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Blast From The Past

By Diamond Woman
05 March 2016   |   5:35 am
The last couple of days have been so emotionally draining for me. After the mail from Emeka the other day, I couldn’t go back to sleep and TK has been working so hard I didn’t want to disturb him with my restlessness so I decided to go downstairs and watch TV.

Diary of a Bored Housewife

Dear Diary,
The last couple of days have been so emotionally draining for me. After the mail from Emeka the other day, I couldn’t go back to sleep and TK has been working so hard I didn’t want to disturb him with my restlessness so I decided to go downstairs and watch TV.

I lay down on the couch in the living room with my phone in my hand contemplating whether or not to reply Emeka’s email. I kept reminding myself that I had a man who loves me and a daughter whose future I had to consider. I was already dozing off when I felt something vibrating underneath my leg. It was one of TK’s phones. A message had come in and a preview was showing on the screen. It read “Missed you tonight, call me”. The sender’s name was saved as “Bee”.

TK never leaves his phones lying around; it must have fallen out of his pocket while he was listening to the news earlier in the evening. I was so confused; I didn’t know what to make of it. I’m not one of those women that snoop around. I don’t go through his phones or pockets and all that. I mean there are times I suspect he is cheating but that was the closest I had ever come to having evidence.I lay back down on the couch and my mind drifted off to another time…my time with Emeka.

FLASHBACK
I lost my mum at 17, the same year I got into university. It was an incredibly hard time for me. My parents got divorced when I was only 2 and I never actually lived with my dad. My brother Afolabi being 7 years older is the only father figure I have had all my life.

My mum was diagnosed with ovarian cancer two years before she passed on. I was 15 and Afolabi was 22. He was in his final year in the University of Lagos studying Accounting and I was just rounding up secondary school. I remember the feeling of terror that washed over me when I was told she had cancer. At the time, the only thing I knew about cancer was that it killed people and it was expensive to treat. My mum was a caterer and that was how she supported my brother and I. Needless to say, from the day she took ill her business went under and we were left with very little as most of her savings went to her medical treatment. Her older sister and her children were the only family we knew.

I didn’t really get to know my father’s family and my mum wouldn’t tell us much about him except the fact that she left him for our own good and that he passed on a few years after she left him.

Occasionally I still try to Google him to see if I can find out more about who he was but I have never found out more than my mum told us. Afolabi and I have concluded there is more to the story than she told us. According to her, she should never have married my dad. He was much older than her and was very wealthy and she fell in love with him only to discover he had lied about so many things including the fact that he was divorced. He happened to have a family living abroad at the time and she had fallen for him thinking he was legally divorced.

Afolabi being older also has no recollection of ever living with my father and after mum passed away we searched for a marriage or divorce certificate but never found either. We eventually decided to stop talking about it. I am of the opinion that my parents were never legally married. All I know about my dad is that his name was Akintayo Adekoya and he was from Ijebu-Ode.

Thankfully, Afolabi finished school on time and went for his NYSC. He served in a multi-national consulting company as an auditor and got retained afterwards. My mum’s older sister Aunty Titi was exceptionally fantastic to us. She took care of me until Afolabi got a decent apartment and I went to live with him. That was when I got my admission into the University of Lagos where I met Emeka.

As I remembered our first encounter I smiled and at that point I couldn’t resist. I picked up my phone and I replied Emeka’s mail. All I said was “Obi’m”. I could picture the smile that would grace his face when he read my mail. It was 5.30am. I fell asleep with a smile on my face and dreamt of Emeka. It was a really beautiful dream.

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