Romeo and Juliet |
Issue 13
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Death is a cure.
When Hippocrates said, “What cannot be cured by medicaments is cured by the knife, what the knife cannot cure must be considered incurable”, he missed the part where death itself is a cure. I say, “The guilt no penance can absolve can be lifted by the fingers of death.” It took me three fruitless hours with the old, frail priest at the confessional to figure this out. I remember how he pretended not to be shaken when I told him I was a murderer, my hands stained with the blood of a girl I claimed to love. But I hadn’t missed the look of horror that flashed across his face when I told him this– if I hadn’t been watching him closely, I would have missed it. I experienced a sadistic delight to have witnessed this crack in his otherwise perfect act– the air of formal detachment he wore as soon as I came before his presence, his expressionless, almost lifeless countenance that seemed to say that in this room he’d heard terrible things perpetrated by people and could no longer be moved by the evil capable of the human frame, his impassive voice that quickly reassured me that this wasn’t a man sitting in the capacity of a judge to condemn me but was simply a messenger. Nonetheless, in that fleeting moment when he lost his balance and his façade fell, I knew that in all his years of listening to the confessions of the most deplorable secrets of men shelved in the darkest corners of their hearts, never had a boy of my age come to whisper into the ears of God, through his ears, that he was a murderer. Later, he tried to reassure me of God’s forgiveness after listening with rapt attention to my story– “Though your sins be as red as scarlet, He’d make them as white as snow”– but there are guilt that only the hand of death can take away. Like mine. I’m not just a murderer; I included God in my sins, implicated Him in your murder. The bottle is in my hands now, and emblazoned across its body in bold letters is the warning: overdose is lethal. I gulp down everything. Soon, I would be with you, free from the guilt, free to explain myself to you. I feel sleepy. I do not resist. Death is a cure. *** You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever laid my eyes on, and when I finally summoned the courage to tell you this, I added that however clichéd it sounded, it was nothing but the truth. I mean, with your olive oil complexion, gracefully curved eyebrows arched over almond-shaped eyes that fluoresced whenever you smiled, slender nose and full sensuous lips that held the promise of a flowery softness, how could you not be the most beautiful girl? I was on my way back from the faculty office where I’d gone to complete my registration when I first saw you. I remember stopping dead in my tracks, mesmerized, unable to take my eyes off you. I wanted to stop you and implore you to tell me the truth– were you a goddess that had somehow lost your way and found yourself in this realm?– but I stood transfixed to the same spot, tongue-tied, my mouth drier than any desert. “What happened, man? Why do you look this way?” Timini, my roommate, asked when I returned back to the hostel. “How do you mean?” “You look… I don’t know how to put it… like you’ve just had a divine encounter.” I chuckled. “You won’t believe it. I just saw an angel.” I was right. Timini didn’t believe me. But I didn’t care at all. When I learned that we were both in the same department and level, that was the first time I believed the motivational speakers who claim that the universe is always conspiring to help us. Still, I couldn’t build the courage to approach you and initiate a simple conversation. I just felt you were way out of my league, like the distance between the stars and the dust of the earth. This irked Timini greatly. “If you love this girl as much as you say, why don’t you just tell her?” he’d hiss at me, his voice thick with disgust and impatience. You’d become an anthem on my lips and I was always singing your name to Timini that he already had a perfect portrait of you even though he’d never seen you before. But what he didn’t know was that I’d never even spoken to you, that I wasn’t sure if you were aware of my existence. But once more, the universe, coming to my aid, stepped in to redress the situation. We were both assigned to the same group for a class project. The typical outgoing girl you were, you knew everyone in the group but me. “Hey, have you been in this class?” you asked me with such warmth and exuberance that melted my heart as much as it made me more nervous. “How come I’ve not seen you before?” I didn’t answer, couldn’t answer actually. Just kept staring at you like a complete fool, the door of my mouth ajar. I wouldn’t be surprised or blame you if you’d thought of me as a bumbling klutz like the rest of the group members. However, it didn’t take long for everyone to realize that I was by far the brightest boy in the group, if not the department as a whole. It was so easy for everyone to dump the tasks on me, leaving me to camel the burden alone, especially as I didn’t complain or protest. But not you. You were fascinated with me, always asking me how is it I know so much about almost everything. It was always beautiful to sit with you for hours as I explain to you what the lecturers had discussed in the class earlier. At such times, I soared like an eagle, eager to flaunt my knowledge and impress you, and you were always impressed. You were liberal with your compliments, you made me feel alive and proud of myself. You found my intelligence intriguing as much as I found everything about you colorful – your ethereal beauty, your vivacious spirit, your down-to-earth friendliness, the only reason I was able to breathe in your presence despite the butterflies astir in my belly– but I struggled to tell you this in the same way you freely praised my wits all the time. As time passed, we became closer, spent more time together, not on books but exploring the privacies and intimacies of each other’s life. You told me things about yourself, things too fragile for public attention, things you’d shielded from the rest of the world. And I equally unraveled myself to you, and you came to know parts of me that no other soul had ever known. You were my best friend, my go-to person, and with you I felt an unadulterated peace, a complete sense of safety. It was this sense of peace that motivated me to finally open up to you and show you how I had carried you around for months in my heart, which was now your shrine. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Your voice broke as you asked, after listening to my passionate profession of love. My voice broke even more as I replied. “I… I was afraid I wasn’t good enough for you and would lose your friendship.” “No, Ayo,” you chided. “Not only are you good enough for me but for any other girl you can think of. But I’m sorry. I just met someone and I like him a lot.” I knew you were genuinely sorry and you kept apologizing as if it was your fault. “Stop apologizing,” I said, laughing. “You didn’t do anything wrong, so why should you be apologizing?” I meant those words. Then I lied. “I wish both of you the very best. I pray you find happiness and peace together.” You thanked me profusely. The air around us had suddenly grown awkward. In the days that followed, I tried to pretend that everything was okay, that I was taking your rejection– I know it’s not fair on you to settle for such a word– in stride. Because I was good with my performance, the awkwardness between us faded, our conversations no longer stilted, and once again we were friends. My performance was stellar because I succeeded in pretending to myself as well that it wasn’t a big deal. But nothing was ever the same again, at least not for me. I’d been worshipping you in silence for months, tormented by your proximity to my grasp, hindered all the while by my infantile cowardice– as Timini called it– and then you had to slip so irreversibly from my reach. I carried all that hurt within me for so long, burying it under my affected chivalry. But there’s a limit every pretense can go, a line a lie cannot cross without falling apart. I carried mine well, until the day I went to church and the pastor asked us all to cast all our burdens on God. It was tempting to watch everyone else yield and surrender their anxieties at the feet of a caring God. I didn’t know when the cord of my lie snapped, and my anguish erupted in a single line of desperate prayer. Lord, may she never find peace in another guy’s arms. With the release of that prayer, I felt such hush wash over my soul as I’d never experienced in a very long time. I knew God had listened to me. It was Timini who broke the news to me. “Ayo! Ayo!” he screamed, prancing into our room. “Have you heard already?” “Heard what?” “Ah, it means you haven’t heard. Bola is dead.” “Which Bola?” “Your Bola.” I was sure it was a prank. Not until I saw your body– or more appropriately, what was left of your body– did I believe that you were truly dead. A dizzy spell came upon me and it remains a wonder how I managed not to pass out. Someone very close to me was screaming your name, but he was using my voice. The crowd of students that had gathered like vultures around your corpse, some furiously snapping and uploading the images on social media, turned their attention on me instead. I vomited twice, not minding the flashes of camera light on my face. Your breasts were gone from your body, and in the place where your private part should be was a gaping hole. Your heart too was missing, as were other vital organs in your gut. The thought of what excruciating pain you had to endure before your soul finally drifted from your body, haunted me so badly that I couldn’t close my eyes in sleep for days. But my real torment would begin after the cops finished their investigation and it became known that your boyfriend, the one who had snatched you from my grasp, had used you for money rituals. How can I explain that when I prayed fervently the week before in church, that this wasn’t what I meant or had in mind? That when I said, “May she never find peace in another guy’s arms”, I didn’t mean for God to go this far. That what I meant to say was “May you never find peace in another guy’s arms so you can fully find it in mine, so you can clearly see how much I want to take care of you, so you’d know that no other guy could love you as I do.” How can I love you now and give you peace in death? My jealousy, reeking of selfishness, has cost you your life. And I have made God a murderer too, Shakespeare wasn’t just a bard; he was a prophet too. In the end, every love story ends like Romeo’s and Juliet’s. |
John Ebute is a Nigerian medical student and a trained screenwriter. His works have appeared in Brittle Paper, African Writer Magazine, Eunoia Review, Spillwords Press and elsewhere. A member of the Swans Collective, he was the winner of TWEIN Recreate Contest 2024 (Prose category), RIEC essay contest, NIMSA-FAITH Suicide Prevention Campaign (Prose category) and first runner-up in the Paradise Gate House Poetry Contest
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