I TOLD HIM HE WOULD

 ​I told him he would fall in love with me.

Maybe not all at once

 Boys like him rarely pour all at once 

but in fragments.

In small, quiet pieces he wouldn’t even notice.

Subtle shifts that don’t prick conscience

until one random day you sit up and realize

you’ve been swallowed whole.

I told him.

And tonight, I’m telling you.

It happened on the night of May 4th.

The day we met.

It had poured rain all morning

the sound of it trembling against my window

like someone begging me to stay asleep.

I had already decided it would be a bed-buried,

blanket-wrapped,

zoned-out kind of day.

Just me, my sheets,

and one of those worn, underlined African literatures that pretend to be books

but actually hold your soul.

But you see fate and Clara don’t hear no.

She barged into my room at sundown,

the way she always does

as if editing my life without permission.

She had walked in with flailing arms, her phone dancing in her hand,

squealing that her long-distance boyfriend was in town

with a friend.

And she, of course,

needed one too.

I would have said no.

I think I did, actually.

But Clara did what she always does

dragged me out of my book

and into a story I wasn't prepared for.

By nightfall, we were dressed

that accidental kind of pretty

that makes you look like you fell out of a poem.

Powder.

Plum lip.

Slip dress.

A Thursday night we got to choose.

And the restaurant?

fine, I’m getting there

was one of Accra’s pretty traps:

dim amber lights,

wide glass windows,

menus printed on thick pearly paper

that made you sit up straight.

Little mirrors on the walls

catching the city’s night lights,

as if to make room for every version of you

that walked in that night.

And then

he walked in. With Clara's boyfriend by his side

May 4th shifted, suddenly,

from a quiet book day

to the night the world became peopled.

He was…..

Tall. Rich brown. Perfect.

The kind of perfect that makes you sit up a little straighter without meaning to, dab the corners of your lip with a napkin and bat your eyelashes like a nymph, the kind of man who looks like he was designed, not born.

All through the dinner he kept his gaze on his screen, flashing those white teeth at his phone, absent-minded, unbothered, as if the whole room existed only to reflect his light. Only raising his head to contribute to our small talk. I wondered who was getting all his attention and the thought panged.

Now let me just say this, I am a pretty girl. The kind of pretty people accept easily.

That’s the advantage of being smallish.

You get called cute even on the days you’re not trying, even on the days you don’t feel it.

And yet I wanted him, first.

The subtle gestures in his movements,

the soft stub on his chin,

the deliberate wave in his hair 

I wanted all of it.

All of him.

See, it’s never been difficult for me to get the man I want.

There has never been one I wanted and couldn’t have, no matter how far apart our worlds were.

So I knew, confidently, foolishly,  that he would love me one day.

Madly. Deeply. Entirely.

I always tell the girls: never fall in love with a man.

You may like him, you may enjoy him, but love?

Loving a man is like loving a wall, pointless and exhausting.

But when a man loves you?

Oh, it is strength.

It is fire.

It is everything strength can hold in its palms.

It took him seven years to fall in love with me.

Seven years from being that fourth-year medical student I flirted with shamelessly,

to returning from Amsterdam a fully grown doctor, older, broader, and quieter.

The day he bumped into me at the mall, I felt my heart stop.

We both pretended to forget;

he pretended not to remember that seven years ago he swore he could never love “a girl like me.”

Whatever that meant.

He had called me crazy, cheap, dramatic, and said he saw me as a sister.

Well, no man wants to sleep with his sister, yet here he is now, in love with me.

And today…

he’s in front of my house.

Kneeling.

In the rain.

Crying out my name, his voice echoing through the entire apartment block.

Professing a love that took seven years to bloom.

Seven years.

A lot has changed.

Clara and I aren’t friends anymore.

I don’t even like African Literature these days.

Life has folded into itself in ways I never expected.

So as I stand at my balcony watching him in disbelief, comical disbelief.

I wonder

How stupid love can be.

How circular.

Now he gets a taste of his own medicine.

Neighbors have stepped out to record him.

I hate that.

He’s like this because of me.

Maybe I should have ignored him that day at the mall, the first time we’d seen each other in seven years.

Maybe I should have turned away, declined the date, stopped the story before it started.

But tell me 

who doesn’t like a little game,

especially with someone who once said nothing could ever happen between us?

I told him he would fall in love with me.

Maybe not all at once, boys like him rarely pour all at once, but in fragments.

In small, quiet pieces he wouldn’t even notice.

Subtle shifts that don’t prick conscience

until one random day you sit up and realize

you’ve been swallowed whole.

I told him.

And tonight, I’m telling you.