The Sunday News
Kundai Chitumwa Short Story
IT is a sad state of affairs to hold on to someone who has let you go, to defend someone who offends you. It may be that his initial definition of love was blurred, and hence, in the throngs of infatuation he made promises he thought he could easily keep. Boy was clearly smitten by Girl.
The typical high school sweethearts, Boy and Girl were inseparable. They usually disembarked from the same emergency taxi in the morning. They shared the same day of prefectural gate duty; Friday. They stood next to each other during school assembly. They spent their lunch hours together. And, in the late afternoon, you would know the day has ended when they made their way to the bus stop together. Boy was the typical boyfriend; tall, not necessarily handsome and a tad too nerdy. Oh, and penniless.
Girl, unsurprisingly, was the typical girlfriend; the most beautiful girl in the whole school. Boy was held in some kind of high regard by his peers by virtue of his choice, or is it by virtue of the one who had chosen him, whatever.
So, as I was saying, Girl was the eye-catcher of eye-catchers in the whole school. The kind who could set tongues wagging, if only those watching were dogs. Then again, they say all boys are dogs! However, the aspect in her that didn’t tread on the highway of Typical Beings was that she was from a fairly well-off family. In retrospect, I personally think my friend Boy should have seen the imminent danger ahead. I think love should visit the optometrist, I don’t think the problem is the alleged blindness; because it never has. Its plain foolishness if you ask me.
In days of old, before the economy took a turn for the better, Boy used to walk to school, some ten kilometers to and from school. Boy was always clean and well-kempt but you could tell that his uniform had seen better days; the colour had depressingly faded and any more stitching would actually tear the cloth. She, on the other hand, would always see him walking by the roadside as her dad drove her to school. Girl couldn’t imagine herself walking that distance, let alone showing up for school sweaty faced after such an ordeal. She felt pity for him. How could he carry himself with such confidence? What I don’t understand is how pity could turn to “love”? Maybe it never changed and their versions of “love” were different. Pity.
As the economy started taking its turn for the better, Boy seemed to be following suit. He started boarding emergency taxis and as fate would have it, someone else started going to the bus stop.
My sources say that her dad told her that she has to become independent and learn to look after herself in some regards. That meant he was handing in his resignation as her chauffeur. You should have seen her on the first day she went to the bus stop in the morning; she really did look out of place. To make matters worse, when she had boarded the first taxi she flagged down, she heard someone greet her. In her sad case of nerves, she couldn’t even tell where the voice was coming from, so she just said hi. It was only when she disembarked at school that she realized who it was; Boy.
I really don’t know what my friend Boy said to her, because by the time they reached the school gate, he had cracked her ribs sore with laughter. And the rest, as they say, is history. And such were the joys of infatuation; they were easily the lovebirds of the century. I find it funny that Shakespeare, the master writer on the subject of infatuation, was himself, not subject to it.
Married at the age of eighteen, to a woman eight years his senior (and pregnant with another man’s child), Shakespeare knew the true meaning of love. Why he would then base his works on infatuation, and in essence mislead my friend Boy, I don’t know. Or maybe I’m barking at the wrong tree (yes, the narrator is a boy). It could be the fairytales Boy used to read as he was growing up; they indoctrinated him with the art of believing that there is such a thing as “living happily forever after”. I say all this with pain in my heart, because Life revealed its true colors when Boy and Girl left high school.
They say distance makes the heart grow fonder but in this case, it caused a continental drift between him and her. He became indifferent about her, rarely making the effort to call, text or visit her. She on the other hand could not make head or tail of it but continued in a state of affection toward him. It then became plain that she loved him, as Boy had lost his right to deserve any love from her. This drift continued for over a year with sparsely intermittent dates, and yes, with Girl footing the bills. As if to spite her, he betrayed her all the more by impregnating another girl. Poor Girl had to learn of all this via the grapevine; that her beloved went with his relatives ukuyavela konkazana.
How someone can come out of this and still say that she loves Boy, upsets my comprehension. But word has it that Girl narrates a story of her own in defense.
The story is of an adulterous woman who was about to be stoned by an angry mob for her unspeakable acts. Then along came a man, who spoke to no-one, but started writing with his finger on the ground near the soon-to-die woman. In a short while, stones were dropped and the mob was no more.
In light of this ancient story, I understand why Girl continues in her state of affection, regardless of whether it brings pain or gain to her; no one is without fault, even Girl. No one can hurl a stone at the offender, because each one of us deserves (in one way or another) the same punishment. We all need to be forgiven.
