When a man tells you he loves you.

This is not a love letter my Tobaby, this is ….different

My loveeee, I’ve missed you and while I want to tell you all about the past couple weeks, just rant about everything and everyone. First I want to tell you a story. I haven’t written fiction in so long but the night before my criminal exam I read so much my eyes hurt. I tried to take a break but all I could think about was you, was this story I had in my head, I had to write and I hope you like it.

Ps; I’m super scared about posting this because I haven’t done this before, I really hope you don’t think it’s silly, I love you 💘

the day jaja asked me to marry him was the worst day of my life. i remember the lavender dress i wore, the one with the loose hand that would always fall off, jaja would kiss my shoulders when he noticed the loose hand slip. i don’t know if he did it out of love or so no one would see me package my breasts, but i hated it. I think i hated jaja and because of him i never wore my favorite dress often. jaja was my least favorite of my three boyfriends. so unideal that he would be my husband, he knew about my two other boyfriends …. well between you and I, I had four boyfriends, i always thought men to be the spice of life, and you could never cook stew with only one spice now, could you?

it started as a joke you know, to have one boyfriend for everyday of the week, not until i met femi. femi drove a dark brown mercedes’ not one of the hideous ones with fat boots that the fraudsters of nowadays drove, femi’s car looked like him, dark brown, rich and insanely sexy. it had matching interiors which also somehow matched the colors of his eyes, brown. maybe that’s why the first time he told me i love you on that stupid falomo bridge, his car parked close to the christmas lights i believed him. i’m not sure if it was the way he said it or if it was all that damn christmas light, maybe it the way he paused before he could complete it, the “i ….. i … love youuu”. such sincerity, femi always had a way with words, with my body too, but this isn’t about the love of my life.

it’s about a fool, jaja. i met jaja in a dimly lit club in ikoyi, i was waiting for my uber, legs crossed at exactly 2:14am i had just submitted my final papers to apply to for my masters in harvard, jaja reeked of suya and chi exotic, not the one i like the one that smells an awful lot like pineapples and coconut.

“what’s a pretty girl like you doing out by this time”

then what is an ugly boy like you doing outside by this time too! ehh Oga, i always hated men that asked stupid questions,

but a week before we met i had started following this lady on tiktok who taught ladies like me to be “more confident” it was the reason i was writing this paper in this crusty bar for Godsake, the random lady on tiktok who always mispronounced her R’s had given me stupid advice again.

“they make the best pornstar margarita”

Jesus, I’m a liar, what is a pornstar margarita, why do i behave like this, which kind lie be this, did i even see that on the menu, why do i act like a fool at times, shey i should’ve just read at home.

“but you’ve been licking icecream and eating buffalo wings now, why didn’t you order the margarita?”

how long had he been watching me? the kitchen closed two hours ago and i just realized that they had taken my plate of buffalo wings almost 45 mins ago,

“you keep going silent, are you okay”

shit i’m doing that thing again where i keep thinking and forget to talk, let this boy leave me alone, where is my uber, i hate this ikoyi, i’m sure there’s traffic this midnight, fuck that, i hate lagos, jesus can harvard just fucking accept me already i’ve been trying for four years now! i’m already 26.

“ok maybe your name?” that was the first time i saw his face clearly, if you looked really hard, jaja had a beautiful smile, his mouth formed the perfect U and his eyes closed when he smiled. “ivana… but you can call me ivy” no one had called me ivy since my internship in north carolina, why tf did i say that.

“jaja… but you can call me your husband”. you know the thing about jokes? sometimes they become real, and they can gut the hell out of you. that night i wish i screamed Godforbid, i wish i screamed it for all of lagos to hear. i wish i held the bread knife that came with the soft starter bread and salted pecan butter and held it to his neck forcing him to take those words back. Jaja was such a funny name too, reminded me of ‘jaja of opobo’ and i’m sure i made a joke about it that evening, i wish i didn’t.

femi didn’t always like me, not everyday, he liked me on thursday’s when we went to karaoke and occasionally on sundays when we played make believe family in his home church, when he clasped my hands in church i’d usually close my eyes, envisioning our marriage at this same church. i always wanted a simple dress with a dramatic veil, with the words “to have and to own” inscribed on the tail, never “to hold” hold wasn’t enough for our love, it had to be to own.

i didn’t like the name “adventure” much, i didn’t like it at all and more importantly as my surname. why the hell was that femi’s last name in the first place? but he never told anyone, everyone called him femi ADV. almost like he knew it didn’t fit into his life, the same way i didn’t. he said it on the night i thought we’d break up, he was drunk and it was a thursday and we had gone for karaoke, he said something along the line of “do you know who the fuck i am” to an angry bouncer then he blurted out his full name, in full rage in that dark blue senator with his moisturized beards, damn femi was hot, he was stupid but he was hot and he had to be my husband.

i’m not sure where i met taiwo, i’m sure it had to be at church or the gym, or one of those third spaces that exist so you find love… taiwo used to sing and a lot too, so it mostly gave me a headache. i could never tell if he was a bad singer or not, taiwo had money money, he bought me my first ever hermes slippers. one time he didn’t call me for a week and as an apology he sent me 7 dior bags. one bag in 7 shades. i sold 4 of them and gave one to my annoying little sister, i would eventually borrow it so much one day she’d never take it back, how typical of me to be unable to let go of the things i love. but then again this story isn’t about any of them. it’s about the man that called me his wife; Jonathan, his full name was jonathan and this piece of shit didn’t tell me until one year after our wedding.

the first time that femi slapped me i cried for four days straight? he gave me pink roses, it wasn’t my first time receiving roses but he looked sincere and he managed to match the roses with his shirt. we went to the over priced restaurant with a view on bourdillion. i didn’t break up with femi because he hit me, to be fair he never hit me again nor raise his voice at me but my favorite color was never pink, it was always lavender… femi didn’t love me and when a man doesn’t love you he makes sure you know. i once read that the partner a woman choses is evident of her self worth and her self value, i scoffed because as a woman i’ve never had to choose, refuse? yes but not never really choose, not in the way men do. not in the way my brother did.

maybe that’s the reason why i was the one who asked David out, david had soft eyes and i met him in my fourth year in university, he was the class nerd but had the prettiest face i had ever seen. he often mistook affection for “kindness”, which was quite funny because men were quite the opposite. i didn’t kiss david until two years after university, i ran into him at the providus bank on the same road as foodies. i was running late for an inspection, i had no job so i had decided to become a “realtor”, not until my body decided it needed to take hot shit in that 4pm Ozumba Mbadiwe traffic. i swerved into the providus bank with my brothers stupid toyota prius that wouldn’t stop honking every time i pressed break but i was short on cash and needed a job. that was when i met david again, the man of my dreams.

david was awfully idealistic, he wanted to change the world, change nigeria, change bad governance, save the fishes, save the ocean, end world poverty, stop corruption, save the turtles, save the kids, see e no get work wey david no give himself. he was the man of my dreams. so i woke up.

lavender had always been my favorite color maybe that was the problem, that evening on the 13th of july where the only dress available was my lavender dress that taiwo got for me from one of his multiple trips to “dubai” maybe i should have looked at it and said “not today” i wasn’t ready for it’s hand to fall over and over and to have that ogre called jaja keep kissing my shoulders.

“extra perfume tonight, especially on my shoulders” i smiled because i wanted to add a little ground bitter kola after rubbing oil on my shoulders. i wanted to see his face when he would have to lie and say “i wish i could eat you or you’re so sweet” but no i didn’t hate myself that much and to be honest i didn’t hate jaja that much either.

As crazy as this may sound, i wasn’t forced to marry jaja, to be fair no one even cared about stuff like that.

both my parents were divorced and rich af. if not that i had this stupid sense of wanting to be my own person what was stoping me from going on that mother daughter trip to st. tropez last year?

the day jaja asked me to marry him, he wore a lilac shirt, but i always told him lilac was different from lavender, jaja never listened, not to me at least. he was also really sweaty and shaky, but that was very jaja of him. But at least jaja knew the color I liked, he was color blind, not wicked.

jaja had black eyes, not the type you could stare at for long, he had very bushy eyebrows too, and usually wore his hair in cornrows. cornrows i would learn to make so i’d make them for him on sunday nights. it would be our little family ritual. i and my husband, jaja.

the first day jaja got angry at me he pulled me so hard i fell face first, i knew he didn’t mean to but i knew better than to let things happen twice especially with men - so i called my fathers brother, not the destitute one that spent all of his trust money in the ritz Carlton in the Hamptons. i called the other one “uncle B” and in 17 minutes we had 11 army officers at our house in park view, they beat the shege out of jaja so much that he never tried that rubbish again, because with men once beaten, twice they must die.

jaja and i never really fought, he liked suya sundays and hibiscus juice tuesdays - we liked each other but not too much, in a way that we were friends, best friends. the perfect recipe for marriage.

now i remember, him getting beat up was our first and last fight. i cried so much in the bathroom, jaja began to beg me, beg me to stop crying, because they beat him, when i was the one that ensured they beat him. in a way we began to understand ourselves, dare i say love ourselves, jaja was easily the kindest man i ever met.

ivana idoko, that became my name. i think i hated it in the beginning, but the more i knew jaja, the more i loved it, the way he’d say “ivy” he often teased me about our first date, our first kiss, or why i had the same bag in three different colors. jaja held me in his hands. in his hands i was safe. jaja’s favourite food was porridge, potato porridge and clementines immediately after, on the days jaja felt cute he put the clementines in his porridge, so disgusting, he was always such a menace. maybe that’s why the day jaja died i bought clementines too.

Jaja tomorrow our son turns two. I’m seating in the library in the east wing In Harvard, i wish you got to meet him, such a beautiful boy, his name is jonathan.