LOVING Aman | ✓

25

I don't know what's worse; loving with pain or not loving at all.

-Sweet_Sultana

* * *

|Letter 8|

     Captain,

              Why do you love me, captain? I've always been curious. Why me? There were, still are, millions of girls out there who would kill to be Captain Mukhtar Auwal Ingawa's bride, so why me? You always knew I was broken, perhaps not how much, but you knew and yet you still chose me, why? Why? Why?

      Because I keep getting all these weird ideas, thoughts.  I kept thinking that maybe if I knew why, I could make it go away. And maybe stop you from getting hurt. And maybe keep you away from me. And maybe

        I don't know.

        And I am scared.
      
        And I don't want to be afraid anymore. Or unsure. Or even broken. I don't want to lie either, or keep secrets.

       And... I don't want to be afraid of losing you either, captain.
      
        So please, let me know.

        I really need you too.

With love, forever,

Maryam Muhammad Maishadda.

|Letter 9|

Captain,

          Do you want to know something strange? whenever I think of you, I think of a hedgehog with its sharp spines and its ability to roll itself up into a ball.

        You were like that. Like a hedgehog.

        With you, I've always needed to be careful not to get injured by your sharp edges and whenever I did get pass them, you roll into an insurmountable ball, and it seemed the harder I tried to get into your defences, the fiercer you protected them.

         But do you know what the hedgehogs do whenever they are cold? They hug eachother- despite the sting of the spine on their backs, they cling to eachother. Then I find myself wondering, why couldn't we be like them?

       God! I miss you.

Maryam Muhammad Maishadda.

I paused at this junction to rearrange my thoughts, reliving what I had gone through which the pages of this book had brought back . . . both the good, the bad and the ugly.

I guess meeting Aman again out of the blue was something my heart had yet to recover from and the pain I had safely tucked away were coming back in gasps. I was feeling it all over again—this wasn't what I had in mind when I thought about closure and I didn't know what to do with myself.

It suddenly felt too much.

Honestly, I didn't want to see him, or talk to him. I didn't know if I should be relieved either; I finally get to ask him why, face to face, or if I should be angry at him for tarnishing the memory I had of him with that absurd proposal.

However all these questions and doubts did nothing to change the fact that I loved him.

God! It's almost impossible to really hate someone when all your heart does is betray you with memories of something nice they did for you.