Fiction: I Love You Is

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By

Ekomobong Ekpenyong

I am writing a letter.

How big I have grown. How hot my anger has become. How large my arrogance has become. How petite my humility has become. How bilious can love be. I remember hiding behind the kitchen door to answer Titus calls. I laugh, a throttle. Titus that one who always called my name, Stella, with an r slur at the end. I sigh, still scritching my pen. How ‘whomanly’ I have become. Although the world would never call me that. I have become too coarse to be a woman and too soft to be a man. And about Kene. He always made me his trophy. I harrumph. The led lamp is giving my book a sepia look. I write lightly, the binatome oscillating fan flutters the pages of the book. I am thinking on how to begin the next sentence.

But I broke up with them. I was always looking for something, something else. Perhaps lurking in the cloaks of old clothes or in the smudgy pages of old books. Dog eared ones, with the teeth marks of insects and rodents who nibbled at it.

And Jubril, his cologne always lingered some more in my nostrils. The artificial fruity smell of his hair cream got me buying a packet of it and sniffing at it terribly. The smell always waft stronger and stung my nose after minutes. That one I loved. That one never loved me. He never did. I did write him poems. The ones he never got to read. It always ended up as an antique in the bottom of my tinker box or as one of those words to fill in the vacuum of empty pages.

Dear Jubril,

You do remember the nights we got silhouetted against your dark blue curtains and smelt like garlic afterwards. (a tear slids down) but big girls don’t cry I think. We don’t, we simply bite our lips and rock our bodies to the lulling chords of Adele’s Hello. I got feelings afterwards but you said twas a game, a game you won. Do you remember how I always ran after you dropped me at the spot by the almond tree. I did because I never wanted you thinking me as weak. I ran away from the caught feelings but it trailed me to bird and filled me with blurry visions of days we would never have.

And my terrible laughter, you remember you called it that. (I laugh, falling on the book) You don’t know you caused it. Your nose was like snout, jutted and with a comical curve at the end.

Fool, you never took me to dates. My back always dated the hard foams of your mouka bed. I had smooches for appetizers; kisses for desserts; and orgasms as the main course of the meal. (my face flames but I can’t see it though I feel it’s hot)

Do you remember how I stayed up at midnight to wish you a happy birthday. And despite my hoarse voice, sang you a birthday song. (I sigh, love could be stupid) I counted it right, on my birthday you were the 173^rd person to wish me a happy birthday and you abbreviated it- HBD.

That love was wicked, so monstrous that it gnawed at the throbbing flesh of my heart. I didn’t die though. I lived to remember it. Those frozen memories of you are tugged in the pocket of my ripped mind. Severed. Perforated. Dismembered.

I don’t how to say this but I love you is…………..

Yours annoyingly,

Stella.

II

Its valentines day. I don’t have a date but my roommates do. They are gone and a strange kind of silence fills the room. The orange sun ebbs out gradually among cumulus clouds. Love songs rent the air, those fake ones that exaggerate love and make it look like all it’s really worth the while. Brandy’s piano man blares from my MP3 speaker. It is nutty and stringy, the lines enjambed into trails of whispers, forming one edgy chorus. I chuckle, Valentine Non-Conformist. I sit at the edge of the bed, idly swiping my phone and staring at the pictures of coloured lovers. My eyes grow teary from the bright glare of the screen. I put it away and reach for the letter tucked into a page of Jane Eyre. I pick my pen and fill the dotted space I left the night before.

……..I LOVE YOU IS AMARATHINE.

And like the others, it will never get to him. It will be tucked into a corner of my heart. And slowly the words will fade off till I can remember it no more. And like the brown scents of harmattan which goes as it came, it will become a tiny dot in memory. May it be.

Ekomobong Ekpenyong

Ekomobong Ekpenyong is my name. I am female. I live in Nigeria and I am undergraduate of the University of Uyo, studying Communication Arts. I love feathery clouds, rainy days and windy weathers. When I am not writing, I am singing along to the lyrics of John Last’s Sweet City Woman.