My Elastic Heart Will Go On
Oyindamola Depo-Oyedokun
The day I saw him, my heart almost forgot it didn’t belong to him anymore.
How could it? How could it forget so soon how, with a string of calls and texts, he reached for it and violently cut it loose from his?
How I wept and pleaded and wept and pleaded, to him, to God, day and night for the pain to be taken away.
How my tongue learned and memorised the taste of my tears, and my eyes poured till I couldn’t see.
How my anguish followed me to my dreams, so that I woke up crying in the middle of the night, rattled that the nightmares were also my reality.
How, for days, my chest remained in a constant state of tautness, and my lungs lost their rhythm; the formerly seamless contractions and expansions that allowed me to breathe easy were no more, and I was in bed suffocating, on my knees suffocating, in the kitchen suffocating, on the streets suffocating.
How for days, my head was so hot that I wanted to yank it off my neck and submerge it in a bucket of ice just for relief, any form of relief.
How he made me question everything.
Was I not good enough?
Did I somehow push him away?
Was there someone else?
Were the words of affirmation, of reassurance, spoken to me ever-so-frequently over the last six years all lies, void of meaning?
At what point did they start being lies?
When he raised my face from his chest, gazed into my soul with an intensity that melted my insides, and told me he would never leave me?
When he wrote that he would choose me in every lifetime and in every version of reality?
When he vowed to spend the rest of his life making me happy?
When he said he would always be there?
When he said he loved me with everything he had been, everything he was, and everything he hoped to be?
Or maybe his words once held meaning. But if they couldn’t stand the test of time, it feels like they never did at all.
The day I saw him, my heart almost forgot it didn’t belong to him anymore.
Almost.
When I couldn’t bear to have my skin make contact with his.
When the feelings of elation that usually erupted in my belly when I saw him were absent.
When all we had was a wordless ride when ordinarily, I would have teased him about the shirt he had turned into his uniform, or asked what song was playing instead of going straight to Shazam, or showered him with eulogies for being the most beautiful man I knew.
When his car felt like a stranger’s.
I knew my heart did not belong to him anymore.
*
May you always remember that man might say and man might will, but man cannot always do. Man is limited in foresight and in ability and in courage, so may you always rest your heart ultimately in The One who has never been and can never be limited.
*
Life came at me fast.
I have been armed with the knowledge that life does not always go according to plan for a while now. It has helped me navigate raging seas of disappointment as though they were still seas.
But this raging sea was far too tumultuous, far too unforeseeable, and all my ammunition was devastatingly insufficient.
I thought this was the one sea I could always count on to be still. I knew – or at least I thought I did – that no matter what or where, he would always be there. In the distance or in person, but always there. I banked on this one thing. Other plans were stackable blocks that could fall apart in the tempest, but we – him and I, me and him – were rock solid ground.
And so I looked to future events of us – me and him, him and me – as certainties rather than possibilities. And I borrowed joy from those future certainties every so often.
One minute, I was stoked about attending a concert with him, being held in his arms while we rocked with the SDC, singing and shouting in unison. And the next, I was looking for how to sell the ticket to the concert because the idea of not attending with him left a bitter taste in my mouth.
One minute, I was looking forward to December 2nd because it was the day he would come home. And the next, it was just another day.
One minute, I was seeing us, me and him, me and him, in every proposal and wedding picture, eager to have our my imaginations come to fruition. And the next, I was deleting our four-year-old playlist, clearing media folders and Instagram collections.
One minute, Ibadan was our city. And next, it was my city. And his city. Separately.
I entered my city and a huge part of what made it home had always been him, seeing him, smelling him, feeling him.
But this time, I couldn’t even tell him I was in our my city, and I had to make the other parts of what made it home the sufficient parts of what made it home.
The clean, serene air and unhurriedness, friends that were like family, family, easy smiles and pleasantries like “eku ìjókòó” (because to Ibadan people, even sitting was worth greeting about), my mother’s amala and ewedu, my father’s unsolicited switching on and off of lights, the bed I slept in as a child.
One minute, I was wholly taken by someone who completed my world. And the next, I was wholly released and forced to find completeness outside of him.
*
May you always remember that life is dynamic and only God knows tomorrow. May you ride the waves as they come, ever ready to find new meanings and new pulses. May you never be stuck; the dynamism of life is a call to adventure, so venture.
*
I had to learn how to listen to music again.
For the past six years, I had listened to every love song with him in mind. He was the man in them, the object of all my serenades and professions of adoration and devotion.
He was the too-good-to-be-true baby that I needed to warm my lonely nights and couldn’t take my eyes off of.
He was the darling whose side I would never leave and whose tears I would always be ready to dry.
He was the one whom I followed down the rabbit hole to Wonderland. But even though I earnestly prayed not to, I got burnt by his flames and our fairy-tale was doomed.
Even songs that weren’t love songs were painful to listen to because they reminded me of him. Music was a big part of our relationship; shared song links, synced playlists, and car rides blasting everything from Alté to Rap to Amapiano. Our hearts were always making melodies with each other.
But now, I would have to learn to make my melodies mine alone. I would have to blot him out in favour of an abstract man, whose name I did not know, whose looks I could not picture, whose scent I could not perceive.
I would have to detach and declutter, not just for music, but for so many other parts of my life too.
It is the most arduous task I have ever done; cutting six years’ worth of strings that were tied around him loose and making room for an abstraction. I do not know that I am done with this task, or when I will be, but I know that one day, I will have to be.
*
May you never stop listening and singing along to those love songs with reckless abandon. May you continue to sway like you do, dance like you do, lose yourself in them like you do. You may not know the man in the songs anymore, but that will not drain them of their joy or beauty.
*
My friends came in shifts with hugs that made me feel lighter and words that invoked belly-deep laughter.
They brought me comfort food that brought me no comfort, as it all felt like gravel in my mouth. I paused mid-fry to weep and mid-milkshake to sob, and they rubbed my back and anchored me while I poured out my angst.
They sent me money to take myself out, ‘change my environment’, so that I could escape the bedroom walls that were fast caving in on me.
They listened as I narrated the details of how my world fell apart, almost in as much disbelief as I was because they too had thought we were rock solid ground. They expressed extensions of my anger and extensions of my confusion.
My sisters came with words, words of people who had gone ahead of me and so could see more clearly. They offered that clarity and expressed extensions of my pain.
I tried to hide my pain from my mother, but she felt it anyway like there was a phantom umbilical cord that still connected us to each other. So that even though we were miles apart and she couldn’t see me or hear me, she knew that the fruit of her womb was bearing a pain she couldn’t carry alone. She soaked me in a pool of her affection, encouragement, and prayers.
My people were my lifeline, and I held on to them with as much vigour as I could muster. If not for them, all of them, I would have kept drowning.
*
May you always remember that you are blessed in people. When a sorrow that you cannot explain weighs you down, your given family and your chosen family will carry you. They will show up in prayers, words, substance, and presence. You will never be alone.
*
It was the second year of our love when I finally stopped fighting it.
I had spent the first year tussling with our love, with him, picking fights where there were none, finding excuses to bolt because I was scared. Even then, even when I had never experienced it, I knew the potentially earth-shattering power of love, and I feared it. I wanted to guard my heart. I wanted my earth to remain in one piece.
But in the second year, I surrendered completely. I allowed myself to love him with everything I was. I stopped rolling out the permutations and combinations about why we wouldn’t work and fixed my mind on why we would. Our love would be enough, and we would beat all odds. We would do it, because there was nary a love like ours. Nary a love as pure, as strong, as glorious. I allowed myself to believe.
When my doubts reared their ugly heads, I bundled them in a bag of faith and sealed it tight. Sure, the doubts mattered, but they were no match for our love.
And I thought he was doing the same thing too. I thought his bag of faith was bigger and thicker, and he had fewer worries because he always seemed so sure, even when I wasn’t. I did not know when he stopped sealing the bag and started getting lashed by his doubts. And I think maybe if I had gotten a memo, maybe if he had said, “Oyindamola, I think I’m starting to lose this battle…” I think if he had told me that, I would have bolted, returned to my former self, and maybe it would have hurt less. Maybe it would have hurt less to be the one to do the giving up rather than the one who was given up on.
Now, I question why I didn’t let my doubts overpower me in the first place. I question why I didn’t wreck the love before it wrecked me. I question why I held on to that stupid, stupid faith.
Because do you know how sickening it is to be loved into finally letting your walls down and then have the giver of that love build his own walls to shut you out?
It is a betrayal. The kind that those seemingly crazy people who nurse wild animals as pets must feel when the same animals grow up and devour them whole. The kind that thalassophiles must feel when they are consumed by the same waters that brought them joy and peace. I have been devoured. I have drowned. And because I learned to surrender, I stopped seeing it coming.
Last to leave was a fool, and I was the fool.
*
May you never let the pain of loss close off the walls of your heart to the spellbinding light of love. May you surrender again and again because, though this love can shatter your world, it can also make it utterly whole. May you always be willing to take that risk, and may it pay off in the end.
*
My heart has broken in many ways over the course of my life.
It broke when those staff members ganged up on me when I was barely a teenager. When they cooked up lies and painted delusions as reality at my own expense. When I realised that even with all my goodness, people whom I looked up to could treat me so abhorrently.
It broke when I couldn’t go to the UK to study my dream course in my dream university in the first year. As I watched all my friends go on to live the life that I had imagined for myself while I was stuck at home, left behind in a pool of stagnancy. When I realised I had no form of escape.
It broke when I couldn’t go to the UK to study my dream course in my dream university in the second year. As I questioned whether my prayers meant nothing and what I had done to deserve this double-barrel punishment.
It broke multiple times when PCOS dealt me blows, and my body betrayed me. When I couldn’t stop the blood, or the weakness, or the anxiety, or the humiliation.
It broke in the most monumental way when my first love deserted me.
My heart has broken in many ways but is somehow still here. Our hearts break in many ways over the course of our lives but are somehow still here. So maybe they don’t break but bend.
Maybe our hearts aren’t brittle but elastic.
*
May Sia’s words always ring aloud in your ears. You’ve got thick skin and an elastic heart. You will not break, but you will bend and stretch with an ultimate tensile strength that will take a lifetime to reach. Your elastic heart will go on.
Oyindamola Depo-Oyedokun is a writer, and self-proclaimed polymath, who’s passionate about telling authentic African stories and making complex concepts plain. Her writing portfolio spans everything from news articles to prize-winning short stories, and two fiction books which have sold hundreds of copies combined. When she’s not putting finger to keyboard, or fawning over aircraft, you’ll find her chopping the life of her head.
*Image by Jr Korpa on Unsplash
