BY AJENIFUJA DAMILOLA AHMED
He stood near the window looking into the street as different faces with their own worries tread the path to their various destinations. He sniffed quietly, trying hard to swallow the waves of tears building up in his heart.
He had the urge to break through the glasses or jump down a skyscraper. He had been too busy with his job (he never noticed). He was too engrossed in his work, career, dreams, and his happiness, he didn’t notice the people surrounding him, most especially his wife. Now it’s all useless and late.
Before their marriage, she had been his only source of joy and inspiration. She was with him all through his stay in the orphanage home. They had met and grew up in the same orphanage home. Diwura had fallen in love with him on the very first day she had set her eyes on the little ‘him’. She remembered the nurse that brought him mentioned finding him near a waste truck on a rainy environmental day.
This had melted Diwura’s heart. She pitied him being born into a cruel world with no one to love him. She was an orphan herself but her story was totally different. She became the mother he yearned for at a tender age, although she was only seven years and he was only a year and some months
She worked hard to make sure he never lacked a thing, she did odd jobs to help him survive all through his undergraduate days. She was his better half. She was the mother he wished he had. Diwura was an angel even though she was six years older than him, she respected and gave him the honour he deserved.
Immediately after his graduation, his priority was a second degree, a better job, a beautiful home, exotic cars and a wife. And then he had married Diwura, probably out of pity. She was more or less like a piece of unwanted art in his home. But she endured. She had even tried to build and improve herself by going for adult education.
She took care of his home, she prepared his food, set his table, made his bed and submitted herself when he had the urge to make out with her. Never for once had she thought herself a slave to this man but a companion, helper and mother.
But to him…he was doing her a great favour. On a normal day, he wouldn’t have married a woman of her calibre, he thought. He remembered the day he proposed to her just like yesterday. He had taken her out for dinner. After the sumptuous meal, he had proposed to her right there in the elevator.
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He smiled, recalling the exact words he had said to Diwura.
“Diwura mii owon…I have a billion memories,
but yours are such I can feel like a cool breeze in a humid temperature.
Such I can taste like honey after a gulp of herbal concoctions.
Such I can inhale like an Asthmatic patient in search of breath.
Such I can meditate on like a monk doing yoga.
This is something I can’t explain because I know you won’t understand yourself”.
He had said before kneeling like a gentleman asking her to marry him and be his sane companion in this insane world. Diwura was petrified. Words and breath ceased in her world for that brief moment. After regaining her consciousness she had replied to him poetically…
“You’re the spark that makes my fire glow
You’re the drop that makes my water flow
You’re the wind that makes my breeze blow
You’re the missing part of me
“I WILL…I WILL MARRY YOU”. She had said happily before embracing him not as a brother, son or an orphan that he was, but as her husband, companion, soul-mate, sweetheart and demi-god that he was soon to become.
Their marriage ceremony had come and gone like the horn of a train moving through a busy lane. The only few people who had attended their wedding were from the orphanage home they grew up in, few friends and acquaintances.
Diwura was filled with joy. She never imagined their story turning out this way. She had always treated him with respect but as a son, brother and best friend but whatever made him look towards her with the love she couldn’t explain.
Then after their marriage, everything began to change. He kept late nights, he travelled often, he ate out most times, he became the opposite of everything she had trained him to become. He slowly became a monster that dwells within himself.
He had only bought her flowers after she lost her baby (pregnancy) when she accidentally tripped and fell in the bath tube. He hadn’t felt remorseful. He had moved on immediately like it was nothing while she cowered and burrowed in her lost treasure.
She aged rapidly because everything she dreamed about was all illusions. She had kept it to herself when her doctor told her she had an enlarged heart (Cardiomyopathy) after she complained of chest pains and consistent abnormal heart rhythms/beat to her doctor.
Diwura had cried her heart out while her body shook vigorously all alone in her bedroom. She was like a snake moving across a rocky path. She was like a comet blazing across the evening sky. Like a rainbow fading within the twinkle of an eye.
The news had broken her down faster than normal. She had changed mysteriously within two weeks. And here sat her husband (a supposed brother, friend and lover) tuning the television station and laughing at everything and anything that amused him.
Tears filled her eyes but not a drop came out because she knew he would only understand when she’s gone. This wasn’t her fight anymore, although she had lost the will to fight for survival.
“I’m only human”. She said to the shrinking image in the mirror. “Life is but only a string of short moments”.
Diwura willed all her personal properties and money to the orphanage home that brought her in when the world threw her out, that clothed her when the world stripped her naked, that showed her love when hate was the anthem the world pledged to. Diwura died silently in her bedroom one Sunday afternoon immediately after she came back from church (she had decided to take a short nap) when death came through without knocking.
She held unto her chest, coughed violently for a while. She had struggled to ask God to forgive her husband, for he was only a child before she could fight no more and death had its way. She fell back on her bed, slept into eternity only to wake up in FOREVER land…
He couldn’t blink away the tears that filled up his heavy eyes when he saw the note Diwura had left him before she departed this sinful and insane world.
P.S: I’ll wait for you like a lonely house until you’ll see me again and live in me. Until then my window aches.
Those were her last words and message.
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