Where we are now or, A bit of background

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It could be a sunny day outside today but quite frankly it’s muggy and has been raining for two days solid.  So it’s balmy and unnaturally warm, the sort of hot when you wear a low-ish cut tee shirt and stop feeling guilty about it the minute you step out of air conditioning.   There are those who get very excited about being in Africa, (West by the way) not the more fashionable east or very western south, I am in between continents you see.  So you find me in a car in a middle sized African city being driven to see someone who is in the same line of work as I am but who is older, wiser and much better traveled.  One of those scions of knowledge, worldly and otherwise who still managed to have four well-balanced progeny in spite of her general amaziness.  And all strong willed women, I’ll have you know.

‘I am still getting used to being here’, she says with big welcoming arms, ‘I arrived three days ago and I have been trying to get my electricity reconnected. She has warm eyes , grandma wrinkles in the right places and the sort of pale skin where you know her grandfather and or mother may have been Portuguese, Dutch or maybe even English.   My cousins are of a similar hue.  Anyway, I immediately notice her season one Downton Abbey boxset and wall of books.  I immediately feel at home.

I need to stop sensoring myself when I write and just write what I am thinking.  I am getting very rested at the moment and watching a lot of girly television.  As such, I have had time to muse on a few things.  Feel sorry for myself appropriately.  So I have come to some conclusions.  One, I am twenty six years old and I am unhappy.  Not deeply unhappy, no…. not depressed unhappy, no sir.  Not so unhappy that I am unable to function at work or in social scenarios.  Maybe that means that I am not so much unhappy as dissatisfied with where I am and what I am doing and how I am.  I just did the math and I realized that I haven’t been in a relationship in 8 years.  Then I was told it was a bad idea and good girls didn’t get into trouble with boys.  Good girls concentrated on the future and all it had to offer.  It was a fun and clandestine time I admit.  I had just returned from been surrounded by very posh, very tall, very white boys and had to ease myself into being attracted to gentlemen of my own ilk. 

 He made it easy.  He was a pest.  I was peacefully minding my own business but he insisted on talking to me at the most in opportune times.  I can keep a secret, my dears.  I can keep a secret.  I reckon I was initially asexual to aforementioned chap and listened and kept secrets about his girlfriend and other scrapes he may have gotten himself into.  I remember not owning a mobile phone but somehow racking up a lot of hours of received calls. Mostly entirely innocent.  For I am a good listener; and taking a year out to ‘travel’ etc.  in truth, the year was to plug the gap between being seventeen and being eighteen before medical school.  So as I was saying, we became slowly inseparable.  If a new coffee shop opened, we just had to go, we saw the same shows, he liked drawing comics, and I liked reading them.  I hid my growing attraction to him under sarcasm and wit, never being one to take what I want with both hands.  His girlfriend I remember was an interesting number, I don’t think we ever really spoke to each other.  She was taller, fairer, had much larger frontal appendages and in all honesty oozed the sort of raw sex appeal that meant that she never lacked suitors.  He led me to believe that theirs was a mutual understanding that was physical and not much else.  I hummed and nodded in acquiescence.   Their love affair ended after some rumors of cheating I think, and with that came the obligatory hand holding and cheering up. 

  I may have forgotten to mentioned that he popped by on his way home from an internship he did a couple of blocks from my house on a near daily basis.  And with mother at her new job… the coast was clear.  So on one of these days when I was tinkling at the piano he hovered a little close, and I ignored him.  Then he insisted on playing chopsticks and I feigned amazement (to anyone who has had piano lessons from the age of 3, chopsticks is the equivalent of white noise).  I abandoned the piano and decided to make myself comfortable on the couch.  I can’t remember what we were talking about on that couch but he decided that chat could not say what needed to be said and kissed me.  Curiosity made me give it another go, and then another.  Then it occurred to me that I knew all his bad habits when it came to girls and I stopped abruptly and led him to the balcony for a clarification of things.  He admitted to feeling very strongly about me but not thinking it was reciprocated.  I simply demanded monogamy of words and body, and once he agreed to that I agreed to see how things go.   I added a secrecy clause when I realized that my mother would not let him come to the house if she knew that I couldn’t keep my hands off him.  Our affair was halted by continental drift.  In the divorce he got the Americas and I got Europe.  T’was a fair settlement