He chose her. He chose her over me and I just couldn’t believe it. I feigned sickness - an allergy because I was too proud to admit that I was spending nights overworking my tear factory. I borrowed a friend’s Discman (if you don’t know what a Discman is, Google is your friend) and listened to “On my own.” I really did feel that without him, a river was just a river. Would it have turned into a lake if he had stayed? I don’t know. I didn’t write the song. By the time the poor Discman died from over usage, my tear factory had run out of raw materials. But I was still furious and embarrassed (more embarrassed than furious) so I swore off boys. I also swore that one day, I would exert revenge on Sharon Muriira for stealing my man. Yes, yes I know that at 15, he was still just a boy and I know that he wasn’t mine because you can’t own a human being, unless you’re a slave master. But you know what I mean. In the beginning, Steve and I were perfectly happy. At least I was. I was over the moon. When he came along, everything else stopped to matter. Teachers were wasting their time standing in front of me because now, they were just moving objects. I breathed and read and dreamt Steven. We even had our own name-Eliven. I spent all my waking hours writing our name and drawing heart shapes around it. He seemed to love me as much as I loved him. He wrote to me every week and with each letter, he promised the sun moon and stars. He promised forever. However, before long, exchanging letters stopped being enough. He wanted to see me. So he proposed a plan; that I find a way to see him every Friday night. Basically what he was saying is that he wanted me to escape from school every Friday night to meet him. It occurred to me that Steven didn’t know me at all. If he had known me, he would have known that there is no way I could muster the courage to jump over a fence. I told him as much. He told me that if I couldn’t get over my fear, he would find someone who could. Indeed, in no time, he and Sharon were together and I was left alone, to tear off pages of my books where I had written his name. There were so many pages! I would now like to extend my apologies to the trees that gave their lives only for me to use my books for unproductive ventures. Anyway, in time Sharon was glowing. She was with child. We sang for her, “Pack up your things and go home, no more school for you.” It was a song that our Headmistress had taken personal liberty to compose for shaming girls who chose boys over education. I refused to sing along that day because I knew that it could have been me. It was now crystal clear that the heartbreak was God’s way of helping his foolish sheep (me) who had lost sight of what was important-school. Since then, boys have come and gone but education has never let me down. Nod if you know what I’m trying to say.
