LOVING Aman | ✓

22

Sometimes love isn't the answer. And sometimes love isn't the problem. It's just somewhere in between.

-Sweet_Sultana

* * *

|Letter 2|

April 21st, 2018

Captain,

It's me, again.

I'm sorry for not meeting you and for not picking up your calls. I'm also sorry it took me two months to write to you again. I wasn't emotionally ready. However, here I am again, on the pages of this paper, hoping I can help lighten up the pain my abrupt departure was causing you. Or at least try to.

I still don't understand why I left; I mean people don't up and leave from where we come from, and I don't know if I would ever do, but I need you to know that it isn't your fault;not completely anyway.

I have demons, Captain, some really scary and terrifying demons which I
have always known or rather believed you couldn't save me from. You were, after all, someone who couldn't even save himself from the demons that ravaged his sleep nor the once that hung heavy during the day.

Yes! I knew about your nightmares. I couldn't not know. The piercing screams, the drenched sheets and the shivering, who did you think held your hands through all those nights? I should have confronted you about them, like almost everything, instead of treating it indifferently, but I couldn't or rather wouldn't. I was too scared then. However now I know differently.

My excuse for it all was that I was young and dumb and now, I guess I am just older and dumber. I know I shouldn't have left you, like how I should have confronted you all those years, but like I said earlier, I simply didn't know how. Or rather I feared you might catch on my hypocrisy on the whole secret thing.

However know this Captain, there is no neat, concise answer as to what led us here. At least none I can think of. All I can tell you is that I didn't know how to handle being loved by you and the harder I try to make sense of it, the more confused and pained I was and in the end, it lost it's meaning and I lost my way.

Don't forgive me, Captain. I can't forgive me either.

Maryam

"She didn't know how to handle being loved and I didn't know how not to love." I found myself musing as I closed shut the manuscript. I never realized that until now.

Jabir...Irrfan...Aman and now Jabir again. I couldn't help but wonder what they have in common.

They're all broken, a voice in my head replied, and they all have secrets.

And perhaps Jabir is the most broken of them all.

Surprising, and yet true. And he wasn't just my cousin's crush or my ex boyfriend, he was much more than that.

Jabir is my favorite man in the world

And I love him, endlessly.

* * *

We had met for the first time in the middle of March, seven months after the death of my dad when I had ran away from my Uncle's; I had been forced by Uncle Audu to come stay with him and his family. My mom had been grief stricken and had done nothing when he'd all but dragged me to his car and we'd drove for three hours to Katsina from Kaduna.