girl in my class, even the silent and nerdy ones, always seemed to lose their heads over.
I wasn't silent, but I was nerdy.
So, I was among them too.
I always enjoyed biology, because of him, not just because he was cute, or tall, or fair, or a always wore a well-ironed shirt and a tie, but, because he always took advantage of the fact that 99% of the class liked him, to carry us along. He was a really good teacher.

But that was different, I knew he was older and was prolly even dating someone already, but I did that for fun.

At least I could stare directly into his eyes when he was teaching, and openly tease him, whenever I wanted to make small talk.

I never had such an opportunity with Jibreel, I never even knew that I liked him till some years ago.

He was my brother's friend all the while, and I never noticed him.

Save for a few features though, but that wasn't enough.

So many details were still missing and I always told myself that I'd have forever to explore them, but now, my forever seemed way impossible.

I always thought it was a waste of time and emotions to just waste away days of shyness, heartache, nervousness, heart racing at the mere sound of a person's voice, all of that, and then the person would end up with someone else and so would you.

The thought never sat well with me cos I never entertained it.

Now I had no choice, I had to see how things would actually turn out for me.

I was scared though, that I wouldn't be able to move on easily and find someone else, someone like him;
Perfect in a way that I never thought was humanly possible...

Cute in a way that shouldn't even be legal...

Patient in a way that I'd always imagined that time must have left him behind and gone its own way...

Well, I guess, no one can be all that and still be human!

I didn't feel as eager to get married anymore.

I didn't care what mom and dad thought, I mean even though we were twins, one still came minutes after the other, so I guess this time around, those one hundred and something seconds would have to count.