BY: ABDULLAHI O HARUNA HARUSPICE
One of the most dangerous feelings in life is unexpressed love- it has a lethal effect that can ruin many things for you emotionally. We are victims of this phenomenon – we want someone with all our hearts but can’t summon the courage to make it real. I am a victim, and I will tell you, my story.
She was my first thirst for love, our paths crossed in primary school. I was barely a lad but already ingrained with the cubic toxins of love. Ours was a natural flare for each other. We lived in complementary existence- she was so good in English language; thus she became my tutor of this borrowed language. Whatever proficiency I have today in English language, this lady laid the stoic foundation.
She was the reason I came to school early and punctually. From primary school, we proceeded to secondary school- where we literally lived in each other ‘s image. We were inseparable, we were the ideal kind of friends – we jived innocently in everything we found ourselves. While I was made class monitor, she was made the assistant, we shared the same seat. We trekked home from school for six years. We were made prefects.
I suffered the worst form of torture from senior prefects who wanted her. For all they did to woo her, she would turn them down. In anger, they unleashed their venom on me. To them, I was the reason she wouldn’t date them. The day we finished school, we wept like we wouldn’t ever see again. I was a known face in her house.
While in the university, we got our first physical distance. She went to a different school, for the first time in nearly twenty years, I wouldn’t be near my bestie. It was tough. We kept in touch, but something was horribly wrong somewhere. We had everything as bestie but one thing! In our 20 years of friendship – not for once have we defined our friendship. We lived on borrowed reality. In my deepest mind, she was my love, same with her. It was this illusion we found ourselves until she announced one day, she was getting married!
My heart stopped beating, the world rotated in violent spins, the worst had happened! My best friend, my secret lover, and my motivations getting married. It took me forever to jolt back to reality. That was the first time in our lives we realized how unfair we had been to ourselves. We cried for our foolishness, we cried for our lost chance, and cried for our sealed mouth. It was there I realized that ‘you must never befriend the one you love’. Start loving before you can become friends!
From suppressed love to heightened anger, we became deadly paranoid with ourselves. We saw each other from the points of self-inflicted defeats. We threw our chances away on the altar of naivety. It has been nearly twenty years since she got hitched and we got parted, many years of suppressed resentments for ourselves.
So, with the trending story about these guys in this photo, I am not surprised one bit. Losing the one you craved for and never having the opportunity to make it real can be devastating. Story has it that they were the best of friends and did almost everything in confidence. Then time came for the guy to move on, and all hell got loosed. She won’t live to see her best friend in the arms of another lady, the weakness in humans manifested, before you say, Jack, her bestie lay bare in cold blood. She has murdered her bestie!
This is how dangerous unexpressed love can be, it hurts and kills to lose the one you built your friendship around. We may condemn her but remember, in all of us, there is that bestie we can kill for.
Sorely musing.
Haruspice is a journalist, he writes from Abuja
