Broken Spell

~ livelytwist

Broken Spell

When my eyes first met you, my heart asked, “Is he taken?”1 I followed your form as you picked a bottle, read the label, and then returned it to the shelf. You stood in the corner with the display lights softening your features; I knew you were the answer to my loneliness, the catharsis for my emptiness.

Before my head could formulate an answer from empirical data, we were walking along The Seine hands touching occasionally as we drew closer to insulate ourselves from other lovers meandering on the way.

Je t’aime. I love you in French. You say it first because you are not afraid. I repeat after you because now I am sure that one plus one equals one and that I have not dieted in vain. My wedding dress is an hourglass while your tuxedo is white and your groomsmen wear black. The tears on my face have only little to do with the pinch from my stilettos and more to do with my realization that heart, happiness, and home, begin with h.

Dark. Because on our wedding night, the stars do not shine. It does not matter as our love lights the way. The vanilla-scented candles I poached from Efe’s wedding gifts, which I was supposed to guard, make our shadows long and lean, as they became one. I sleep in your arms drowning in your scent and dream of vanilla ice cream. It is your breath, not fluttering butterflies, on my stomach that makes my eyes open as the sun rises to greet our love. Small wonder that we plan for maternity leave so soon after our honeymoon.

Four. The number of children we will have. Two boys and two girls. One of each gender on either arm, yours and mine. But in this economy, where purchasing power can be as uncertain as Russian roulette, two will have to do. His hands will be firm and kind, her hands will be dexterous and warm; our children will mirror the best of us.

A decade or two. We will wait before returning to The Seine. With the Eiffel Tower kissing the sky and glowing in the river below, you will whisper, “Je táime,” and water our love so thirsty branches will bud and grow anew.

When my eyes first met you, my heart asked, “Is he taken?” You cocked your head my way for one second. Blood rushed to different parts of my anatomy. I took my sit behind the counter and looked everywhere but at you. I asked the woman in blue if she would like my help.

I sensed your presence as you filled the space in front of me.

“Miss,” you looked at my chest, my face bubbled like tomatoes in stew as our eyes met and held, “Abe- yi- wa?” you looked down at my name tag again, “Abieyuwa?” Your eyes danced first and then your lips followed so I saw how perfect your teeth are.

I nodded like a yo-yo, my head bobbing up and down. Yes, yes, yes, take me as I am!

“My wife asked me to―”

“Oh shit! Damn!” How could I not have seen the wedding band?

“What? W-h- w-h-a-t?” You looked like a little boy who had lost his toy, stammering as his mother asked where.

“Ngozi, Ngozi! Ngozi!” I gave her the look, “please help this customer. It’s time for my break.”

I went outside and stood in the sun. I let the light breeze flush you from my mind.

 

©Timi Yeseibo 2014

***

This post is the consequence of reading too many Mills & Boon romance novels when I should have been solving algebra in secondary school. Seriously, I started thinking about relationships after laughing at Naijarookie’s depiction of the way men and women think. But when I read the opening verse of Jazilah Ali’s poem, Broken Spell, I knew I had to add my two cents.

 

  1. Broken Spell – Verses About Walking Away From False Love by Jazilah Ali

http://www.lyricaltreasure.com/broken-spell-walking-away-love-poem/

 

All people illustrations and vectors by Microsoft

Design: ©Timi Yeseibo 2014

 

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Timi Yeseibo and livelytwist.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

66 thoughts on “Broken Spell”

  1. Aha! If there ever is a movement for men to wear the tag “married or engaged or in a relationship” on their foreheads, I will support it..yes I will, too many broken spells can be avoided.

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  2. Lol Oh no, But this is me. I can see into the future. I can tell how it would be on our first daughter’s wedding day. But then, he’s taken. I enjoyed this very very much.

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  4. I can totally relate to the girl. Sometimes, I see some guy that I fancy and immediately plan our wedding and where we’ll live and the number of children we’ll have and then his girlfriend will walk up to him and I’ll be rudely pulled away from my fantasy.
    Sigh.
    I feel her pain, and I laughed at the end.

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      1. Sorry. I don’t understand your response, Timi.

        My comment stemmed from the illustration you used, and the fact that she envisioned having children with him before they’d had sex.

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        1. Oh Nancy, you know how you meet someone and you sort of like click? I felt as if we were together, and didn’t need to set context. I’m sorry. We’re on the same page. I meant that Abieyuwa was being presumptuous 🙂 Certainly not you, no way!

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  9. Timi, you are good. 🙂 And it is official, you are a hopeless romantic.

    The Mills & Boon really did get to you… in a good way. I also had my fair share of reading under the table by the way. 🙂

    Thank you for sharing my poem. I am honored to be showing up here at Lively Twist.

    Cheers.

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    1. Thanks Jazilah for writing it in the first place. Love, romance, attraction, etc, so universal that we can all relate. Perhaps romantic love, though valid, is a pointer to something else our hearts are yearning for. Yeah, give me a love story any day. 🙂

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  10. LMAO!!! Ain’t nothing wrong with checking out a beautiful brother, my sister. *don’t tell the church* 😀

    But you should’ve stopped at the pinch from your stilettos and the stolen vanilla-scented candles… I will NEVER make that mistake again. Ever. The mistake of dreaming about his babies is very costly.

    I predict she’s going to need therapy to snap out of this. Oh—and some in-service training hours to brush up on her rusty customer service skills! Lol

    P.S. Timi, are you in love? Just asking oooo!

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    1. Lol, no, I won’t tell! @costly mistake, uh-uh 🙂
      Remember that song, the heart is not so smart, goes where it should not go? I guess therapy cures it!
      p.s. I am always in love . . .

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  12. Lol..i was soo into the story and soo happy reading it that even tho the title had suggested the ending to me it came as a total blow when i finally got to it….i loved every bit of it..but i must say, i think it’s high time u stop teasing us a bit and give some good old “happily ever afters”!!! dont u think? I’d really love that..

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    1. I’m glad that you were soo into the story.

      It’s interesting that you should mention good old “happily ever afters”. I had a similar discussion just this evening, where I argued that this story has a happy ending. I mean, what was the alternative? Hooking up with a guy who is already taken 😉

      The premise of this post is our tendency to put the cart before the horse in relationships. I remembered how my friends and I would analyse the inflection with which a romantic interest said something as simple as hi, and arrive at conclusions that had their basis in our love-struck imaginations.

      But I hear you Prissy. If I search hard enough, I could find a Mills & Boon novel. Would you like one? Just teasing 🙂

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  14. Happened to me severally, I even got emotionally attached to someone lately, who was already involved with another, but i just couldn’t get her of my head…

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  17. O my gosh! You totally killed this one! Had me spell bound until the end!!! This post is pure genius! If I was from warri, I would be “degwo-ing” for you!

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    1. Aw, sorry I had to break the spell. But isn’t it like us to build castles in the air and call it hope? 😉

      Tamkara, you are generous with your praise. Thank you.

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  19. Dammit Timi, I dreamt for a moment there and yet a tiny voice kept saying, this is too good to be true….just wait for the punch.
    Does that make me a pessimist or a realist? I wonder.

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    1. I’ll include humour in the tags. I didn’t think the story was funny as I wrote it; ridiculous, yes. But reading it again in the light of the comments, I have to laugh. Thanks Eric.

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      1. You have a way of capturing the anxieties we all feel in matters of romance and relationships. We laugh because we know how foolish it all feels and how hopes and plans seldom work out the way we expected.

        Keep it up!

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  21. Lol! Love the way you jolted us back to reality. Its amazing how far our minds would dare to travel without rules when we just let it run.

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    1. I am, aren’t I?
      With the Eiffel Tower kissing the sky and glowing in the river below, you will whisper, “Je táime,” and water our love so thirsty branches will bud and grow anew. *sigh* 🙂

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  23. This story reminds me of the short story Sexy in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. Young lady meets married man in a shop, but this leads to a different place.

    I think it speaks a lot of her that she stopped her reverie when she saw the ring. Most people do not see that as a problem to pursue their fantasies these days.

    If I was able to change the human psyche, the first thing I’ll touch is our proclivity to make many assumptions and choices based on physical attraction.

    Well written story. But I’ll stay being Oliver Twist.

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    1. @making assumptions etc based on physical attraction: my thoughts exactly. I gladly agree that physical attraction is pretty important but if it doesn’t come last, we’ll mess a lot of things up in our decisions.

      Good point, bro.

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      1. I read the story. I liked the prose- simple, engaging, effective.
        Young lady meets married man in the shop . . . I enjoyed the honesty in the account as well as the pin that burst their bubble of two. Thanks for the recommendation.

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  24. Beautiful story. 🙂

    Now for that lesson, hehe…. 😀

    I saw a post recently on an online forum. The poster was talking about how she’d fallen crazy in love with a married man and had no apologies for it (not that I see a need to apologize for how one feels about anything or anybody). I think she really thought that she should be apologizing for her unwillingness to not act on those feelings. She insisted that if the man wanted her then he was unhappy in his marriage and why should she feel bad about being the one that makes him happy?

    I remember thinking right then that that was a clear lesson about the true nature of love. I don’t believe that everyone you meet is a potential something to you. And I have never seen it proven that it is so. The very people who insist that you can’t choose who you love are the ones who keep on dating the same type of people over and over again. If you can’t choose, shouldn’t you be able to date just anyone? Why do people tend to date people who share some characteristic – bad boy/girl, nice/shy boy/girl, tall and athletic, average and muscular, hint of danger, brainiac etc?

    I think you choose whom you love. I have never seen feelings that drive you so hard that you can never rule them. If we were truly driven by what we feel, the world would be chaos, wouldn’t it? We would recognize no moral boundaries and acknowledge no intellectual limits, would we not?

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    1. @I don’t believe that everyone you meet is a potential something to you- food for thought. Well, Abieyuwa felt as if she could control her feelings, that perhaps she could “choose who she loves,” for she “let the light breeze flush him from her mind.” Or did she? 😉

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      1. Lol @ did she? Emotions are hard to control no doubt. But, if they really are like kids, my brother’s kids, for instance, they can and want to be ruled. Like with my brother’s kids, they’ll raise hell when you refuse to give them their way, but if you ignore their fury and put your foot down, over time – weeks in those two hurricanes’ case – they start to listen and even defer to you more than to those who are pushovers for them. I’ve seen it too with my emotions.

        I feel rather strongly about things. And when I’ve put my foot down, the emotions don’t automatically die: they take time. Even when I think they’ve gone to sleep, they flare sometimes and I have to maintain vigilance. But the more unyielding I am, the more control I have over them.

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  25. Hehehe. Of misdirected fantasies and aborted daydreams.
    Perhaps, she’d (next time) have altered the question to “Is he NOT taken?” before letting all imagination run (romantic) riot.

    A good one, Livelytwist, especially the subliminal touch to this.

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