She was sleeping. She found herself again in a chair in his room, only this time with the added sensation that accompanied the meeting of her skin and that of Prof’s. In her dream, life began to have a pattern and she became comfortable with using the first-person pronoun for him in Yoruba. The awe with which she held him, career and age wise, dissolved into moments of passionate kisses and arresting stares, which had them giggling like teenagers later on. Soon, she became more confident and she started to call him by his first name, Eni. She stopped feeling a small lump in her throat when she did; but because she still respected his past and their considerable age difference, she whispered Eni, with a fondness that unfurled an ache in her voice each time she did. Sometimes, she would whisper, ‘Prof,’ to herself, caring less about those around her. She woke up.
Her first urge was to see Ireti. It came strongly at her, like never before, and she stood up from the bed and went to the bus stop to go in search of him that afternoon. She knew he would not be in school because of the ongoing university lecturers’ strike so she went to his house. The house was different when she got there. The co-tenants looked through her and this amplified her being a stranger in their space. She knocked on his door, remarking that the campaign poster which she had noticed on her first visit was half-torn, and elbowing it out of its former position was another poster for a concert featuring the Plantashun Boiz. She pushed the door slightly and it swung open. His friends were in the room, gathered over a bowl of rice, shirtless and laughing, until she opened the door. They were the same boys who had spied on her, laughed with—and at—her on her first visit, and now as she peered into the room, they all looked away like they had never met her.
She asked questions like someone who was trying to find the directions to a toilet in a crowded hall while trying to hide how pressed they were. They didn’t even wear a smirk, they looked at her with straight faces and answered her in monosyllables until she realised there was no way for her to get anything from them, except what they wanted to let her know: he had moved from the house. She had gone to the student union office on campus a few times but he was either not around or always too busy to see her. Ireti who appeared to be present everywhere all the time, was suddenly nowhere to be found, and she could not understand why.
‘Please tell him I came.’
‘Okay, we will. Shut the door on your way out, to keep our sanity.’
She felt a weakness in her legs and even though she knew he might not have meant it in the literal sense, she felt he had communicated to her what she feared, that he suspected she had some connection to Prof.
When Desire got home, she rolled back and forth and sideways on her bed. She thought of Ireti and considered going to tell Prof that he had disappeared and he no longer needed to worry about paternity, but this would mean returning to him. She thought of how she had sat on his stairway and wept. She waited and hoped he would fling the door open, running and shouting into the streets, ‘Desire! Desire! Wait, wait, I am sorry!’ She inhaled a gulp of air knowing how fickle imagination could be.
When she left him, she had wanted so much to believe that she had misread his intent and she was being taught a valid lesson on resilience. And then when she got home, she prayed he would come to her flat the next day to find her and apologise. Her hope evaporated when she remembered that she had never told him which block she lived in.
How could she explain her return? ‘I have come because I want to give you my address, you know, in case—’ She wiped her face with her hands and shook her head. It was one thing that would not come to pass. She wondered if he would pull her close and draw a line on her skin with his finger, as they sat together in the room. She pictured herself saying to him on one such occasion, ‘What would people think?’
‘Which people would think of us—the ones that know or the ones that don’t?’
‘What about Ireti?’ she asked.
‘What about him?’
Desire pictured herself laughing like she had not done in a long time, throwing herself into the air, leaving her weight to fall into his arms as he spoke.
The world built in her imagination, however, collapsed as a mosquito hummed in her ear. She tried to catch the insect, slapping the air.
She saw herself on Prof’s stairs once again. She thought of it as the place where her dreams became even more vivid. Desire wanted to run through the door and down to his door, banging on it until he came out to see her. She wanted him to open the door and then she would fall into his arms begging for help from the dark room of torture; all she needed was access to his home. She considered asking him, ‘Aren’t you satisfied with being in darkness now? What is the point of a light that does not shine?’ She wanted him to say he was sorry, and she would fall on his chest, and they would cry together. But more than anything, she felt she needed to run away to a place where she would not be reminded of him, or even Ireti, or anything in her life. How easy would it be to forget, was there really something called forgetting? Somewhere she did not feel like she knew the both of them—and did not care either.