Fiction – Please Come Home To Me

It hadn’t started raining everyday…

It hadn’t started raining everyday when you left or I did not notice. There was little I noticed when you were in the room. I liked pretending, eye glasses pinned low on tip of nose, flipping through Mancur Olsen’s book on stagflation. But my mind was always far from economics or anything else whenever you were there.

You never saw me peeking at the stretch marks etched across your buttocks like the scratch marks of a cat. As you bounded across the room wearing nothing but different coulours of that leopard spotted panties I liked so much but didn’t tell you; I wondered if you knew how seamlessly the stretch marks complimented those leopard spots…

I guess I never told you a lot. Like all the things I liked about you. The way you rubbed your eyes furiously when they itched. The way your smile grew so wide it was difficult not to smile with you.

You were the fizzling bottle of excitement and I often wondered where you got the strength to smile in a world so filled with sadness. I was different from you – staid. Iru Ofinku –never smiling. You said that I looked better when I smiled, when I let that half dimple appear on my face and vanish suddenly like an unwelcome guest.

I guess that I should have told you that I loved you more insistently. I should have told you that I smiled always in my heart and that each kiss I pretended to begrudge you each morning was a drug I was happily addicted to.

I should have told you that the night before you told me that you hated me, I had snuggled warmly behind you and whispered into your ears that I loved you so much. I liked doing this. I had hoped that these whispers would be borne to the depths of your dreams, and somehow get to you.

The rains are more insistent now and for the first time, I have noticed how cold it gets when it rains. I have read almost half way through Mancur Olsen’s book on stagflation. But I understand so little when you are not in the room. Everything distracts me even the low sound of my breathing. And I still pretend that every rattle of the door is you coming home to me.