STAY SOBER

By sober, Vivian meant ‘stay without getting into an entanglement of any sort’. In her opinion, none of it was worth it. Her day could start out perfectly and end drastically all because she decided to fall in love with a boy. No, no, no, no. Actually, it wasn’t love. Love had nothing to do with her keeping up with their sad excuse for a penis, attitude, and hygiene when she could have simply used the door. It wasn’t love that made her tolerate Nkwam’s saliva-infused lips drawing close to her for inseparable moments whenever they were within the four walls of his three-bedroom apartment at Orji and outside of it. It wasn’t love that made her offer tight-lipped smiles whenever Ojong bragged to their friends about his private room expertise, when his private room expertise reeked of nothing but amateurism. It wasn't love that made her stay with Takim a while after he'd mashed her face with both his palms for disrespecting him during a disagreement that mostly stemmed from her complaints about his ill snoring attitude. It wasn’t love, it was survival. All shades of it. Vivian knew this and that was why the only way she could compensate for the error of not leaving on time, was by whining about her circumstances, while laying in the space she kind of didn't lay but encouraged. Daily. “One day, I am going to leave him.” One day, like one day was a wish, a promise she hadn’t yet gotten a firm grasp on. 

In public, she'd act tough like she was in control of the situation, but aside, she'd ask you, distraught, why you wanted her to leave things—people she’d struggled so hard to encounter in the first place. Things like leaving were easier said than done, especially for people within her social standard. By the way, her current relationship was her seventh relationship in six months. Do you know how strenuous it is to date beyond months? It is so problematic that you begin to think about which relationships happened in one month and which ones didn't. Come to think of it, was she dating one man for each month since the year started? 

Vivian’s mind was constantly boggled with a lot of questions so her movements out of her relationships were constantly delayed. Her partners, now previous, always helped her in tremendous ways, ways she never wanted to accept, ways she could only accomplish for herself on average if they left her in truth. She’d never dated a man who wasn’t benevolent to her in ways that exceeded lots of laughs and bottomless hugs. However, why she never believed she would be left semi-handicapped if the romantic male persuasions in her life decided to desert her was because; if one relationship failed, another was going to arise from the dust and spin the dynamics. She was certain of that or at least tried to appear so. After all, women who had men on the internet do it for them for less; love them, shower them with gifts, and treat them to the minimum chivalry, didn’t have two heads. She believed she was going to get her Prince Charming soon, a man who was going to fill in the boots her late father had once forgotten to wear, but in the meantime, she wasn’t going to abandon her frogs because she was in a taut spot. 

Then she met Ikoghosa who swept her completely off her feet two years and 13 nights after their first meeting and made her smile every day since then. Not for long however, her insecurities from her past relationships creeped in and she found it incredibly tricky to trust multiple things about a person who could make her believe in love again, only to make her revert to disbelief a couple of days later. With Ikoghosa, Vivian was certain she'd found her prince. The only problem was, if he and a frog stood side by side, you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. So, when she conversed with her younger sister who was thinking about getting married to a guy she had just met on Facebook, Vivian Chimaobi wagged her forefinger in her face and told her, “Nne, stay sober if you don't feel good about this thing. It is for your own good.”