इ ऍम सो सर्री-इ ऍम नो BULLETPROOF

I AM SO SORRY: I AM NOW BULLET-PROOF


Why did I say those words?
Why did I tell her that it was over between us?
Pulling each of these syllables like as if I was pulling each and every one of the rose’s blossoms and the unfortunate thing was that she had over-lived a definite six months in my life but an unwritten life at that.

Celine, and that was her name and nineteen eighty-nine that was the year and she was my first cut into the treacle world of relationships.
During our form fours at Nyatate secondary school.
We were so much in love!

My adoration for her was like dentistry; she stilled the bombastic, and heartened my heart with a love like a map to a new country.
That’s how I thought of her and felt about it all and she was small and fragile and light in complexion and she came from an adjacent village to ours.
She was true, good, faithful and loved me good!






She was warm, balm, and benediction and loved me with a love so searing, so brave, and so honest. She was each note, tune and every sweet sound in my heart and her love was a tracing around my heart and since praise is a language too difficult to separate from love and when Owls hoot we call this hooting a call for forthcoming grief, I still feel it’s a call for love, and I also felt I loved her but the unfortunate thing was that I had also learned how to speak of love in place and think it was the thing that was in my heart.

When you are in love and closer to your girl, she would try to transmute you to a molecular level, but something must have changed over the time we were in love. Something just didn’t make sense somehow. Sometimes she wanted me to be soft, and sometimes she wanted me to be hard in ways that I didn’t know how to be.
I also knew I could snap easily and drastically to the first sign of contamination

But something must have been telling me that it was time that I move on.
It was like a sensation like something had crossed the river with me, or was this my ego running ahead of this time or I simply had a heart like a squatter camp.
But what was that something?

Did I feel dissatisfied with her? Did I feel undeserving of her love? Was it something said, done? Did it have anything to do with something I can’t really express, something unfathomable yet it had been so instrumental in making me feel the way that I did?

Can I say something to pacify myself of the blame? What can I do to undo the wrong that I might have done her? Can I go all the way back correcting that wrong?
Every relationship is like a window, framed and contained, with its fixed view.

And it all depends on what gives you pleasure, that is if you like to look in through the windows or out through the same windows, that is, looking in through the relationship or out through that same relationship.
I have come to realise that I liked both ways of looking at it.
Once a relationship is over I have liked to look in through that relationship so also out through that relationship so that I would see whether there was still something in or out of that relationship for me.

Even if it seemed like it was some months and a lot of things could have changed between us, but I did go back on that relationship, some five or so months after we had disbanded it and I discovered that what was inside and outside of that relationship couldn’t suffice enough anymore for me, and that her love no longer lied inside those windows and I also made a resolve never to return back to what no longer was mine anymore.
Ok, call it whatever you want to but that’s what I did and was it because I am unlovable, empty and a fantasizer?

Someone must have said those words or they could simply have happened in my mind and I also remember what her younger sister said to me.
That Celine had loved me so much but that I had been a pain-some bastard and that they now view me with so much contempt, that I felt I personally do deserved it.
But I was surprised that that sister of hers accepted my date ever afterwards, though she later on told me she wanted to hurt me the way that I had hurt her sister, and she sure took all the pleasures in making my world such a hell-hole.

This girl hatched for a vengeful relationship straight away and like the sucker for trouble that I have always been I fell badly in love with her. With this one I went all the way like as if I was trying to atone for the wrong that I had done her sister and she liked it, and she became a woman insane, murdering me every moment she could.

She knew everything about me but she still did not show desire to meet me across this bridge I was trying to built as if she was waiting to find something else more about me that she hadn’t known about.
I entered this corner knowingly and its corners that I am now scared of ever-after this. I would rather have them planned and straightened, not curvy, before I enter them afterwards.
But all that I could do then was to push the boat far outer for her.

She became the fist woman to break my heart and I remember the waste of pain that comes with the breakdown of a relationship and loss loomed big like the sun eclipsed by the moon and for years after that it seemed to me like as if there was nothing after that first heartbreak and love.
But from that moment onwards I had started to cut sorrows like shaping a shape that I had learned without knowing it.

It became like you could only watch them, one girl after another, coming into your life and getting carried away by some forces you do not understand and to remember their names becomes difficult for their names would be like names of a crash-test, dummies without nuances or meaning. Entropy would always topple them into fallen beauty.

But I had nothing to apologise to them, neither to her, and very little to her sister because I had been true to myself and that’s what everyone else failed to really understand about it all.
That I shouldn’t have faked on the way that I felt because in the long run it could have helped no one.

But I am now trying to listen to these words and all that I hear in these words are the sounds of the stones that I have struck up in my pathways, now yielding sweet-drink memories.





And I know memories selects its own material like some distant editor would read this story and feel she should cut quite a lot of this crap to make this story appeal to a wider readership, but I won’t stop inventing remembering here if I am going to tell this story of my love of Celine and of her sister Angela, and of what a verdant field our youths are for writing, ruminating, pleasure and pain.

One of my best friend openly told me that I didn’t know what I wanted in life; maybe that I didn’t know what I wanted in love could have been a better summation, that is, in people loving according to the ancient measure, but was he correct?

I could have told my friend that I had known when to accept that limit and that one day I would go beyond it.

I had known what to do then and I also know that I could love someone someday, any day I feel like it, that I am waiting for someone, not that I know her name, yet.
He tells me its all part and parcel of my not knowing what I want in life and I am not trying to excuse myself of the wrong I did to her.

I am saying that’s what I wanted to do and I don’t regret the decision that I took because its how I felt but.

I am saying that I now know that I should live with my heart open to embrace those that I don’t remember anymore and those that nobody remembers anymore and I am also saying that now I breathe with the knowledge that the moment you hold them in your heart is always enough to sustain your heart and mind in the future, but I am also saying.

“I am so sorry.”
I have become the bigger person here.
I have managed to open up these memories and enfold them into paper here, these memories shifting into shapes on a piece of paper.
Burn this paper if you want to, you also burn these memories, but I don’t care anymore because I am now bullet proof.