A Wedding in Enugu

Antonia, I am guilty of playing God. I do not know where to begin, or where to end. Would saying too little make it seem like I do not care. And how do I know to stop myself from saying more than I need to. Perhaps I should not concern myself with these thoughts. I would be feeding the very demon you chastise me of. But you must know that it is not perfection I am obsessed with. It is a clarity of mind. One that, like God, had forsaken me for many months.

I have sat with myself, for weeks now, since receiving your letter, in an attempt to make sense of who I was during the last few months of our time together in Beijing. And I have sought reason and clarity for my actions towards you, despite a truth that I am quite certain never abandoned me. And so with little clarity on when to defend myself, and when to hold myself accountable, I am writing to you again, hoping not to succumb to the words whose midst I now find myself.

I am sorry to hear about your mother. I would lose myself if any-thing happened to mine. And I would hate the world and curse God for afflicting such an unfairness on me.

No child should experience a loss so deeply set before they are able to fully settle into the brutality of life. And your dad. How is he taking it? My father often tells my mother that it is her duty to bury him. I think I can understand that. I would not want to face my elderly years without the company of my favorite person in the entire world.

I have so many questions I want to ask you. And I worry I will disturb your grieving heart. But it is best I carry on with them.

You never really told me why you did it. And I do not know that you ever will. Why choose now to tell me that you are carrying our little girl, if you have decided to rid yourself of her? What is it you are playing at? It must have been convenient for you to assume that she would have destroyed the progress we had made at finding normalcy in our life before your father called you back home. It is difficult to believe that this was your reason for hiding her from me. 

I have so many more questions I want to ask you. But before I do, it is important that I share with you the sorry details of how I came to learn about your affair with Bartholomew.

But first, before I forget, I feel I should let you know that your father’s attentiveness towards you is not because he knows about the child you have done such a brilliant job of keeping from everyone in your life. It is because he worries about you. And beyond that, he needs your company now more than ever.

Anyways, the affair. Barbara stopped by our apartment while you were in Shanghai with your Supervisor. And she asked if we could have dinner together. Bartholomew, she said, had left for Shanghai in a hurry the previous day. And she thought she could spend the evening with you and I.

I told her you were in Shanghai as well.

She came over the next morning to ask if I had any clothes that needed to be dry cleaned, and I handed her two of my blazers and the white linen shirt you bought me in Shanghai. I planned on dropping them off that afternoon. She came to see me later that evening to let me know my clothes would be ready the next day. And then she asked if she could join me for dinner and a few drinks at our place.

A couple hours later, when I had gotten off the phone with you, after you informed me that your Supervisor wanted you in Shanghai for a few more days, she came over with some local meals she had prepared. And before settling down to eat, we stopped by the liquor store downstairs, to pick up a bottle of Caribbean Rum and some vitamin drinks for the night.

Barbara asked a lot of questions. Mostly about you and your job. How often you were away. The last few times you had traveled. And when and where you traveled to. She wanted to know how I came to own my white kimono linen shirt with the hibiscus embroidery. And about your pink quilted sandals laying about in the living room.

The night was coming along okay, until she picked up the phone to say good night to Bartholomew, and I heard So Long, Marianne in the background. I did not think much of it at first. Until the song that played right after. I am sure you know which one that is. And then all of Barbara’s questions came rushing back to me.

This time, without all of the simple answers that hid an ugly truth.

And I came undone.

I do not recall when Barbara got off the phone with her husband, or how long she sat with me in silence, waiting for me to return to myself. But when I heard her come out of the toilet, as she walked back into the parlor to clean up the table, I thought about the rest of her conversation with Bartholomew, and then began sieving through all the details I knew would become our undoing.

Barbara was washing the dishes when I joined her in the kitchen. She had not turned on the ceiling light, and I did not bother with it either. It seemed we were both content staying in the dimness for a while. Though the light above the staircase landing cast a soft glow into the kitchen that allowed us to carry on with the dishes.

She took her time with each plate. So my thoughts had a while to fight the truth with the delusion that what I heard over the phone was a mere coincidence. I wondered why Barbara was there. Did she come over to learn more about the woman her husband had abandoned her for. And the man that had not done enough to keep his partner’s gaze at home. I rinsed each plate and gently arranged them on the dish rack. And for what felt like a while we carried on in silence.

Barbara’s skin had become warm to the touch. Her arm had rubbed against mine each time she handed me a plate. I thought it was the rum. Then I thought… but Barbara, without turning to look at me, asked if she could spend the night. And when I asked why, she took a moment, but chose to continue with the dishes.

When we were done, Barbara turned on the lights in the kitchen, and examined each of the plates in the dish rack carefully.

Barbara and I sat in the parlor and talked about her new job attending to passengers on Hong Kong Airline’s short-haul flights. Three years had passed since she resigned from her job in Singapore to marry Bartholomew. And she had started looking into attending flights because she wanted to make sure she had no time to regret leaving her husband. She also said she had found an apartment close to the airport, but had delayed signing the lease because she was not sure about Bartholomew.

She told me why she was leaving Bartholomew. She even asked if I planned on proposing to you; if you had been to my home town. I told her we had plans to visit the previous summer, but something came up at work. I did not bother with the details of whose work got in the way. I did not think it was necessary to tell her that. But I wonder now, how honest you were about that.

I woke up the next day’s afternoon to a knock at the door. Barbara had called a moving company to help her move her things out earlier that morning. She had come to let me know she was leaving and to apologize for the rest of our night. She asked if I would be okay. And for a while we held each other in an embrace.

A few minutes had passed when the truck driver called to let her know they were ready to leave. She asked if she could have something that belonged to me. Something I bought myself. And as she walked away from me, I thought about our night together. How we laid on the floor and talked about all the flights she was going to attend. And the tears that turned her eyes to a shiny glass when she talked about her widowed mom in Hong Kong.

I held onto myself that night, so I could comfort Barbara. I owed her that much. She had been attentive enough to notice what remained hidden to me for so many months.

I will stop here. Because the rest of it, you already know.

Antonia, being cheated on, I learned very early in life, is a feeling that can only breathe one way. You can either let it go and not give it any chance to frame what is left of your relationship, or you can hold on to it and allow the dark clouds it comes with to hover above all that is precious to you. And when enough clouds gather in, they will invite a storm that will destroy everything in its path.

And yet, knowing all of this, I held on.

And the details of your betrayal, the sleepless nights, and the insatiable desire to understand why you chose such a violent way to tell me that you were too scared to take the next step in our relationship, had me as their object. And when they were done with me, a different madness had its way with me as well. One that came with a rope that pulled me down to an endless pit, tied a noose around my neck, and dared me to find my way out.

And in that pit, God abandoned me. And the devil had his way with me. And no matter which way I tried to go, I felt the noose pulling at my neck. Nothing mattered anymore.

I wanted you to feel what I was feeling. So I searched for ways to punish you for your iniquities. Because God, I was convinced, was too gracious to do it Himself.

I did not search for long. You were like a Catholic in the middle of Lent, insisting on all manner of punishment. So as penance, you convinced me of your devotion by offering yourself as a tool for all of my pleasures. And without restraint, I indulged.

The shame of the rage I acquainted your body with, your tears that aroused me, and my neglect for you during those months follows me still. I was lost, and lonely in my despair. I knew hurting you would not heal me. But I did not care.

Healing was not an option for me.

But then I met Barbara, and everything changed. I took one of her flights to Hong Kong. And later that night, we met at the bar in the hotel she and her aircrew were staying. We talked until dawn, and then she had to hurry back upstairs.

She was doing a lot better. She talked a lot. More than she used to. I thought it was an act at first. But as she talked, it became difficult to deny the nowness of her spirit. She was present. She had let go of the past. Including the one that we shared. And when we said goodbye, she asked, again, if I would be okay. And with a desperate gentleness I told her I wanted to be.

And for the first time, healing became an option.

A few days later, on my flight back to Beijing, the tears finally came and filled the pit. And the current carried me with it until I found myself on hope’s shoreline.

Now you know why everything changed after Hong Kong.

Antonia, I hope that when the day comes that you choose to tell our story to strangers that take a seat in your new life, that you will tell them how well I loved you, before you tell them how much I hated you for becoming too familiar with our neighbor while his wife mourned the end of her marriage in our living room.

I am guilty of many things. I will be the second to admit it. But hating you, is too ambitious a task, even for me. It is because I needed you, that I was so careless with you. And it is because I was sure I had lost you, that I was so willing to burn you down with a slow fire. 

You were right. I became the devil. But even he loved you the only way he knew how to. 

For my part in all of this, I am deeply sorry.

My cousin Ifemefuna is married now. It was a small wedding in our compound. My mother was happy to confirm that a baby had nothing to do with the rushed marriage. Last week, Ifem and her husband, Ikenna, visited my parents to thank them for their help with the wedding. I asked her, when we were alone, why she wanted to get married so quickly. She said that she was tired of saying good bye to Ikenna every time she went to visit him in the parsonage where he lived.

I wish you told me that Abuja was too much of a rush for you. Nonetheless, I know it has been over a month since you wrote to me, but I hope you kept the little one. It is dangerous to play God.

Look after yourself. 

Sincerely,

Anthony Ibeanu.

A Winter in Beijing

Antonia, I would ask about your ailing mother, but I do not think I want to hear from you after this.

I thought I was going to die the other night. It has been three times now since you left that my lungs have forgotten to do anything with the air inside it, because my whole body was too busy trying to make sense of the reasons why you insisted everything we shared had to come to an unnecessary end on Christmas Eve.

And then my mother called. And slowly, my chest settled, as she shared news about my cousins from my father’s side. 

One of them, Ifeanyi, who is around my age, though a little younger, is getting married before February’s end. My father used to sponsor his undergraduate studies, but he dropped out of school a year ago to open a church inside the apartment building my father gave his mother, my father’s sister. 

I am sure he has come up in our conversations.

She also shared news about Ifeanyi’s sister, Ifemefuna. She too has decided to take some time away from school. Last week Sunday,  the assistant Pastor at their church came with her mother and Ifeanyi to see my father. Because the assistant pastor was interested in marrying Ifemefuna. My mother thinks she is pregnant. She thinks that is why they are hurrying everyone up. But my father disagrees. He said his sister and the assistant pastor have no reason to tell such unnecessary lies. That it is in her nature to rush things.

It was then that the details of the weeks leading up to your hurried decision to leave us came to me. Like the changes to your body you said was because of your new diet, the tampons you stopped asking me to pick up at the store, and the unusually long showers you started taking in the mornings. And then I felt my chest begin to tighten again, and I held on to my mother’s voice.

And just before my mother had to go, I asked her what she would do if she learned that Ifemefuna was indeed pregnant, but she could not hear me. The network had dropped for a moment. And I did not ask again. I knew what she would say. She would be disappointed. But in the end, she would be there for her. Because unlike my other cousins from my father’s side, my mother was always fond of Ifemefuna.

Before hanging up, my mother said she loved me. That she wished I had come home for Christmas. She also said that my father could not come to the phone, but he misses me too. And that my tomatoes, the ones in her garden, had ripened, and she had made my favorite stew with them for Christmas.

But she did not ask about you. Though, I wish she did.

I wanted to tell her how you left in such a hurry. And that she was right about you and I. That I spent the last days before Christmas, and all of Christmas in bed trying to decide how I was going to keep you around, before booking a flight to D.C. to see you. But you insisted you did not want to see me again.

I think I am okay now. At least I am trying to be.

Christmas has come and gone, and the green on the Christmas trees are fading, along with the sting of our last words to each other, before you cut off all communication with me.

The new year is quiet in Beijing. I thought I would like that. So I am writing to you now because I want to let you know that I am trying to forgive you. Even if you do not deserve it. That I think I know why you left us behind in such a hurry. And that you were right to do so without telling me. Because it would have broken me. And I would have done things to your body I know I would regret.

Anyways, this is the last time you will hear from me. I hope you and the child I have concluded you are carrying are doing okay. Unless, of course, you chose yourself. If that is the case, then I pray you find peace with where your choices have brought you. I am trying to do the same.

I have been struggling to keep my mind in this city. And though there are a few things in Beijing I could occupy myself with, I feel I should go home to Enugu. Ifemefuna’s wedding is coming up at the end of January. And it would be a great place to reconnect with my cousins from my father’s side of the family. 

Do take care of your mother. I will miss you.

Sincerely,

Anthony Ibeanu.