YOUR BOYFRIEND OF ONE YEAR

You are a romantic. Let’s just start there.

You are someone who loves Love. You grew up with the Disney classics and wore your blue sweater on your head so you could pretend that the woolly fabric falling down to your shoulders was the heavy fall of your tresses, which you tossed this way and that every time you watched Jasmine with her long jet-black hair and form-fitting clothes.

And when Jasmine kissed Aladdin at the end of the movie, just like all the other princesses kissed their Prince Charming, Love looked more beautiful to you and you couldn’t wait to kiss your own Prince Charming.

And as you got older, you kissed a lot of Princes.

The one who swept you off your feet in High School and had a roguish smile that you were constantly smitten by…

The one who told you that you simply had to date him after the great sex you two had just had, and went on to often have you feeling possessive…

The one who you chased relentlessly that turned out to be a good cook, a great friend – and very camera-shy…

The one who became the love of your life and nearly wrecked you when he broke up with you…

And the one who was married to a woman, and who made you cry when he had to move away.

You kissed a lot of Princes, and they were all for just a while. They were all a lot of passions that burned for just some time.

But then, when you met Him, and he made you laugh,

and he touched you,

and he pissed you off,

and he showed you kindness,

and he kissed you,

and he made you trust him,

and he said yes when you asked him out,

and he moved in,

and you started spending nights in each other’s arms and days sharing each other’s spaces…

You suddenly woke up one morning and realized that you’d had a boyfriend for one year.

This had never happened to you. None of the other guys had lasted this long in your life – not even the one who was the love of your life. In fact, you spent more months getting over that one than you spent being with him.

You’d come to accept that maybe long-lasting relationships would never be for you, and you tried not to be jaded whenever you heard of Nigerian same-sex couples who celebrated two, three, four-year anniversaries. You couldn’t even imagine how any two people could be with each other for years without one killing the other.

But you are someone who loves Love. And so, even though you’d stopped believing in longevity, you still lived for the passions that came in brief storms.

But here He was, the man who stayed in your life for a year: your boyfriend of one year.

It felt so surreal to be saying to him: “Happy one-year anniversary, my love.”

After that, in the coming months, you would come to notice a shift in your perspective, a refocusing of your energy. One year with him suddenly meant you had to be more serious about him, more invested in what you both had, and less anticipating of the end. You found yourself thinking about your life as less about just you and more about the two of you in it. You made decisions that included him – and when he said things like, “We have to do this… We have to do that,” you felt a warm glow inside you –

Because there was something special about knowing that you had a boyfriend of one year.

Your friends often told you that you are too out of the closet to live in Nigeria, that you have to relocate to a country where you can enjoy the freedom you deserve to be true to yourself. You knew this to be true. When your brother began calling you with ideas on how to get you over to the overseas country where he is residing, you welcomed that.

But you found yourself being oddly hesitant. You had a life here, and you were scared of the unknown that came with relocating, of starting over. You were also afraid of leaving behind your boyfriend of one year, of lengthening the distance between you two. Long distance relationships never work, you have steadfastly believed, especially when there’d be no definite timeline as to when you’d see each other again. You knew that to leave would mean you breaking up with him.

But how could you have come this far, reached this milestone, being this fortunate – just to end it?

And so, even though you pursued all these avenues for relocating abroad, you did so with a reluctance that even people like your brother noticed. He even called to berate you, saying with startling accuracy, “If you have someone, a boyfriend or whatever over there in Nigeria, that is causing you to drag your feet like this, you need to shut down those sentiments. There’ll be plenty guys here when you come over.”

But would they last like your boyfriend had lasted? you wondered. Or would they become passions that leave you exhausted when their storms have passed?

Every morning you woke up and looked at him, his face in repose, you wondered to yourself: Surely, this has to mean something.

Every time you had a fight with him and you didn’t like him very much, you still put in the effort to make things work because you told yourself: Relationships are not a lifelong honeymoon.

Every time you were caught between your insecurities about him and the love that was still there, you agonized to yourself: Could I find another like him?

And every time, at the end of whatever situation, when he fit into your arms and held you close to his heartbeat, you sighed blissfully to yourself: Yes, it is worth it.

Your boyfriend of one year – and you were looking forward to making it two.

But then, you never made it that far.

One morning, and several mornings after that, you woke up to face the reality that he was gone. Like all the storms before, this too was done.

You will be alright, you know that. It will take a little time to get used to life spent by yourself, sure. Your personal space being all your own again, of course. But you will be alright. Eventually, you will even stop tormenting yourself with the question: Am I just not good enough?

And you’ll go back to loving Love – well, maybe a little less than before – and waiting for the next perfect storm.

Written by Pink Panther