Ladi entered my life like a river which overflowed its banks onto a barren land. The land submitted with minimum persuasion for it required water to engineer fruitfulness. After four months of an affair with Ladi, I asked myself where he existed all along, whether dream and reality reached a confluence, and whether the experience would last.
I am in a new world and I love it. I stood by the window and looked at the moon as it turned in circles in the sky.
It did a dance because clouds swirled around it for no one should imagine the possibility of such a massive planet being twirled by fluffy clouds. My mind at peace with the world told me the moon does move around the sun but how it does without a misstep to make it fall out of its orbit or path my mind offered no explanation. Nor did the significance of the round moon escape my attention for my tribe’s people associate the moon with fertility. My life took a turn onto the path of fertility the moment Ladi made his entrée.
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I must have stood and leaned on the window sill for some time for the muscles of my legs sent appropriate messages to the appropriate part of the brain. The moon put up a braver struggle against dark clouds and after a successful fight stood alone and glowed in all her majesty like a queen on a throne.
The brightness of the moon made me see the garden I developed after Ladi came into my life. He mooted the idea and brought the vegetable seeds in attractive micro packets. To till the soil and prepare the beds Ladi brought shovel, rope, pegs, and manure. To him the word fallow must have no space in anyone’s dictionary. Land which he termed the world’s most valuable resource after water has a top place in his list. Anyone who allows land to remain in fallow will likely let other things such as the brain and capacity to love lie fallow.
When I tried to lean on the window sill my stomach reminded me to allow space because Ladi deposited seed there and like the seeds in the garden it grew at a slow but definite pace. The occupant of the womb does make my steps and internal system unsteady but those are welcome discomforts. Before Ladi the idea of motherhood sat as far from my mind as the moon from the earth. Reality and the unthinkable shook hands when Ladi waltzed into my life. Each time I remember it I exult and feel I should scream in delight.
I brushed my hair by instinct as I have done several times in months. Some girls make their hair to cover their eyes and continue to brush the strands aside the way white women do. In my case I wear normal hair but I continue to brush the curls by instinct.
All of my adult life I have worn low cut the one associated with tomboys. Ladi one day asked me whether he dates a boy or a girl because of my hair style. He insisted people regard hair as a woman’s crown which should be worn. I felt no urge to be coerced to pay a visit to the hairdresser the first in my adult life. Today I understand ‘attachment,’ ‘hair food’ (hair eats?), ‘frying,’ ‘weaving,’ ‘breaking,’ and other terminologies associated with the way and manner women keep or lose hair. The hair management experience has come as new and welcome source of excitement and fascination. I am in a copious new, glorious, bouncy, and joyous world!
I recalled the words of the first poem Ladi wrote for and about me. The beauty made me read the piece several times and at a point I cried till fever visited me. When, almost breathless, I asked him how poems are written he laughed in the carefree but serious manner of his and told me all human beings are born poets. Whether in our words or ways or wear, human beings craft poems which those who can discern can read aloud or in silence. I went on to ask him whether ‘every human being’ includes me. He laughed louder and said yes several times with emphatic nods of his beautiful head. With respect to the written form he said anyone who can sit down and organize words to convey emotions in verse will have a poem on his or her laps.
I tried my hands, first about a farm girl in my village and went on to the street I live in all of them as warm up for the big one – about Ladi. His reaction to my first poem should best be described as anticlimactic. I expected him to either exult or shrug and say well, you tried. But he looked sober, embraced, and kissed me The way he held me I thought he would squeeze life out of me. My tears flowed like rivulets on a smooth wall during rain fall.
With the boldness he imbued me with poem after poem I dared to write one about him and watched his face with anxiety as he read it. He sat silent for some days when he visited but often let go the kind of smile a child reserves for a loved mother. Each time he visited me the piece of paper with the handwritten lines occupied his shirt pocket. He guarded it like the pupil of his eye and told me everything about the piece fascinated and stunned him from the concept to the words which he termed honey drops, to the handwriting which he said looked like a piece from the stable of a white teacher.
The icing came by way of his comment on my looks. He observed something from my face to my hips down to my feet. In my entire adult life, no man has described me as beautiful. When I clocked twenty-two one man managed to tell me I look attractive. It gave me tons of food for thought for days. Did he refer to my physique which should mean every item from my hair to my toe nails?
I drew a conclusion in early adulthood on the status of my physique. No one I thought should see my hips and describe it with any measure of correctness as figure of eight. If I found myself as a judge at a beauty contest my replica would at best dream of a third place although I can say the word ugly would be inappropriate to describe my looks. My lips cannot conjure the image of a mouse, my forehead has no resemblance with the masks used by masquerades, and no one will look at my dentition and wonder whether there would be need for a make-up artist to make me Dracula’s younger sister. But by way of self-assessment I told myself the word beautiful should be regarded as flattery in the mouth of anyone who used it to describe me.
Despite what I regarded as a fair assessment of myself the possibility of a place in the cast of the ugly flew away like a defeated vampire the day I met Ladi. In fact, a female neighbour looked at me yesterday and said, “Lola, who has come on board?” I felt intrigued and I guess my face betrayed the emotion which made her offer a quick response. “The way you look,” she said. “The spark in your eyes, the glow on your skin, the permanent smile on your face, name it. Forgive me if I say I noticed you are beautiful few weeks ago,” and with an apologetic addendum, “for the first time.” I took no offence and in fact flashed a smile as wide as the stream in my village which made her shake her head in bewilderment.
I thought of one reason to doubt the woman given her gender and her marital status but found none. A well-married woman, my neighbour Madam Funke has nothing to gain from me. We have been neighbours for five years without a compliment from her. I said to myself whatever she has seen credit should go to God and to Ladi.
I took another look at the sky and peered into the belly of the moon where the form of a being sat like a bronze cast of a human in deep thought. It made me recall paintings or artwork of some people’s view of the life of philosophers. But at the moment and I believe for the rest of my life I will have no reason to be moody or to brood over the vicissitudes of life because Ladi covers every piece of ground with capacity and goodness. With Ladi my mind saw the possibility to terraform the Moon in the future and when it happens two of us will be there.
Sometimes people say the Creator makes two people for each other. I accept the idea with gusto for it presents the reason Ladi and I clicked the nanosecond we set eyes on each other. The emotion stands tall, big, and round like a corn silo on an agricultural farm. To cap it, the feeling has been mutual, the operations reciprocal, and the future as real as tomorrow. I feel as if we have known each other all our lives.
I have no idea what others have experienced but for me something about love defies explanation. All the research in the world cannot come up with a template on how to place or explain or describe love. Love looks like a robust but formless animal on a slab before a butcher. How to position it for dissection defies knowledge, skill, and experience. Subtle when it moves and when it envelopes someone, love functions like the aroma of an expensive perfume. The person in the midst of it struggles to breathe but finds self unable to explain its hold and experiences unwillingness to move away. I feel breathless in a satisfactory manner and when I utter the magic words, “I love you” to Ladi my heart and soul are in rhythm. I know I am in love and the world should celebrate with me.”
. Part of a series from the collection Brief Encounters © Bassey Ubong, 2024.