So This Is Love

‘Get up.’ I opened my eyes to see her staring at me with a loathsome look of disgust and impatience. I shut my eyes tight and let out a yawn that I for a moment hoped would rid me of the anger that was quickly rising in my chest. ‘What time is it?’ I asked calmly, trying to hide my frustration behind a demeanor of tranquility and composure. I had had a long night. For the past three weeks I had been sleeping on the sofa, and it had not been a great experience so far. I had wanted to book a hotel room every night while I drove home from work but I never got myself around to do so. I would find myself at home however much I hated it, and I still wanted to see her. ‘I don’t know.’ she answered curtly with a smirk on her lips. ‘I want to clean up the room, you can find somewhere else to prolong your nap.’ She added after a minute of ominous silence during which I had sat up, put my hands on my thighs and planted my face to the ground, weeping silently that I was in this hole of torture. In response I lifted my face to hers. Our eyes met and I saw that glow that had won me over years ago while we were still in Medical School. Those were the same eyes that had driven me mad with infatuation. When I first met Alshie, I never thought that I would come to love and adore her as I did.

I used to see her in Medical School Christian Union, and I would quickly say hi to her like I always did with other ladies, careful not to prolong a conversation into anything awkward and unseemly. She had about her a venerable air of composure that revealed an unmistakable and solid sense of direction in life. She was not outspoken but seemed to have a close friend who was her exact opposite. I never thought much of Alshie until we found ourselves serving in the Hospitality ministry together. And then bit by bit we got to know each other, and soon realized how similar we actually were. We loved the same things, we hated the same things. We went on to confess how we were both introverts. We also were first-borns. She was a writer as she was a reader, so was I. I had asked about her favorite read, and she had said she loved John Bunyan’s A Pilgrims Progress more than anything else; so did I. After she sent me the link to her blog, I stayed awake the whole night revelling in every single word of beautifully curated articles that it was impossible not to love. She was an inspiration. When we shared about how we got born again and how our journeys in salvation had been, I saw in Alshie a partner. I knew it in that instant that I was speaking to my wife. It had been said that for a Christian, there was no better place to find a wife that in Christian Union, and that it was particularly important to get a woman who loved the Lord. Here we could begin a relationship that would be guided by principle, and we would have so many people to guide us. Alshie had to be the one; she was decent, few of words, and she had a beautiful smile. I had told my then roommate Njoroge Maina, that I desire nothing less in a lady, and cared less about anything more.

I just didn’t know how I would get past my fear and confess my feelings. And such a disposition of restrain was inspired more by the fear that my feelings would be unrequited than it was because of priggishness. I had had crushes for a million ladies, but I had never dared to ask them out or tell anyone about how I felt. In the end I was glad that I never did, because such feelings soon revealed themselves to be useless and distracting infatuations. Even so, I knew that to win this fair lady, I couldn’t afford to be faint at heart. I would soon need to tell my feelings if I would ever get Alshie to be with me. Every time I looked into the beautiful blue glint in her eyes, I wondered if she felt the same way for me.

It is difficult to hide the flame of a candle with bundles of dry straw, for it soon dawned on me that my boys had sniffed me out, when one of my forebears stood me up after service one Sunday and questioned me on what my intentions with Alshie were. I immediately realized that my ways had been found out. When a man is in love, sooner or later the world will know, however much he hides it. ‘This cannot be a mistake Daniel,’ he had said, ‘if you are not sure that you love her, please don’t get it any further.’ I had stayed silent, looked down to the ground, my heart still racing hard as I had not expected the confrontation. ‘I am sure I love her,’ I had said with a kind of solemn and certain conviction that surprised me as much as it did Michael whose face softened and lit up into an encouraging smile of someone who seemed to have been moved by what had to be a genuine confession. ‘Well…’ he had remarked and gone on to share insights from his own experience when it came to the murky waters of romance.

I didn’t ask Alshie out until a year later when I was completely sure of my feelings, or at least when I thought I was. ‘I’ll give you my response on Friday, after the service.’ That was the response she gave me and the only words she spoke after I seemed to be done with my prolonged speech about eternal devotion and fidelity. This was on Monday, and I immediately knew it would be torture for me. Never has five days been an eternity. I did not sleep a wink, neither did I properly study. Everyday my love for Alshie seemed to be multiplied by a factor of 1000. I loved her more with the passage of every second, and adored her the more with the dawn of each day. I soon knew that as long as she walked the earth, I would never be happy with anyone else. That Friday I arrived a little late for the service as I first needed to finish up a report on a Medical Camp we had had a week ago. I got in when the worship team was singing Yahweh Yahweh by Nathaniel Bassey. I surreptitiously swept my eyes across the room. She was not there. I kept looking during the praise session, through the teaching session. I couldn’t bear to face the reality that she had not come for service until the Chairperson had given the benediction, until we had shared words of the Grace and we were dispersing for tea. I was cooked. Not coming for service meant one thing, she didn’t want to have to face me and give me the bad news, at least not so soon. I was broken, and did my best to avoid the chatty parties that would notice the streak of sadness in me that evening. While I was scrolling through Uber looking to see if I could get an affordable solo ride home, the message came up: ‘Hi Henry, I had to rush home this evening. Everything is alright. Let’s please talk on Sunday.’ I smiled, and read it all over again. I now strangely knew what her answer would be.

When we got married, we truly loved and enjoyed each other’s company. Everyday was bright and exhilarating. We couldn’t get the fill of each others love. We kissed, we embraced, we caressed; we did everything imaginable that a happily wedded couple would do. Alshie was the evidence of the one thing I ever did right in my life. It was a win. ‘The greatest mistake a man can make in his life, is marring the wrong woman,’ I had heard it said and repeated a thousand times. I was proud at what I accomplished. I had bagged the price, what more could a man want in his life?

As days went by, so did the happiness slowly fade with it. Everything was perfect until it was not. Slowly but surely we soon realize that we never liked each others company as much. We had drunk to our fill from the pitcher of love until it was empty. Suddenly we did not love one another anymore. Everything soon became mechanic and artificial until it was impossible to put up with the facade anymore. I would look into her eyes, and I could see coldness where I had seen a fiery passion. She was not beautiful anymore, she just looked like any regular lady I would meet in the streets. I hated the shape of her nostrils and how tiny her ears were. There was no longer any joy in going back home. Her presence was suffocating, she gave out an air of death. As each day passed, it became clear that even though I had never hated her, I had never loved her either. She soon, with a chilling air of insouciance, confessed that letting me into her life was surrendering to a chimera and a whim she now regretted every second of her life. We had thought we were soulmates when we never were; we had only forced ourselves to believe it, and reality had soon intruded. Alshie was a great lady, but she was never supposed to be my wife. It might have turned out much better if we had stayed friends. Everything might have been fine if nothing ever turned romantic.

‘The Papers?’she asked. A tear fell from my eye. I had still not mustered the courage to sign the divorce papers. Maybe I still believed things would take a different course for the best, but would they? Divorce? Who would have thought that I would be caught up in a divorce? ‘I am yet to sign them.’ I said and rising up. ‘So this is love,’ I stuttered silently as I made my way up the matted staircase to take a shower.

Simps Will See Dust 08

Was it ever fair to judge a lady by her looks? Did a lady deserve the attention of a man simply because she had a beautiful face or a shapely body? Life had taught us to be materialistic, and to judge things on the basis of how they appeared to be rather than how they really were. When people got married, or had girlfriends, didn’t they mostly do so for the face and forgot all about the soul. But did a beautiful face ever make a lady a good person? We might have taught ourselves to believe it that way, to associate beauty with innocence and elegance with graciousness. Everything I believed in had crumbled, and now, I was certain that beauty could be the most beguiling thing, and to judge a lady by her looks had to be among the most unwise and unfair things to do. A lady was only beautiful because of her mind and her dispositions, because of what she believed in and stood for. And she was beautiful when she was sensible rather than sensual. As long as she carried herself with dignity and honor. But what did that now mean for Brenda’s dignity, or her honor. Would I still respect her as I would?

Brenda had always been the perfect embodiment of beauty at its extreme, prettier than any lady in the world, yet still the sum of the most serene and commendable virtues anyone could think of. She was flawless in every human scale of judgment, and no one would ever have blamed me for falling in love with her. Even my classmates who were in relationships confessed that if they had only suspected they stood a chance with her, they would have jilted their girlfriends. I think I would too. Anyone would.

We had just wrapped up our ObsGyn rotations, and we were getting into Pediatrics. Word had it that it would be the most free styling rotation; without a proper system for follow up of the students, and without a definite authority to answer to, and a standard of performance to press towards, it was a certain thing that the students would mind their own business. By a strange quirk of fate, Brenda and I got assigned as bed mates. That meant that we would clerk our patients together, get to listen to the version of their stories, and draft their history for presentation, together. I had not clerked so many patients in ObsGyn. Though I continually promised myself that I would clerk some more before the end of the rotation, we were soon submitting our logbooks and that was a done deal.

I had not been myself since Brenda confided in me about her state. I had always been a little confused and edgy, but I now knew that I was a mess. I rasped my lab coat trying to straighten the untidy creases hoping that I would not meet a resident pediatrician who would ask me why I didn’t have my name tag. We walked up to the first bed by the door, the child’s eyes warmed up to us, she was smiling quite dazzlingly, and had it not been for the medicine lying on the bedside table, or the line she still had on her left hand, nobody would have thought she was ill. Beside the medicine casing also lay a barely eaten banana and an unopened loaf of bread. Her eyes were teary and seemed to be popping out of their sockets but she still managed a resolute smile.

“Where is mom?” I asked. “I am with my dad, I don’t have a mom” she answered with a palpable struggle in her voice, but with such endurance to relay that information, “He’s gone out to air some of my clothes.” “Okay. How are you feeling today?” Brenda asked, squatting a little to level her face with hers, “what’s your name?” “Tiffany. I have a surgery tomorrow, I know I am going to die, but that will make Papa sad.” I gasped. I never expected a kid, about the age of five speak so macabrely. “No, don’t say that, Tiffany. You won’t die. You will be okay.” Brenda said reassuringly taking her hands. “I want to rest, when I die I will rest. Papa will rest.” “Tiffany!” Brenda interjected softly. I felt broken by every word Tiffany spoke, yet I only stood there silent, as mute as I always was when it was important that I said something. “God is with you, okay?” “Is He?” Young Tiffany asked looking at Brenda, “everyone says that all the time, I don’t believe it anymore.” She had a kind of apathetic and solemn look on her face that seemed to say that she was content with her fate, and that she didn’t want to believe in fairy tales or anything like it anymore. “He certainly is, darling,”

Tears came to my eyes. My heart hollered silently when I regarded the depth with which young Tiffany spoke. She was a mature person trapped in the body of a little girl. Her view towards life was so sublime unlike the frivolity with which most of us had taught ourselves to think with. Brenda knelt down to Tiffany, embraced her, and quickly wiped the tears in her eyes. I was not sure if any lady could do what she did in that moment, they all seemed so invested in themselves, so concerned with their own affairs to be touched by the selfless story of a young girl willing to die if that would end her father’s suffering. What did I really live for? My love for Brenda in that moment had been multiplied by a thousand. I adored her. I loved her for being so different, so motherly, so kind. But what did my love mean now that she carried another man’s child. She was not perfect anymore, and I could not go on loving her anymore, yet I knew it deep within me that if my affections for Brenda could ever change, they would only increase. And in that moment it struck me, I had to convince Brenda to keep the baby.

Simps Will See Dust 07

As I watched Brenda approach me, clad in her white satin lab coat, my heart raced in my chest. Try as I would, I had never quite gotten used to her beauty, her grace, or her mien. My eyes hurt, so did my heart. After the phone call we had had that night, she could not be the same beautiful Brenda I was in love with, not anymore, yet she was. I hoped I could blind myself from taking in the intensity of her womanly features, but I couldn’t. Her beauty was clearly meant to torture everyone of her acquaintances, especially those of us who desired her but clearly, would never have her. I couldn’t help but relish in her beauty, though I now knew that I despised her, or wanted to. When Brenda walked up to me yesterday evening, her requesting to have a phone call with me later that night was not something I would ever have envisioned. Just a few moments before that, I had never in my life asked any lady out, and when I finally did, I had misdirected the question and so asked the wrong lady out. When I told my wife about this incident years later, she said that I had done that to make Brenda jealous, for there was no sane man in the world who could ever, even if accidentally, ask the wrong lady out. But after all, I knew that I hadn’t been sane. You could not be in love as I was, and still be sane.

I wondered whatever it was that she wanted us to speak about on phone, the fact that I could not think about anything the phone call could be about made me shudder, but in its own strange way, also a little excited, only that afterwards I would have more of the former and less of the latter. Maybe my love for her was finally doing its thing; I was finally winning Brenda over bit by bit. But today, while I looked at her, I loathed her. There was something despicable about her beauty. How could she? How did it happen? When? It could not be this Brenda; it could not be the lady I loved, the lady I adored from my first encounter with her in first year, the lady I hoped everyday that one day would be mine. It had to be another Brenda; not this beautiful, kind, quick-witted and principled lady. This one knew what she wanted, she knew what she was working towards. This Brenda could not be pregnant! I could not accept it. I could not believe it.

“You are looking at my belly, Henry” she said pitifully, waking me from my reverie. Tears were welling up in the corners of her eyes, and she was clearly putting up a determined struggle to keep them from flowing down her cheeks. I didn’t know whether it was pity or rage I was supposed to feel at that moment. My life had been so simple until that moment when I came to that horrible awakening. I had lived simply, my life consisted of nothing aside my academics and Christian Union. I was a man in love, occasionally sick because of it. I was principled, or at least I thought I was, and then suddenly, I was an accomplice in a scandal. One I did not want to believe but had to anyway. Where was the world angling to? I knew I would never see any lady in the same light again. I hated that I would now always be suspicious, fearing that they were always up to something. If Brenda could get herself pregnant, every other lady might as well as have had. In that moment, I felt that misogynistic urge to punish every other lady for Brenda’s crime but I made every effort to stifle it.

“Does Ashley know about this?” I asked reaching into my pockets to get my handkerchief. Why was I even crying! I hated myself for all the pity I felt when it should have been rage. “She should never know.” “What!” I gasped, “Ashley is your closest friend, you have no secrets, you told me so yourself.” “Every lady has her secrets, Henry.” She was calm, but her eyes darted in distress. “What’s the meaning of that?” I asked struggling to keep it at a whisper. “I wouldn’t be able to look at her again, she can never know. Please Henry.” “For how long would it remain a secret?” “I don’t know Henry,” she was about to cry. I would have asked what her intentions were, whether she meant to keep the baby or not. Was there any other options other than keeping the baby? I couldn’t bear to think it! But then, soon her belly would start showing. She turned and walked towards the Pediatric wards, her steps were still confident, her strides graceful. No one would have thought she was a devil, that she could be so loose. But was she?

I bit my lower lip and sighed. I was in deep mire, and I couldn’t move lest I made a mess. For how long would I keep the secret? Njoroge would certainly find out, I couldn’t hide it from my roommate for long. I followed her briskly. “Brenda.”