Remember the plastic flower, the homemade card, the bodaboda delivery, the milk like liquor and the Cadbury chocolates? If you do then you probably can tell where we are headed with this, if not maybe you need to revisit ‘The Valentine Story’ for catch up. Well, now that we all are on the same page, we know that the valentine story didn’t close, we were to start the other phase at midnight, in a bar’s bathroom.
Calls have been made, most don’t seem promising, looks like everybody always has an excuse. This has to happen, if it doesn’t this might just be the biggest false start of the 21st century. Help comes though too late for dinner but at least the thought shall count, or so they put it. Here comes the next phase…
Source: pixbay
He walks in, a bit late but not too late, but oh well, late is late, with an excuse of course “The guards held me at the gate for a while, I should have been here on time.” He is in a brown stripped shirt. The buttons are all done, save for the last one at the collar, on a normal day one or two more would be undone but this occasion called for ‘looking the part’. He comes in with a lot of expectation. “This has to be it”, he thinks to himself, it can’t get any better, and just like it was before “Life Happened” the only direction was North, South would mean going back to Egypt. Who wants to cross the Red Sea again yet you can’t be sure of finding Moses at the crossing point, to part the waters?
The first three months are great, not so for him, he feels like he’s only been tickling, but she insists he has been satisfactory, she even mentions moments when he has been better than those who went before. The comparison should anger him but not in the way that she puts it, at least not now that he is holding to insecurities. He just promises self to keep up and even grow better, he knows there is a gap in his performance.
He is now six months in, and reality starts to check in, and it sure does like a sponsor checks into a bar, ready to throw rounds. Signs indicate that he might get through with this, but as it looks it won’t be smooth sailing, there is a battle to be fought. He remembers ‘The First’ in “Thoughts of a lone drinker” once lied that scientists have proven that if you go past this sixth month, you are bound for eternity. (Things people create in their heads when in love, SMH!). This was of course a lie; he actually knows of one whose life changed for worse at the sixth.
He managed to ace the battle at the sixth, but the news at the eighth comes as a shock, she has decided to leave, life has enough, this isn’t one she was willing to take on. She non ashamedly says it in the company of two others. By this time, he wished he’d listened to Reuben Staddurd’s ‘Change Me’ keenly. He’d like to fork out Avant’s ‘4 Minutes’ but even that can’t save the situation, he is already at half of four. He is in love alone.
It’s three and a half months of ‘loneness‘, take note of ‘loneness’ and not loneliness, because all seems to be working fine, and if anything this is a moment of shine for him. Then they try a ‘make up’, it seems forced but he chooses to give it a try, only to realize it is worse than the first. No matter how hard he tries, the sins of the past remain a ghost, when it falls at half of four again, he figures out it is time, and this time he isn’t willing to let them walk out on him again, he has to act first and fast.
Tomorrow is yet another valentine’s day, in less than a week, he walks out….
Insight 