ABOUT SOMETHING

April 04, 2020
6: 20am

Last night, my last journal entry read like this….

When I was young, my heart knew innocent love. My heart felt them and most often wanted me as I wanted them too. There was a boy in my neighbourhood, who I knew ”loved” me and I did feel different about him too among all the boys in the neighbourhood. And that particular loving took six years to finally dissolve and fade. He never said it, I didn’t either, I never mentioned it anywhere in the letters I wrote to him. I don’t remember him ever writing back, but I knew he loved me and it was clear and easy to accept and affirm it.

But as I grow older, the love I thought I knew and was familiar with began to lose its innocence or simply maybe it got new faces, it got new locations and it got new histories. It got new hearts.
They became complex especially the ones that were never spoken or admitted. And so the silences turned them into something else that was no longer familiar with innocence but something that if not played well, caused the heart to bleed.

The something else is buying all your time and giving it to a somebody you are not committed to in any official way, inviting them into your homes for dinner, sometimes sleepovers, buying them gifts and accepting their gifts as well. That something, it’s always complex, we lie to ourselves to believe in it because we are too scared to call it what name it has, or maybe truly we are all lost to a name that best describe something.

It never really come with a definite name but it capable of hurting you to the core if you are unlucky to be the victim that plays too in this game of no name. I once had been a victim of too many somethings. And my association with something over time blinded me to think I was only better at something. It’s like playing with a dying fire, you know it is dying so you begin to loose guard of the intensity of the warmth, because soon it becomes comfortable and for a moment you can bear it and yes you can, until it suddenly picks up and flames up. That is how somethings always work. You don’t see them coming until they arrive.

That something that makes you a give a soft kiss on the cheek, then the next thing you know you are lying next to someone who has no name for the particular kind of welcoming with a large sheet of pretence, the only thing capable of hiding your nakedness, shame and a medal that celebrates a successful kind of stupidity. You know you have been stupid many years and most or days before. You know. You thought you walked away but have you not thought that bridges can be walked on from two directions?
It is just something happening.
Something is addictive, something is possessive, something is demanding and most often something is terrifying. And something can break you really hard in the end. That something.

But who needs something when they could have things with names on them like commitment, trust, honesty, accountability, respect, belonging, protection and intimacy?
I am not a life coach, but maybe someday I will become. In one of my session with one good friend, someone who has been consistently checking in, I told him some things I have said to a friend the previous day during a conversation.
I told him, Max, I think we all know what it is that we need from another human being. It’s not just a mere want. We all know the kind of man or woman we truly want to end up with. We just feel we might not have it or what we want won’t have us and sometimes the latter is true. That is what makes us settle for somethings but deep within we wish to settle for what we really and truly desire.

I told him changes I had made in my life and how they were beginning to shape my perspectives of other things. I told him of new habits that guarded my heart as I work and wait to finally settle with someone I will be proud to settle with someday. I told him childhood days were over and we knew better things now and there were little room left to keep committing some same old mistakes. I told him all that, and it resonate with me too all over again.

So who needs something when we are all made for better things. So you ask me why we settle for somethings
Why? I wish I knew. But life gets complex at a moment and we all get overwhelmed with the process of growth but when you finally notice that all you are is a slave to something and you don’t want it anymore, walk away and don’t ever look back.Because when you boldly walk away from somethings, other things will begin to find you.
Love always,
Jo.