STOP ONE

- I hate you! She roared

Three words only. Three simple words. And yet, they will ring bells in my head, the remnant of my silent life. I will always feel the pain, the disgust, the hatred those three words were enrobed with, especially because they came from the loved one. Many times, I returned to the Lake where they were spewed at me. I was not holding onto old memories. The bitter truth is, I couldn’t just let the grief go. It was the only pillar that remains after the flood crawled under the bridge. That Lake was the only witness of our love on the first sight, and remains the privileged taleteller of its demise. To it, I could bargain my shameful tears without shame. As an old confidante, it will blow solace to my chagrin using its waves, the wind, and birds chirping in a theatrical harmony.

How passionate were we...like all those fairytale love stories with a charming prince and a princess. Happily ever they live….sounds only plausible in an abstract world. The genuine world tells another tale. My idyllic adventure with Ghislaine, such is her name (I assume she is still alive), was not dotted with insurmountable obstacles. She had some symptoms of depression when I first met her. Her life was wedded to failure it seemed. Nothing would transform to blossom under her palms. I found her in tears, desperate, hopeless, sitting quietly on the edge of the Lake. Even her previous boyfriend had managed to break up with her alleging she was cursed(that’s what she confessed to me). I did not take into account this prejudice (proven or not), and gave her everything that could be given to a woman: love, tenderness, attention, understanding, patience, etc… . Little by little, but certainly, she recovered from her pain and began to embellish my days with her smile. The feeling of having rescued a human being out of the pit of hopelessness gave me more satisfaction than the love we shared with each other. I made her understand that I was not the best of men on earth, but for her I will give my best. And that's what I’ve done since our fortunate encounter. It’s what I was doing when a pretender, apparently more well-endowed than me, nourished her mind with caressing and shimmering promises. Easy-to-convince ears easily contaminate the fragile heart with ambitious aspirations. They cut the channel that connects the brain (the reason) to the heart (sentimental) so that they do not corrupt each other anymore.

- Between your life and I, which one are you gonna choose if the choice were offered to you? She asked me

That question might look plain to a simple minded person. Unfortunately, it was quite the opposite of the definition of ‘‘simple’’ when fate displayed that question on a golden plate in front of me. I couldn’t belittle my existence by choosing her over my life. The fairytale answer would have been: "I can’t choose between you and my life because you are my life.” I wasn’t an unscrupulous liar to vilify shamelessly the truth. I was ideally living before I met her, and would continue my dull life without her. Nevertheless, before I could give my reply to her query, she construed my reflection time as an ultimate choice. Women are curious beings.

- No more to say. Your silence is telling enough. You chose your life over me. I can’t be with someone who loves his life more than me. I need someone who can make sacrifices without a second thought. I’m sorry to tell you this: YOU ARE NOT MY CHOSEN ONE, AND WON’T BE IT EVER!

No matter the shock her words engendered, I wish she let me place a word. She wouldn’t, and worse, pushed me hard to the ground.

- I HATE YOU! She screamed before running away.

I didn’t have the strength to stand up, and run after her. Everything that follows was LESS: speechless, endless, helpless, and particularly breathless. Only the Lake showed its compassion by waving and refreshing up the air to appease my lacerated inside. It sufficed a word from my mouth to change everything, if only she didn’t rush so quickly to some inane conclusion. I guess she made her decision before even asking the question. She wanted just a reasonable reason to throw me like a filthy waste to the trash bin. Clearly she would have kicked me out of her life no matter my response. I was pained by the fact that she betrayed me after all the mountains that I had the audacity to climb for her. We did share either our joyful moments or our mourning tears with each other. Time has elapsed. No sentiment is eternal. There are two types of love. The first is a balloon filled with air that deflates and shrinks with time. The second is a seed that grows up and blossoms if planted and watered with care. I was victimized by the first.

Move on from my old demons, as well as all the bitterness that was accorporated with. From my home country Togo, my loner quest led me to Minneapolis(Minnesota, USA.) For the instinct of a bruised man like I was, it is more than a city. It symbolizes that sanctuary where you exhale peace after crossing a swirling desert. Minneapolis is not just remarkable by its splendor and sublimity, but also by its opacity. Located in a State endowed with a strange climate(where you can be roasted in the morning by the sun, molested at noon by the rain, and combusted by the cold in the evening), Minneapolis remains one of these places where the predictable and unpredictable walk hand in hand as old enemies. In fact, this strangeness adds a solemnity to the living conditions in the city. The impression that sometimes the fairies responsible for the Fall go astray and orient themselves to the summer, or the gods of the Winter may have trouble giving up their seats to Spring's archangels makes Minneapolis a city where magic is not hidden under wood's barks. I discovered it with its highs and lows, manners and taboos, vices and biases, dualities and pluralisms, charms and repulsions. I came to it after closing an ominous chapter of my life that left my heart with its deepest scars ever. Its discovery made me discern a new lexiconic boundary between "literal" and "figurative" that is not conventional to the respective definitions that I knew to them. So quickly that one discerns the limits, so quickly dispels the confusion.

I visited places, encountered people, contemplated wonders, and also was shocked by all the "out of the ordinary". People? I saw all the races, all lengths and widths, all sizes, all colors, then realized that there couldn’t be such a diversity without a mesh of discrimination. Men! Their footsteps are rhymed by the tic tac of the clock … always catching up with the weather… that's my impression. They are running incessantly. They do not dwell on futility. The American dream is not a horse to which one attaches a lasso to hold it back. You must work efficiently hard to achieve. You will earn it at the price of great sacrifice and rigors. Every man for himself, God for all: an award winning motto hidden under the transparency of a desire for equity and equality. My biggest burden was the language. Trying to decipher this language so foreign to my ears seemed an impossible mission at first. It was visibly enthroned in majestic and distant spheres far from the one I had learned in my native country. Whatever the cognitive effort I provided in the first few months, the only words I could distinguish were "fuck!", "shit!" along with “the hell!”. These words kept coming back in almost every conversation as if they were the foundation of the American vocabulary. Later, I learned for example that the word "bitch" which appears commonly vulgar can be used in several contexts. Depending on the intonation of the voice, this word can express hysteria, joy, exclamation, surprise, questioning, disappointment .... and so on. Over time, I learned to understand. I learned to decipher the codes, the puzzles, the charades of this language, which is so fascinating and complex. Sometimes I feel like grinding pebbles when trying to speak.

Of those places I had the chance to veil healthily with my shadow, one strangely took a special importance by the enrichment it brought me. The place itself has nothing special. It is useful for some people like me who do not have the privilege to own a gear, and indispensable if you don’t know how to drive. I have accumulated more practical knowledge on that place than I have accumulated over all the years spent on school. All my adventures revolve around this place. This place is so humble, and yet replete with enumerable riches if you extract the essence as I did. Over the course of the day, stories, anecdotes and tragedies have been accumulating around this place. They enriched my life either by the revolt or by the humor that each event aroused. It will certainly enrich anyone of the readers who takes the time to dissect these stories as the hulls of peanuts. That place I have highly spoken of above is the Bus Stop. In my home country I had a Lake, here in the USA I have Bus Stops. This story is the first of a series I will be writing about all the events that happened to me at the bus stop.

I started this narrative with love as a topic. Obviously, it’s a noble sentiment filled with an ecstatic breeze of passion and madness when it’s fully lived. However, how unbearable and excruciating is the pain when you can’t afford the risk to stain your feet on that muddy feeling. The fear of betrayal, the dread of a limitless unknown, the apprehension of collision between a resurrecting past and a fragile future coerce the lonely soul to dodge the strings of that so-called sentiment. Words don’t always bear the vigor to express it when it jumps to your neck while you are unlikely waiting for it. Being a loner for such a long time increases the amount of time it takes to discern the nuance between the emotions. How to portray the beats my heart mastered when I first saw her at the Bus Stop. More than a goddess, she was showered from the soles of her feet to the apex of her head with gorgeousness and mightiness. She was modeled with the finest muds the gods ever created. She was fresh like a rose petal drenched by an early dew, furthermore majestic like a white stallion galloping on the wind of Kalahari desert. Even though her prettiness blew my mind and its shock current flowed down to my heart, I diverted it and spewed it on the smoke of a sneeze. I closed my eyelids, and in the same manner, locked my heart to avoid being penetrated by the sweetness of my discovery. Nevertheless, it didn’t fully prevent my naughty eyes from admiring her every time they had the opportunity.

She regularly has in her hand a creepy satchel made obviously from straw residues. For days, I wondered about the secrets that satchel was holding. The satchel itself doesn’t have any printed symbol that lets one guess its eerie content. Truth be told, sometimes I focused my discreet attention more onto the bag than its owner. My intuition didn’t rest murmuring to my elusive sight that valuable “things” were hidden there. I longed to see them. One fine day, the bus was so late that Sir Boredom coerced her to finally unzip the satchel. I turned my face away in a desperate manner to delay the instant I would satisfy my burning curiosity. It didn’t last long. My head rotated itself without my permission. She was perusing a pile of canvas with terrific drawings that she pulled out from the satchel. I could feel a venom of an uncertain satisfaction illuminating her eyes. She got that look only rigorous geniuses scrutinize their masterpiece with. A gaze tainted with a homogenous mix of criticism and fulfillment. It suffices to say she was talented if those canvases were the fruits of her wombs. I delighted myself cherishing the mix of colors, the shadow of creativity, the sweat of interminable hard work that were reflecting on the canvas. If she was able to exteriorize such a beauty and dash it on canvas, how much her heart must be overflowed with beauty. I wanted to shout out my astonishment, but the heart(mine) wouldn’t open the valves to do it. I was forbidden to spit up any compliment.

How cute of her to be an artist painter. I was an artist too. The schism between us wasn’t huge. While she plays with colors, figures, shapes, simultaneously I play with words, phrases, expressions. Both of us dig our inspirations from the abstraction, routine and life-based experience. My mouth spices up with excitement to let her know about that fact. I was consumed to tell her how her canvas drew whims to my imagination during my writing journey. I bet it could work the other way. My writings could trigger her creativity arousal and make it grow wider than ever. Together, as an ocean and its waves, she(with her painting art) and I (with my wordy art), we will grow wilder by inspiring each other. The encounter of two separate destinies fusing to an artistic chemistry above human conception. We will conquer the entire world weaponized with crayons and inks. I wasn’t in love. It was something far bigger than love. It was sort of a mixture of a deep passion, a deathlike desire, a tormenting wish that haunts a solitary heart, leading him to a chronic depression. I was searching for the same feeling as a masochist walking over a sparkling fire. I was a ship that wanted a horrific wind to drive it to the abyss. Later, a little bird whistled her name to my ticklish ear: Sheila. What a suave name her parents had the sweetness to give her….S as Sweet.

That day, it suddenly started snowing with violent blows of frost. As you know, Minnesota’s weather is unpredictable. No sign would have warned ones about the snow’s downpour. The sky was pale blue that afternoon. Some white cumulus were zig zagging on the sun’s face. I was already underneath the Bus Stop shelter when the snow downfall began. Sheila was standing four or five feet in front of my shadow. She moved backward to protect herself from the heady wind. While backing up, she inadvertently hustled me. Instinctively she rotated back and said

- Oh excuse me!

I gently replied

- It’s okay.

She turned back again with an awkward gaze towards my face

- I wasn’t talkin’o’yo a**hole!

I got more confused than I was surprised. Who wouldn’t have thought like I did? That she was apologizing to me.

Though she continued her solo diatribe

- Yo’moron.... who would like to talk to a piece of shit like you.......freaking a**hole! Piss off Piss off Get lost! Bastard…Pfffff…….bufflehead……Pffffff……... jerk… One must be taught respect...Jackass…Pfffffff…...retarded....one must learn to mind his business...Pfffffff…….Stalker...

I bore all the disrespectful insults without twittering or chattering a word back. I was trying to understand how and why a simple « It’s okay » could elicit such a belligerent reaction. My reply wasn’t worthy of aforementioned hatred and wordy massacre. The most horrible insults in American English, I was learning them from a woman. A woman I thought to be overfilled with beauty, love and kindness of heart. Comparison is not reason, says an old diction. There are two types of people. The first are white demons. The latter are dark angels. This time I was the victim of the second. Indeed, I realized the plain sooth I was not born to deal with women. I understood there will never be a sane relationship between women and I.

When my bus came, I jumped inside to flee the filth. While leaving the Stop, I turned my head to throw a last farewell look to Sheila only to notice the presence of wireless earbuds on her ears. They were hidden by her puffy hair. I couldn’t see them, of course, because I was facing her back. She was singing the whole time. Those crude and sassy words I have heard her rhyming were apparently the lyrics of some notorious music the young Americans are so fond of. Maybe once again I was wrong.