There’s a scene in the Nigerian film Alter Ego, where in the middle of Lagos traffic in broad daylight Omotola Jolade-Ekeinde’s character pulls her driver into the back of the car with her and they have a quickie. I have done that and the person was not even my driver. I have also joined the mile-high club with a total stranger in an airplane and count that as one of the most exhilarating experiences I have ever had. I have even let someone I only met at a party fondle my breasts and even finger me in a corner without ever asking him his name or divulging mine. I have had countless one-night stand situations it is not just awkward but also criminal to even begin to count.
So, I have been there and done that, which is why when it came to settling down, sex was no longer a consideration for me. Feeling that I already had all the sex that would last me a lifetime, I told myself, “Ronnie, this is your chance to make the choice of the very pick of the pack”. What was paramount for me then was to find a man who would provide every luxury of life but also be at my beck and call. I can tell you free that such a task is not an easy one, perhaps even impossible. I think that, and I am not an expert here (who is in this game of life anyway?), what you want dearly perpetually eludes you. I may have picked up Lagos and given it a vigorous shake but no man dropped out. But if you keep at it, searching for what you truly desire, there is every likelihood that you may one day find it. This is the story of my search for love after grabbing life by the balls and telling it what to do for the longest time.
Don’t get me wrong now for I’m not the kind of girl who thinks that she is nothing without a man. I can and have been able to make my way and if my path and that of Bright didn’t cross, life would not have ended for me.
I found Eugene first. Or to put it more correctly, we found each other at a friend of a friend’s birthday party. It was not my kind of crowd but I was bored so I agreed to accompany a colleague to the shindig. It was someone’s 50th birthday and everyone who was someone in the corporate world was there. We found each other in the kitchen of the big house where the party was taking place in GRA, Ikeja.
“What do you think you are doing hiding back here?” were the first words he ever uttered to me and I felt that he had searched my heart and knew my every thought.
“I’m not hiding, I just came here to get some water,” I replied feebly.
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell a soul if you don’t tell. It will be our secret. By the way, my name is Eugene. I’m a printer,” he said.
“I’m Ronnie,” I said, “I work in advertising”.
And so our encounter began. The wildest romance if ever there was one complete with sound track, first date, first kiss, exhilarating sex and all the promise that a true comingling of minds could ever bring.
But first, I don’t think that anyone should outsource the search for personal happiness to someone else as only you know what makes you happy. So, if I have so far given you the impression that someone else will leave their own quest and try to make you happy, then you should perish the thought. Not even the kind of man I was looking for can make you happy. The best he can do is be an enabler of the said happiness you are looking for. Finding your own happiness is your personal duty, which you should never abdicate. You should go for it night and day, never resting too long from the effort. And every step of the way in my life, I have done nothing but search for it. Eugene popped up on my radar while I was still searching. Thinking I had found the one, Mr Right, I let my guard down too quickly and before long we were cohabiting. That was the first time I would move in with a man. But it did not last. We wanted different things. Where he used to be in my life now I see emptiness. I guess there is just no easy way to break somebody’s heart.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Eugene told me one cold April morning. To be honest, I can still feel the chill even though I like to say that I have moved on. Some people just cut you so deep you take forever to heal.
“I’m seeing someone else,” he said.
“But,” was all I could manage. Eugene didn’t tell me the whole truth. When he said he was a printer he meant that he started life as a printer. Now he was a businessman who supplied many of the printing machines in the country. He had gone to printing by choice having come from a well to do family so he was a womaniser and one of Lagos’ most notorious bachelors who had only been bidding his time with me. But it hurt to think he would pick someone else over me. All though his action stopped me in my tracks, but move on I did.
I had barely finished processing my loss when Bright came along. For a long time, I paid him no heed. To be honest, he had always hovered at the edge of my existence but my eyes had been trained on something else. But as my mum would say, “what is yours is yours and no one can take it from you.” That is exactly how it happened even if I never agreed with her on that.
I was heading home from work one full year after Eugene made his dramatic exit from my life when someone in a car splashed water on me. I liked to walk the last few paces to my flat in Surulere and was doing just that when his car, a Rav4 ran into a pothole and displaced the dirty water all over my body ruining my cream dress. Served me right for wearing such a dress on a rainy day.
He turned out to be someone in the neighbourhood I have run into in the supermarket and other places around, who never failed to say hello. Well, after he apologised profusely and gave me a ride home, we have never stopped seeing each other. This is the life and nothing that came before prepared me for the bliss that I have with Bright. He is very much a marker that demarcates me life into a before and after. What is more, the sex is out of this world.