Dear John

Dear John,

She likes her breakfast warm: oats or cereal with three slices of wheat bread. For oats, she likes it salted, and for cereal, she likes to have it with a lot of evaporated milk.

You are the kind of man that would serve a woman breakfast in bed, I presume. I was not. I am not. And I do not foresee me becoming one. For this cause and a multitude more she left. This was the bane of our love affair, the reason for all the acrimony our union suffered: my person was just not wired with such romantic tendons.

Send roses to her work place and if you want to be a little extravagant, toss in bars of chocolate. I did this once or twice when that hurt look crept into her eyes; when her responses to my "Good mornings" were just a muffled "mmmhn"; when she would whimper so long in her sleep for no reason at all; when I knew her heart was drifting from me.

The roses I sent did no good in our case however, and I love to liken the belated gesture to placing a bunch of red flowers on the tomb of someone you love. They loved you once but they are gone, far gone to lift the roses to their nostrils, to smile as they smell the scents.

Now that her eyes shine and dance with desire for you, now she has walled you up in the innermost parts of her heart, it is wise you maximise the moment. I have spent residency in her heart, and I know its labyrithine routes. But at some time, my life got hectic. I felt our affair had grown to maturity and that we could overlook each others vagaries. Sadly, I lost my map and groped like a child who has lost its mother at the marketplace.

I bumped into her at the bar a fortnight ago. She sat at a table for two, glowing under the red light. You were using the rest room, she said and I was glad I was beered up enough to face her and she was in such a good mood to face her pestilencial burden. Thankfully she held back the venom in her tongue custom made for me, but the way she stared at me could curdle milk; a man in coma could have awoken by the tension between us.

But she looked good, I must confess. No longer beleaguered by her catalogue of woes. I am surprised she found the time to smear on make-up. You must be doing a good job, fella.

How do you find her nightly need to chit-chat before sleep? How do you find her snoring? In the heydays of our affair, it sounded like a sweet symphony until the fire flies died in my eyes and it became the blaring of an elephant's trumpet. How do you find her watery egusi soup? Has she taken your name to Pastor for divine confirmation?

Call me when she bores you.
I will write you again.

Dick.