The Island of Lost Voices: In light of new information...

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Do two walk together unless they have agreed to do so?

Amos 3:3

Hey, welcome or welcome back to Silk + Water.

Today’s another Island of Lost Voices post, and I am sharing a personal essay that I wrote during a very difficult period in my relationship. It had seemed, at the time, as though the story I had been telling myself about it was beginning to reveal its holes. It was a time where I felt our foundations shaking because it had been built on somebody else’s unfinished business and it had me questioning whether I would have made the same decisions had I been privy to that business.

Incidentally, yesterday also marked 4 years since the night we met.

And with that, here is ‘In light of new information’ and I hope you enjoy.

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In light of new information…

by Yasmina Nuny

The love story we tell is this one: 

I was the only other black person at the show. I had come alone because I made a last-minute decision to perform that night and I didn’t need the distraction of company. Too nervous about being unprepared, I used the solitude to rehearse poems in my head. Oppy would admit to me, much later, that he and his friend had felt a little sorry for me that night, alone and surrounded by a sea of white folks, but I hadn’t minded. 

They were my biggest fans that night, as I retold personal experiences of racism at Sunday church to an uncomfortable audience. They came up to me at the end, in solidarity, to introduce themselves before I could slip away: Oppy and Safiya. I had expected the usual post-show interaction: exchanging socials, maybe a few pictures and we did those things, but Oppy and Safiya were unusual. They didn’t let me forget them or be forgotten by them and offered to drive me back home. 

I warily accepted their offer, choosing to put my faith in kindness. I had noticed them at the show for the same reason they noticed me and thought how beautiful a couple they made. In the backseat of his car, I had felt like a younger sister, listening to their bantering and bickering. They confirmed in that short journey that they were only dear friends, and that they liked my vibe. I would learn later of Safiya’s role in promoting said vibe as though we had known each other for longer than the hour it took between talking to me at the end of the gig and my getting home. 

Once in bed, I sent them a joint direct message thanking them for their kindness, assuming that it would have been the extent of our interaction, save for the occasional “likes”. But I soon found myself reacting to Oppy’s daily life, and him to my poetry life. Having scrolled through his profile, I became intrigued with his older, working man-ness relative to my final year undergraduate student. Only a few years separated us, but they were enough to convince him that I was, unbeknownst to me, the little sister I had thought myself to be that first night. 

He had told me he had been meaning to come see me again. His intentions and my interpretations were mismatched; I was excited and he, well, he liked my vibe. In a younger sister-ly kind of way. Recently single, I was excited at the prospects that someone whom I had a growing interest for might be interested in me too. So, I shelved the pact I had made with God that I would remain single for the year and wore a skirt that accentuated my figure, unclear to the unknowing eye whether it was for him or for the gig. 

In the end he missed my performance. But I became quickly enamoured with him when he decided to show up anyway.  He had come to see me! To God’s chagrin – or perhaps His amusement? – Oppy became a real love interest that night. He drove me home and messaged me the next day, inviting me for coffee. Playing it cool, I told him my last exam was coming up and I’d be free then. I bought a dress for the occasion. I spent that British summer wearing it around the city but would never get the chance to wear it on a coffee date. 

I’d had a lot to sort through in the few months after meeting Oppy. Graduate school applications awaited me patiently, not to mention I had not yet had the closure I needed from my last relationship. God made sure that I honoured our pact to give myself time to resolve the unfinished, the uncertain. At the time though, I had developed a talent for being equally excited and fed-up by my interactions with Oppy. I decided, multiple times, that I was done putting myself out there. Entertaining the idea of him was fun, having a crush was fun, but as a dear friend put it, he was a man of words and no action.

And so, I finished my degree, graduated, and left the country – albeit temporarily. As any good millennial, I shared on my Instagram an image of the porthole looking onto the tarmac and wished the UK farewell. I remember rolling my eyes when he responded to the story with “Wait wait wait… you’re not coming back?!” But his words were honey. I assured him that I would be back in September to begin my graduate degree. “Good! You definitely left too quick!” he replied. It was confusing, surely this was a man who was interested in me and yet I remained coffee-less…

Upon my return to the UK it didn’t take me long to be reminded of him. I was in town with a friend when I bumped into him. He was doing some last-minute shopping for a trip he had planned to Tanzania with a friend for his twenty-fifth birthday. Boldly, perhaps stupidly, I told him to message me when he returned, he apologised for having been so busy and hugged me tightly.

When he got back, I reminded him of the coffee he owed me. Oppy often reminisces about that moment, how it had convinced him of me. We exchanged phone numbers for the first time and, nine months after our initial meeting, we had dinner. It wasn’t a date. 

After dinner we took a three-hour walk on that cold November evening. We talked about our lives and bantered. We talked about exes and whether we were open to dating at this point in our lives. I explained to him that I had just completed my year in singleness and had closure with my ex-boyfriend. I told him about the fight that led to the break-up, how it had been about his ex-girlfriend. I told him I was open to a relationship, but that I don’t do exes. He spoke briefly about his own ex-girlfriend, vaguely enough that I couldn’t fit a timeline to their relationship. He told me that he was open to a new relationship, too. 

We had been vulnerable with each other that night, we had held hands, too. As our walk drew to a close, he hugged me tightly at my front door. I looked up and we lingered there, a strange intimacy holding us. I had let myself expect something from him, so when he kissed my forehead, I shrivelled up, feeling foolish for ever thinking that he would be interested. 

A few days later, having decidedly sworn off him forever, he called to invite me to the trampolining park. I don’t think it was a lack of self-control that kept me interested despite his apparent disinterest; when he pulled me into the ball pit that night, trapping me close to him I forgot about the last few months. Holding me, he said that he had wanted to kiss me after our walk. I told him I had wanted him to, too.

Two years on, it is the story we tell each other and others, on the days that we are happily in love. We talk about how easy it would have been to miss each other, and how our relationship must have been divinely orchestrated. We still talk about how the timing had been so perfect, how God waited for us to be ready for each other first. 

But on the days that I love him, but that I am hurt and angry and crying, I make sure that we understand our complete story. On those days, I make sure to historicise it in the context of what his life had been, to understand why the past would keep manifesting in the present and interrupting it. I had wanted our relationship to be intentional; intentionality would have required complete information and, had the blanks been filled in, I am not sure I would have decided to be with him. 

Shortly after becoming exclusive, I learned that the friend he had gone to Tanzania with was an ex-girlfriend. It wouldn’t have been so much of an issue had his trip not ended only two weeks before we first went out. I learned again, later, that the trip was intended to define their relationship, to help them decide whether they wanted it or not. All this new information made me question whether he was prepared to be with someone new, after all, it hadn’t been that long since he had been telling another woman that he loved her. 

Three months steady, his Tanzania ex called. I was holding his phone when it rang and when they spoke, I put my earphones in, feeling as though I was intruding on their intimate moment. Feeling as though the moments we had shared that Easter weekend were insignificant in comparison to her. He hung up and kissed the back of my neck, assuring me – or maybe himself – before I pulled away to ask what had happened. She had wanted to get back together. He let her down, explaining that he was seeing someone, but I was already upset. My mind fixated on the timing of it all, and my trust tested. They would have a few more talks before getting the closure they needed.

He would have other talks, too, with exes whose chapters remained unclosed, one of them even haunting our first anniversary. Whenever he opened up those chapters,  with the ‘midnight call’ ex, and the ‘poetry night’ ex to make sure that their feelings were protected, to help them process and find closure, I was relegated to an intruder in intimate moments with women who, in that moment, were entitled to him. 

It was after our year together that I recognised how much I had been redrawing my boundaries to accommodate my love for him. I would convince myself to ignore how permeable his own boundaries had been with those women and how opaque those histories had been to me. What does it mean to revisit old, unfinished chapters in the middle of writing an entirely new book? What does it mean to become the intruder in your own story? 

If I had known back then what I know now, I am not sure I would have chosen him. But what does it mean to love someone and still want a future with them, in light of all this new information?

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As always, thank you for spending this time with me and see you soon. x

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