ALL FOR BIGAIL (PART 1)

There was a time I was in the lowest point in my life, I was broke, I was thirty one, I didn’t have any means of income and the girl I loved left me without saying goodbye. I had a very good reason why people commit suicide, how emotions and frustrations can render you completely hopeless. I was at the precipice of this and then, it seemed like the only way out, suicide. There was no consolation.

I thought of many things, the life I had lived, the one I desperately want to achieve. I thought at the age of thirty one, I would have accomplished most of my dreams, like being done with school, a well paid job or an established enterprise to call my own and happily married to a beautiful woman and a baby girl to go with it. But look at me now, broke and miserable, not a penny attached to my name.

Mama has been calling me for months now and the bowl of my failures would not give me the courage to pick her calls or return the missed ones.

My rent was due and the landlord was at the door about my late payment, he was threatening to cause a scandal. Facing him to plead for extension was more dreading than hiding out in my apartment. So for days I was faced with the awning desire to end it all, to jump over the railing of my veranda from the three storey apartment building I shared with other tenants.

Most of them wouldn’t understand why I had to let go. Ehimare might probably think it was because of my ex-girlfriend, Bigail, for leaving me. Mama would be filled to the brim with guilt, she will blame herself over and over again, I know the kind of person she is. She will refuse to believe that I did it out of acute depression, a condition Africans don’t believe exist especially our old schooled parents. She will think it was because of Papa, that my father’s spirit has come back to take me with him, Papa that died five years ago. This is the type of superstition Mama will engage herself with.

But what they would not know about my dead, what Ehimare or my neighbours or Mama would not know about my dead was that, it wasn’t about the landlord that threatened a scandal, it wasn’t about my girlfriend, Bigail leaving me, it wasn’t about Papa’s spirit coming back for me, it was about……. To be continue next week Thursday.