Crepuscule of Nightfall by Onuchukwu Joseph Chimezie

If you’d delayed your journey a little longer, you’d have realized that Tolu actually felt the same love for you. If you’d sang your Christian song one more night – something you made a ritual – in your high pitched voice as if to exorcise any demon of gloom, you’d have had your song-prayers answered in a grand style of Tolu’s proposal the next night.

The night before, as you stayed outside his house but within earshot waiting for him to come see you off, you kept hearing a woman shout, ‘No way! No way!’ It wasn’t in the vigor in her voice, it was in her repetitions as if talking to too many people, and with that, there was a dreamy silence. You saw his frown soften into a quivering smile when his gaze caught yours and you both walked out. If you’d compressed your anger into a single agony of prayer the next night, perhaps you’d have been shown, in a dream, a picture of your merrily cackling self in a sweepy white gown as his eyes held smiles that told of how his heart craves for only you.

You instead chose not to witness that night. You instead chose to let your relationship with him fade away like a short-lived firewood. If you had waited that night, without doing anything at all but looking into the sky that was puzzled with stars, you’d know that his red-cum-blue flame of love hadn’t swirled into another’s heart because he’d have walked straight to your house with that ring you thought you admired secretly at a mall. You both would have sat beside each other, tugging and rolling into laughter in an utter ecstasy of pleasure because before he’d leave, he would have pronounced your name more times than you’d count with that endearing intimacy that made you think of a happily-ever-after. But you didn’t. You decided not to.

If you’d asked him that night what that woman, his mother, had said you’d know she was against his brother marrying a teacher who she found too exposed. Instead you assumed that woman in the mother’s statement that night was you. And you knew you’d rather not be seen around than watch Tolu leave you for another woman. So you allowed him watch your body droop high from your ceiling, dangling like a defeated fish held with a fishhook.