I broke up with my first true reciprocal love and my whole world came crashing down. Only the recorded breakup led me to smoke cigarettes again. I quit smoking because my first true love, Miss N., ordered me to quit. It was normal that as long as he went out with Miss N. he would not smoke.
Indeed, Miss N. was my kind of girl: short, tall, fair-skinned, a true yellow bone. When I broke up with her, it hurt so much that I thought I would never get over the pain. I certainly hated sunlight, sunrise and yes sunset too. He hated life itself. He missed everything about her: her perfume, her kind smile, and her overall enhancing demeanor.
The breakup was bitter, messy and heartbreaking. At the heart of the breakup was a mix of immaturity, jealousy, and alleged infidelity on his part. Of course, no one said anything about my own casual fling antics while dating Miss N.
In hindsight, perhaps, it shouldn’t have happened. The breakup came dramatically after he learned that she had visited an ex-boyfriend. I didn’t get to know the full story, for me something broke that day. The golden cup was broken and there was no going back. This is despite the fact that I was deeply in love with Miss N. She was my first real reciprocal love. She may not have known how deeply I had invested my emotions in our relationship.
To make matters worse, at the time of our relationship, I was a broken man. My life was out of control. My position as president of the Student Representative Council (SRC) was precarious at best. He had effectively stopped attending any academic classes. He had full-time armed guards lurking in the background. My life was in danger from the Concerned Student Group. I retired to my flat, read novels and played love songs. I had been diagnosed with depression. He was not receiving any treatment. As far as I was concerned, my life had reached a dead end. She did not have a deep understanding of my situation. On the surface, everything looked fine.
However, it is a pedantic detail that at the time of the breakup she was pregnant and I did not know it. Neither here nor there did I initiate the rupture of our relationship. I specifically told him on the phone never to speak or come see me. It is also irrelevant that the allegations of infidelity were never proven. I guess it’s also a moot point that many feeble attempts at reconciliation were made after I found out about her pregnancy. All this came to nothing. The sticking point was that I wanted Miss N. to pronounce that the unborn baby was mine, and not the boy she was supposedly dating. She reasoned that I was being impossible. In her mind, she should have accepted the responsibility-‘man up’ so to speak. It became clear to me that he took the breakup badly and that he couldn’t handle my anger and suspicions. These unresolved issues of anger and despair led her to make what I consider to this day to be “a terrible decision.” She decided that she would raise the unborn baby alone.
Anyway, I loved Miss N. In fact, I loved her a lot after we broke up. I told everyone who wanted to listen that one day I would marry Miss N. It never happened. Instead, life happened.
As a result of the bitter breakup, she alone gave birth to my firstborn. I didn’t even know the expiration date. I never had any proof that the child existed. Well, well, until that life-changing moment in a mundane noon when I met my baby for the first time by accident in a shopping mall. She was four years old. It was an emotional meeting. To add insult to injury, he didn’t even know that I was her real father. For my part, he couldn’t even acknowledge her presence. I had no right to hug my own son and kiss him. As he spoke to his mother about him, he tightened his grip on the man holding her hand. He might have been afraid of meeting a stranger. He was in the arms of another man, a man unknown to me. He hurt me deeply that my son had been raised by another random stranger.
All my life I had believed in the mantra that says: there has been no greater villain in the history of mankind than the bad father. Of course, he knew better. I was raised by an abusive father. He had verbal tantrums. He physically abused my brothers. He shouted profanities at the slightest provocation. He ruled out of fear. He would humiliate through printable words both his child and his wife in one sentence. He showed no affection to his wife or his children. He really was a monster.
For four long years, before my chance encounter with my son, I feared becoming the man I hated: my father. He had children scattered all over the place. He paid no attention to them. To him, his children were a necessary nuisance that could be ignored. In my father’s life-all his children were an absence that was never felt. I speak of my father in the past tense, because in my world he does not exist. Deep in my heart I have always known that I am not my father.
I had a dream of a family that was different from yours. My dream has always been to start a new family line, a humble line of my own parallel to my father’s line. He had imagined a house full of children, yes, he only wanted sons. I wanted my new family line to continue ad infinitum. I imagined that my first son will be, “the obedient one, he will stay home and be a pillar of help, he will marry a good girl”, and continue the family line. I’m glad I lived to tell stories. Except there’s a twist to my real life story, I have a girl that I love so much that she knows it.
