“Here I stand
Arms open wide
I have held you
close
Kept you safe
Till you could
fly…”
Those
lines kept playing back and forth in my head as I made my way through the crowd
in search of my soon to be ex-girlfriend, Aisha.
***
I
had met Aisha, a fair-complexioned girl of Fulani descent on my first day in
the University of Ibadan. The earth literally stopped for me to feast my eyes
on her inconsumable beauty. Stunned, my
knees quivered like a leaf caressed by the wind. My jaw dropped and my mouth
formed an ‘O’. My legs threatened to divorce my body, but I played ‘the man’
and managed to pull myself together like a string.
“My name is Toba,” I said as I walked up
to her extending my hand for a shake with the hope of feeling the coziness of
her palm.
“You don’t offer a lady a handshake,”
was the sharp reply.
She turned and left, smiling
mischievously, leaving me rooted to the spot with my hand still hanging in the
air. I slowly withdrew my hand and let it drop into my pocket while I watched
her curvy hips swing from left to right like a pendulum. I was dazed by her
haughtiness. How could she treat me like that? I was good looking, neither deformed
nor smeared by shit, I thought. I shrugged my shoulders and left for my room.
On the way to my room, images of Aisha
turning and flashing me a smile kept flashing through my mind.
“She was flirting with me,” I shouted
subconsciously.
Thankfully,
nobody else was around. I walked back briskly to my room to plan how to get
this paragon of beauty. She was just too beautiful for me to let her slip
through my fingers like palm oil. I racked my brain for any idea, but none
came. I didn’t get anything from her or let me say she didn’t let me get
anything from her. No phone number, BBM contact, I could not even get her name.
Was I predestined to just meet this girl and not get to know her? If I was,
then God must be the orchestrator of infatuation.
Since I didn’t have any clue on how to
reach her, I decided to put the matter to rest by dying momentarily.
I was awoken by the nagging sound of my
alarm at 7:30am the following morning. I quickly took my bath, dressed up and
hurried off to my first class.
“Excuse me, coming through…”
The voice sounded familiar, I turned
around and I saw Aisha running breathlessly towards the lecture theatre. I was
elated.
“I was not destined to lose this girl,”
I muttered under my breath.
I stopped at the door, bringing myself
to face her. Our eyes exchanged words our mouths failed to express when we
first met. The foggy atmosphere had been interrupted by the rays of the
fully-risen sun. Our love tale began like the tossing of a coin.
To be continued…
***
Biography
Akindeji Ola is a young writer who hails from Modakeke, Osun State, Nigeria. He presently studies Communication & Language Arts at the University of Ibadan where he hopes to hone his craft as a
creative writer.
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