We Are Dead Butterflies
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Oji Chidera Dickson is a young Nigerian writer from Obiaruku, Delta state. He is a Nursing student at Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University Teaching Hospital, Nkpor, Anambra state. When he is not studying schoolwork, he is reading fiction works and publishing short stories on Facebook. He says, “I write because I want to feed back the universe with the gift of writing it bestowed on me.”
We Are Dead Butterflies
BY OJI DICKSON
(c) 2024
Your heart fled into your stomach as you listened to him justifying his actions. At some point, you knew he was making sense, but then you thought about the doubts you had recently developed about him, your fears and the many red flags that had been glaring at you, which you had chosen to ignore. You bit your lips.
“Listen, Evans, I'm not saying you shouldn't catch up with an old friend, but ... it's getting too much ... see …” You gestured towards the hot amala and egwusi soup, its steam and aroma slowly stealing into the calm evening air. “You haven't even touched your food yet. And while we walked down here, you barely talked to me. You've been so engrossed with your phone, texting with that Melvin or whatever.” But he sighed, still engrossed with his phone. And your heart sank.
Every one of his sighs carried this weight of rejection that made you feel like you had made little or no sense after all.
“Na this your insecurity go kpai you one day,” he finally said, and quickly washed his right hand in the bowl of water beside the food and began eating, his phone still in his left hand. Your steeze dropped.
Maybe he was right. You were too insecure and perhaps overprotective. But your heart knew you weren't. You just loved Evans more than he loved you. He never even told you that he loved or missed you; rather, he expressed it in actions that even a mere friend could do. But that didn't stop you from loving him and telling him how much you wanted to work hard and make more money so that you both could travel outside the country, get married and live your lives. But he would just smile and kiss your forehead without saying anything. You realized your instincts were right after all. You had been a fool. You knew the truth, but you had chosen to bury it under the fountain of your love for him.
It was a Friday evening in his house, where you went to spend the weekend like you always did whenever you had nothing much doing in the hostel. He slept off that night after going two rounds with you. But he had his phone in his hands while he slept, probably chatting with someone before he slept off. The chat page was still on, and you were so tempted to check whom it was. You felt like you might suffocate and become a corpse the next morning if you didn't see the chat. And you finally did. To your regret. “I now think of you each time I'm about to cum. Even while I sex him,” his last text read. But that wasn't even what fueled your anger; it was that he had sex with Melvin already. Someone he had almost sworn was just an innocent reconnection and nothing more. You smiled. An innocent reconnection that led them both to an everlasting pleasure on the bed during the week. You felt used. You had sex with his body that night, not even his heart or mind. Your heart sank. You felt like you had wasted your time building castles in the air all these years.
What changed? you asked yourself, but the answer was always you! You changed yourself for Alabi Evans. Because you were never the type to take indirect insults, but the Yoruba, tall, dark Electrical Engineering student made you receive indirect insults from his fellow coursemates.
“Oga, why you dey do like woman?” “Why you go dey talk like woman? You no get bass?” “You even get nyash pass some women.” “Oga, you sure say you no be gay?” These and many others were often thrown at you whenever Evans' coursemates came around. And it even sickened you more that Evans often joined in to laugh at those alleged jokes. But you ignored it all for him.
“Na Naija we dey, everyone is homophobic, let's just play along,” he would beg you at night.
If someone asked you, you would have said how you slept off that night was a miracle. You thought throughout the whole night how to move on till you dozed off.
“It’s over, Evans.” You said as soon as you stretched yourself off the couch the next morning.
“Ehh?” He didn't even know where you were coming from. He still fixed a gaze at his phone.
But you had packed your bags already the previous night. You didn't want to see him beg—even though you expected he wouldn't. He never believed he was wrong.
“I would leave peacefully so you can have all the time with Melvin. But just know that this whole shit you did to me, you would still experience it from someone, maybe from the person your heart truly belongs to.” You wiped those tears, the final tears you would shed for him. And left.
He called and sent so many texts explaining how sorry he was. But you had finally made up your mind. A bold decision you never thought you would take. You knew it was just a matter of time, and you would heal. You did everything you loved doing. And sooner than you thought, you were bouncing back. At least, you started regaining your appetite. You smiled one morning on your bed as the early morning sun stole into your corner to radiate its beauty. You stared at yourself in the mirror. You never believed you were this strong. You started seeing how pretty a boy child you were, what you had never seen those few years you dated Evans. You felt sorry for the person you were before now. I mean, how could you, a young man of 23 years old, with so much life ahead, handicap your potentials for a Yoruba man of 27 who would finish school the next year and probably leave you for the West, his motherland? But that's all bygone now; you began relating well with others and smiled often. Life wasn't that bad after all, you thought!
You resumed every activity you had dropped earlier on. And you felt it was your bravery or maybe intelligence that made you heal quickly from the distress Evans caused you. No double thoughts. Life can never be tricky, you thought!
“Gozie, your vocals have really improved!” the choir mistress complimented you on a cozy Saturday evening after rehearsals. You smiled and wondered if her statement was indeed a compliment or something else, because you and everyone in the choir knew you had a great voice. However, you later realized the middle-aged choir mistress was wrong. She wasn't a good observer. In fact, everyone in the choir who had been complimenting your voice lately weren't good observers of music. Everyone realized the day you took the solo on the altar. That song, “Ave Verum Corpus” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—which you felt the lyrics resonating with you, and you sang from the depth of your heart, that finally led you to breaking into tears; and even those high pitches your countertenor voice could comfortably sing in your conscious and happy state—flopped on the altar. You realized you had been singing all this while because you wanted to be happy. You never sang from your heart. You were still a broken soul. You never healed.
You resumed choir after three and half weeks, when you felt ease of the shame you had put on yourself. Everyone welcomed you, but one person amongst those that welcomed you made you wanna search butterflies in your tummy.
“Hope you aren't still feeling bad about the other day?” His voice sent such chills to your spine, that you had to stop arranging those scores into your files and look up to him.
It was Emmanuel, the new baritone guy. You were kindled with surprise. You least expected Emmanuel to walk up to you to even start up a conversation with you! Emmanuel, that all the girls in the choir were crushing on? Incredible!
“Oh, yeah. I'm good. I mean, I wouldn't have been here tonight if I were still feeling bad. Thanks for asking anyway,” you giggled.
“It's fine. Are you going home through TYC junction?” he asked. “We can walk home together.”
Dreams come true, you thought. Your bad habit kicked in—thinking every man that is kind to you and approaches you is queer and might be interested in some sort of relationship with you. But maybe you are not fully to be blamed though. None of those men ever proved otherwise to you.
You were not going home through the TYC junction that night, but you never wanted to miss walking towards the junction with someone as charming as Emmanuel. It was a 20-minute walk, and it was as if you both had learnt everything about each other within those few minutes. He was a postgraduate student, thirty by age, into tech, had a puppy pet. What more can I ask for? you asked yourself.
You both met a few other times, either at the choir stand, TYC junction, or a TV station, where you both talked more of random things and how bad the recent economy of Nigeria was before he asked you to come to his house. And you did. You douched and smelled nice, ready to seduce him if he didn’t make the first move.
He hosted you well. A Netflix movie to see, some sandwiches and drinks you had never even tasted before. You both also talked and talked. He told you he enjoyed your vibes and loved your company. You giggled shyly. It was time, you thought.
He placed a soft brief kiss on your lips and whispered, “I love you.” The kiss was heavenly, and his breath, as blissful as talcum powder. You kissed him back and ran your hands slowly through his built chest. “Can we become a thing?” he asked, still in a whispering tone.
“No, we can't,” you blurted out.
“Why?” He was surprised. Not because of your negative response, but your firmness alongside it. He thought maybe he had done something wrong. He was eager to hear.
“Why are you guys always the first to ask for something that wouldn't turn out well, and you would spoil by yourself even before it goes unwell?” you asked rhetorically, then continued, “There's no serious gay relationship. You don't love me. It's sex you want. It is sex everyone wants, so let's skip that deceiving part of the journey of becoming a thing and move to business, which is sex–buddies. No strings attached!”
Emma was still perplexed. But maybe he somehow understood that those words could only come from the soul of a broken Nigerian gay. He apologized. But you were the one to have apologized. All he ever did was to make sure you were happy. You didn't know his story. You realized that you never healed from your breakup with Evans. Those memories unconsciously still haunted you.
Emmanuel was not the same with other Nigerian homosexuals. He wasn’t even bisexual, and was also not internally homophobic. He was just a free-living closet gay looking for true love. Emmanuel discovered his sexuality late, and that was in his twenties. He had thought that he had a thing for women till he had a chance to make out with his girlfriend. He only kissed and smooched the desperate young lady and felt disgusted already. His body remained the same, with nothing to prove that he was ready for coitus. He stopped. “Let's do this some other time,” he whispered to the lady and left.
That was when it dawned on him that he wasn't into women. But before then, he had a crush on his former classmate in high school, Onyeka. But he never knew this crush was meant to be a thing. It was after the unsuccessful make-out with his supposed girlfriend during his 300 level as an undergraduate that he summoned the courage to keep texting Onyeka and finally spilled that he liked him. He explained that he didn't realize it was something serious until later. Onyeka told him he liked him too and appreciated the fact that he reached out to him; if not, it could have been two lily flowers that sank in the river.
Onyeka invited him for a meet-up, only for him to meet five other guys in the room that beat him up, collected his phones and left him with nothing. It took Emmanuel years to recover from that traumatic incident. And what you said reminded him of that with freshness in his mind. He had fully accepted himself as gay, but all he ever got was betrayal and disappointment. And because of that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), he had never approached anyone, no matter the evidence of their gayness. He only approached you, and confessed his feelings because, as he had said to you, he felt so at home with you.
Emmanuel, however, moved on with his life, but you couldn't. You felt guilty for the way you talked to him the last time. You wanted to go to his house again to apologize, but what would he think of me? you thought. Am I the one always to be apologizing? You thought again, this time around, with a teary eye. It is always about them! What about you? You were a voice that deserved to be heard too! What if you had been right? It was only sex these Nigerian gay men wanted. Now that you were ready to play along with the game, the one you desperately wanted to fuck, wanted something serious first. But you were vulnerable with love and never wanted to go through that bitter precipice again.
At the choir, you avoided him. He avoided you too. In fact, he seldom came to the choir lately. At some point, you didn’t see him for weeks. You thought you shouldn't be worried, but you were! You truly loved him after all. Your guilty conscience never let you rest, even during your exam period, one of your most critical times as a Nigerian undergraduate in a federal university. One Saturday night after choir rehearsal, when you didn't see him yet again, you decided to ask his closest fellow baritone singer.
“Agh! Emma don leave us japa since na,” he said with surprise on how you just got to know about it and also with desperation to go meet his newly wedded wife at home.
You were shocked. How? When? You asked only but your shadow. Everyone had deserted the church premises to the various ways that led to their houses. But you sat, not even realizing the tears that were slowly escaping your eyeballs to rest on your cheeks. You let out a loud scream and burst into tears. You asked God, Why? But what best could be an answer from God to you? The poor man had left the four walls of the country that cursed his existence and caused him nothing but trauma since he knew his truth. You also caused him that trauma, but would your sentimentalism let you believe so?
You sent various texts to his WhatsApp line and even tried calling, but it wasn't going through. He probably changed his SIM card too, you thought. You felt heartbroken again. But nothing is more painful than a broken guilty heart. And, as the years passed by, you could never forget Emmanuel. You always think of him. Your heart bleeds again when you think of how he didn't even give you a second chance, as you always gave others, before he left for the whiteman's land, leaving you to carryovers from school, married Nigerian bisexuals, internally homophobic people tormenting your whole life till you probably meet the grave.
COPYRIGHT 2024 BY OJI CHIDERA DICKSON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.