Tag: #love#acceptance#

It’s a chilly Saturday morning and I have enough time to walk through my thoughts.

Subconsciously, I always figured I had the powers of picking the most snobby guy the one who was emotionally detached. The kind who took pride in toxic masculinity. The kind that listened to Andrew Kibe, and paid attention to Amerix like his entire livelihood depended on it. And my powers would somehow make them mellow and mushy.

Okay… the one guy that I genuinely fell in love with in my adulthood knew nothing about the two. He had amazing dreads. This man! He had my heart and I swore never to love another as long as I lived. Boy, was I in a fantasy!

He was my gentle giant. In our last conversation that I’d hoped would somehow parch things up I told him I loved how confident he was about me loving him. The conversation went south. He said, “If after all these years you can’t see how much I love you, then I’ve failed more than I thought” Then he ghosted. I don’t think I’m ever gonna hear from him, it stings and it’s cool.

Okay, so he was pretty much white but in a black body, you get what I’m saying. I told him occasionally that he was “too American”. He was so put together on the outside. I loved especially how sensational he’d pronounce the word “horrible.” He always looked at me like I was some delicate flower. Anytime he hugged me I’d always complain, “babe you’re going to break me.” It’s almost like he wanted me to absorb his pain through those hugs. I promise I was pretty much ready to.

Our relationship was only understood by me and him. My friend Maritim thought I imagined him and he didn’t exist. And the people who knew dreads guy thought I was with him only for his money and his rich background. If only they knew.

One day, while in the thick of it, I told him, “it wouldn’t hurt this much if I only loved you for your money and your background.” He barely would show any extreme emotions. He never cared about money. He always said, “money is very basic and the easiest thing to make.” He was a total genius, this one. He always said, “it’s weird that guys always want to pick the prettiest girl in the room, but it hurts them so much when girls love them for their money” His points of view always had me. Always spoke his mind. Never sugarcoated a thing. This was both a good thing and bad thing in our relationship.

It was all weird because even in two years, I still didn’t know a thing about his background, but people around us judged me so harshly. I took it. Humans can be cruel. I made a mental note to always remember that. (It’s interesting people always think I get my men because of money. Honestly, if I was doing that I’d have made sure to do it to the best of my ability. I’m too lovey-dovey for that, guys.)

I saw through my dreads guy’s pain and I knew I could heal each and every part of it. One thing is for sure, he mellowed. In the three years we were together, he softened. I have that effect on people.

Occasionally, we’d talk about moving away and starting over, somewhere in Watamu or Lamu. The idea of starting over where nobody knew of us or about us appealed so much to me. I still think about it. We were so aligned. Timing was the bitch.

Then came the next guy. He once told me that every conversation he had with me always felt like a therapy session, and communication with me always felt like a communications class. That stung. I fought. I humiliated myself. Then I took my power back.

He was/is a good guy. I think his ego steals away from him. Our conversations at first were amazing. We agreed on everything. I was dumb enough to talk about my insecurities and everything. He listened. He made me feel safe. Then he used all that against me.

So take it from me ladies “keep your baggage to yourselves and heal your nervous system on your own.”

I am gonna write about my dread guy someday. He is a beautiful soul. The contrast is, the next guy was bald.

Anyway, somewhere in there, my fantasy of having the most detached guy and turning them into a mushy romantic is dimming. I see how toxic and damaging of me that was.

I appreciate bald guy though he was my nudge into self-love and self-approval. Believe me or not, the guy straight up told me, “it’s hard being with you because of your insecurities and your anxiety.”

I read the text. Then read it again. My friend Essie read it and said, “this guy is a demon.” I was too numb to process a thing. Two weeks later, it hit me. It took me more than three months of pain. Then I processed everything and patched back my pieces.

I appreciate the cruelty of bald guy. It gave me life. It gave me so much life. Now I know better how to entirely be mine.

As old school as this sounds, I’m never moved by the amount of money a man makes, or his surname, or whatever superficial bullshit everyone pays attention to. Most of the time, I’m in my little bubble, thinking about how I am gonna be my own boss babe, how to self-obsess, and how at one point I’ll make a badass wife to an intentional man.

I am a calm person, but my experiences have been nothing short of epic. Well, I still think emotionally detached mysterious guys are hot… but I know better now.

I got myself out of victimhood. I no longer introduce myself with, “I am such an overthinker.” I let my aura lead. I wish I learnt this earlier enough. I am grateful I did learn eventually. And I always say, I am more than proud of the woman I was before. She led me here, to who I am now.

I’ve stopped beating myself up for being a late bloomer. I’ve learnt to acknowledge that our paths are different, we’re just different. And I often say to myself, “I am right where I am supposed to be because my timing is sacred and divine.”

Lol, I know I usually expose myself so much on here, but someday my kids are gonna read these things and they’ll think to themselves, “damn, mom genuinely lived.”

And maybe that’s the beauty of it.
That on this chilly Saturday morning, with the ghosts of love behind me and self-love beside me, I can finally say, “I am exactly where I’m meant to be.”

My 19 year old self met me at the threshold just as I was about to step out and greet the morning birds.

She asked, “Did you marry him?”

I shifted awkwardly. “I’m not following.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You know exactly what I’m talking about, Val. Stop bullshitting.”

I exhaled. “Fine. I didn’t marry him. Or the one after him the one I swore was ‘the one.’ Or the next. Or the next.”

She squealed.

I smirked. “In the end, I met myself and learned how to be mine.”

She sighed, smiling. “So… you won your own heart. That’s a total win.”

I chuckled. “Doesn’t mean every day’s fireworks. Yesterday was painfully mundane. I almost did something destructive, but I reminded myself who I am. I sat with the boredom. The cold. Until it felt… good. Just being.”

Her eyes glowed with pride.

“I’ve taken a lot of L’s this week,” I went on. “Almost spiraled. But my regulated nervous system held me together. I took the punches without folding. That’s real. I even wrote it in my diary.”

She nodded slowly. “Maybe it’s not so bad you didn’t marry him. You needed to meet this version of you. Maybe you still would have if you had married him… maybe not. Either way, I’m glad you did.”

Then she turned and walked away.

And I sighed.

She knew it was going to haunt her bad. She just knew it. What she wasn’t going to do though, was try to anticipate what her life was going to be like, in a month or two. Clearly, that is what she had been doing for the past three years, living in anticipation.

She made the decision under peculiar circumstances. If you’d asked her four weeks ago if she had it in her to make the decision she’d made now. She would have laughed in your face bad.
She knew that was her once-in-a-lifetime love, and so she had vowed to fight to the end to ensure that she had it.

He knew she loved him more than she loved life. Effortlessly she had proven that to him.
Did he ever love her though? Maybe he loved the idea of being loved fiercely. She will never know.
Maybe the universe conspired to ensure they never would get together. Looking at it differently there was always a force that seemed to be keeping them apart. She had communicated that at one point, but at that time, she knew they were going to conquer it all.
She has cried both sad and happy tears.
She’s grateful that she has been able to genuinely and sincerely love another soul so fiercely, not everyone gets a chance to experience that.

Most of their memories are virtual, and they managed to exchange very beautiful messages. She’s gonna hold on to that.

She’ll still have him in her prayers, sending out good thoughts. Because genuinely he is a good person.

How would it have been, if she felt half the love she had for him, coming from him?

She usually is one to communicate, but this time round she chose silence. It was less burdening that way.

Probably that’s how her once-in-a-lifetime love was bound to end. Probably she gave up too early, probably he never loved her, probably removing herself from his life is the exhale he needed…a lot of questions but she just would never know.  And that’s the thing about life, you just never know.

She’ll mostly be grieving what it could have been, the mental picture she had created like how Sundays were supposed to be for baking and slowing down. And how her house was supposed to be their escape from tech and external noises.

In the meantime, she’s exhausted she no longer has it in her to fight anymore.  She’s done fighting I guess.