The Trouble With Seeing Things Clearly

I am barely 16 when I land on a photo of the New Zealand All Black’s Jonah Lomu, this great bulk of muscle and skill, a legend in the making, carrying tennis superstar Martina Hingis -my crush of the month- effortlessly in his huge tree trunk like arms.

She is so pretty. And I am nothing like Jonah Lomu.

Of course, Mr. Lomu will in 6 months be diagnosed with cancer from which he will thankfully recover but sadly from which his professional career will never, at least not fully. This is the peak of his career, his celebrity… his moment, and he has no idea. Right now he is the king of the world and as he thoughtlessly balances my Martina on his bicep, an awkward 16 year old Ugandan boy, a ball of confusion and insecurity, thousands of miles away in a deep insignificant hole of darkness… I lose my train of thought I’m so filled with envy.

But neither of us can see 6 months into the future.

I walk around carrying that photograph in my mind: her genuinely flirtatious smile, his natural charisma flowing through every inch of expertly toned muscle, she’s probably laughing at one of his jokes and he’s probably laughing too, a bear of a laugh as he swings her about like a paper weight… giggling suggestively… my crush… my secret dream…

My enemy.

Years later, I come across another photo of Martina Hingis and I barely recognize the dream I once cherished. It’s the same face, the same rosy cheeks, the same smile even… almost. It’s the eyes, there’s a certain glow missing. Her eyes were once an inferno but now they are a chimney place fire, steadier, more reliable, more realistic.

At some point romance goes from wine and roses to beer and pizza yet the sky stays ocean blue above so we can carry on.

This girl is on my brain. Not Miss Martina Hingis, no. She’s moved on and so have I. This girl is no dream; she is soft skin and salty tears. I cannot scrape her tender ways out of my mind or her offensive jokes out from my eardrums. Round and round she circulates through my system till my very core is tattooed with her existence and there is no escaping the reality of her or the pinch of her responsibility.

She is My Awakening.

Cherish. But her friends call her Cherry. I call her My Valentine and she gnashes her teeth together for we are in mid-August and she’ll be going back to school in a week. We crowd together in the dark on the furthest corner of my bed, staving off mosquitoes and timelines, feeding greedily off of each other’s warmth as if we can feel the end around the edges of the bed and as long as we stay on it, love will last forever. She runs a toy soldier across my back, calling for back up and shouting random orders into the moonlit room and I secretly thank the powers that be for cutting the electricity off this night.

Leave the world out of it and love can be a beautiful sanctuary.

She coughs lightly into my chest then sniffles. Is she crying?

“No… it’s just… all of this… next week… you get?”

“I get.” And then nothing-… Not a single word of comfort or gesture or famous quotation springs to mind. I am naked and alone in the darkness, unable to find some white lie that will stretch love over us like a childhood blanket. Things will always be this way because even if we close our eyes, the world around us carries on; bills must be paid, fridges must be filled and hearts must not be disappointed.

All hearts except our own.

Ours are expendable.

She feels the helplessness charting through my body and squeezes tighter with her eyes shut, fighting off scenes of our future spent struggling to find time to be together, time to be in love. Struggling in vain. I want to tell her it will all work out somehow, that we have the power to live the lives we’ve always dreamed of. I want to say-

But I don’t because the trouble with seeing things clearly is that there’s no going back to ignorance.

You can’t unlearn the often weighty truths about the ways of this world. That it will go on with or without you or that there are only a few dates between wine and beer. That dreams, no matter how lucid, are still just dreams and at some point you have to work harder at fighting off the things you don’t want like homelessness or disappointment than the things you claim to cherish like midnight scrabble or tiny marching hands in the moonlight.

But always the sky stays ocean blue above us so we can carry on…