He/she might never come around to saying it. They could be waiting for you too. But love and the eagle of time wait for no one.

The moments that come back in music

The record is playing again. The guitar goes m.f.m.s.s. d.d.t.t.d. The piano winds through some highs of notes as the drums roll through the terrains where the sax coughs continuously in the mercurial lows of a frog. No. Don’t push the stop button. Something… Something in the shadow of a tincture of you is coming into my twilight. Yes, the moments… the moments are raging down the hills, an avalanche of nebulous realities. And the record goes on…

Twelve was the number of our encounter

Twelve. Twelve disciples. Twelve zodiac signs. Twelve months. We were twelve. It was the twelfth day of the twelfth month. Your parents had just moved into our neigbourhood. I sighted you through the window. You were small. Eyes sunk. You were on that famous blue and red shirt of yours, the shirt that later became mine though I first wondered how weird the colours were sitting disparately together. Your feet showed the signs of a boy ready to take a flight, a flight to all the lands of the world. In those first twelve minutes, I wanted to travel the world with you.  The tiny breast bumps on my chest seemed to move a bit. Something seemed to be crawling through my skin. Bumps sprouted as I watched you watch the comings and goings on our street before you entered through the gate and went straight into the building.

One minute late

Every day, I peeped through the window that overlooked your compound. I wanted to sip a sight of you like my father sipped his morning cup of coffee. Father was an expert coffee ‘sipper.’ He did it like he gave the little cup a quick kiss. I once touched the cup – it felt like hell. If you touched me on those days, it was the temperature of my heart. Every day, I looked forward to that time – twelve past seven – when mother held your hand and walked you through the gate to join the waiting school bus in front of your gate. The day I woke up late and made it to our window on the thirteenth minute after the hour of seven, you were already gone. That day, I couldn’t concentrate in class. It was your face and your blue and red shirt everywhere.

Bullied by a bully

Twelve days later, I was on an errand to the third building on our street. It was a Saturday. I loved Saturdays because I could enjoy different angles of you: up, down, back, front, right and left. But not even a three sixty dimensional sight of you could satiate the craving of getting close and saying hi and having a handshake or probably a hug. No. Not a kiss. A kiss would make me pass out.

I was carrying the fresh pepper and tomatoes mother sent me in a small black nylon and praying silently that you’d come out at the same time. That moment, I bumped into a classmate of mine. “Sorry.” His response was a slap. Kola was a bubbly clumsy-looking lad, the best bully in my class. The pepper and the tomatoes I carried scattered all over the place as I locked up his shirt. The next I remembered was that I was inside the gutter crying and trying to climb out of the dark stinking water of the gutter.

A little angel appears

Out of the blue, you appeared. I could believe because I have read it in books, I have seen it in cartoon movies. If you have had a good dosage of these things, it was easy to believe just about anything. I soon realized, with you I am the greatest believer in the world. You pounced on Kola and gave him his own bitter pill as you immersed his head in the gutter water before the adults came to separate you. It was a moment of victory for me.

You gathered the pepper and the tomatoes and handed them back to me in the little black nylon and with you looking down. I found your eyes. They were not as sunken as I had thought. There, I recognized the hell that raged in my body right inside your eyes. The inferno started from your eyes without my knowing it. I wanted to give you a rehearsed handshake, a hug, a kiss or at least say a hi but you briskly walked away on the twelfth second before a word could morph up, before my hand could raise itself. I ran home and resumed crying.

Sharing the festival food

My mother used to give food to the neigbourhood during festive seasons. It was my duty to bring jollof rice and chicken to your house. My sisters were to take their baskets of foods to the neighbours downstairs while I was to come to your flat. My heart kicked like an excited foetus in its mother’s womb. It was your mother that opened the door to your apartment on my third knock. She asked after my mother while she took the food into the kitchen. “She is fine ma,” I said aloud.

You were in the dining room. You stopped eating. I stepped slowly towards you. Each step was a race in my heart. “Thank you,” I said with a shaky voice. You did not say a thing. “What is your name?” I whispered timidly. You chewed slowly what you had in your mouth with your eyes fixed to the table. Then you smiled, still without looking up. My heart stopped. In that moment of stillness, something moved wildly. I think it was your heartbeat. I quickly stepped away when I heard your mother’s footsteps. She returned the dishes to me and asked me to tell my mother that she would come around to specially thank her for the gesture later in the day.

Home sickness, love sickness

Twelve days later, we travelled home to see grandma who had been gravely ill. I also took ill after three days of an immense physical distance. You filled up the cup of my dreams. I sipped you every moment; the smile, the victory, even your way of looking down. I made a resolve to tell you about the hell inside my soul though I didn’t have the words. We returned to Lagos twelve days later.

As soon as I dropped my baggage, I made for your door. I met your dad and mum all clad in black. Your mother told me, amid tears, how you left before the break of dawn. She told me the moment was the most torturous for you. She told me you could neither properly breathe in nor out. She told me you gave her a letter to give to me a day before the bout of asthmatic attack. She told me you were deaf and dumb. She gave me your well-sealed letter and your blue and red shirt.

A toast to a dead love

I did not say anything. Too dazed for words. The deepest pain is not expressed in words or tears but in silence, father had once told me. I’d rather have a drink, a drink to the end of a life, a drink to loss. But I was too young to have a drink. I returned to our house and stole father’s latest wine from the fridge. I locked up myself in my room. The sealed letter and the shirt gazed at me as if with your eyes. You could not look at me but here are your things looking intensely at me.

I started the first cup with a sip. It was as I sipped your sight. It was hotter than pepper. It burnt fiercely than fire. Then another sip. My eyes were reddening. Then another sip. The music went loose in my head. Your smile floated. Your smell wafted into my nose, it was the smell of an eagle’s feather. The victory you gave me over the bully classmate returned to me. Those moments I spent stealing many looks of you, those twelve seconds of thinking of what to do as I stood before you, those days of wolfing every bit of you in my mind all rushed back to me on the wings of this wayward music.

A voice calmly shot through the instrumentals, “Love is a ball of memorable moments/a note melding with a kiss/ a key soaring into the highest of highs/ aiming the greatest of crescendos/grab it when it perches for love is time’s restless eagle/ I don’t know the difference between time and love/ Time happens in love as love happens in time.”

Written by Omidire Idowu.

Omidire, Idowu Joshua is a short story writer and editor. Reach him via noblelifeliver@gmail.com