LIZZIE'S WORLD: The crux of the matter

I have just arrived home from my disastrous meeting with Joseph and I am putting my handbag down to reach inside and find my phone when it vibrates just as my fingers locate it.

“Wow, Chris must be impatient,” I mumble to myself. But when I switch on my home screen, it turns out to be a message from Joseph.

‘So you left me to eat alone so that you could go and talk to your boyfriend? Ni sawa tu. Let me just enjoy the rest of my evening,’ his message reads. How rude! In fact it’s so rude that I start to text an even more rude message back in reply – and then I get impatient with how much time it’s taking me to text that I drop that and hit the ‘call’ button.

It takes Joseph what feels to me like 62,000 rings to pick up, and when he does, I skip the greetings. “First of all!” I yell. “Ey, ey, ey, mami. Why so angry?”

“What?!” I sputter. “What do you mean ‘why are you so angry’?” The condescension in my tone is potent. “FIRST of all, don’t go there with that ‘mami’ rubbish, you hear? I am not your mummy!” “Ok,” I hear him take a deep breath. “Next?”

“Next, it was YOU who started off the evening on a bad note by being horribly late!” “But the whole point of showing up was to buy you dinner so that you can forgive me. But you didn’t want my dinner. I did my best. It’s your fault the evening is turning out like this.”

“What?!” I yelp. I hate how he’s turning this into my fault when really, it’s his. “My fault? Are you insane?!” “Look. Just come back.” “For what?!” I spit. “Oh. I forgot. You have a boyfriend you have gone to talk to.”

My eyes roll so hard I am afraid I might injure my sockets. “First of all-,”“Here we go again,” he interrupts me. Nothing is worse than a man interrupting an angry woman. “Nothing good ever comes after a woman’s ‘first of all’.” I hear him suck his teeth.

I toy with the thought of explaining to him that in fact, I don’t have a boyfriend – and then I figure that I don’t owe him any explanations. Then I toy with telling him that I don’t owe him anything, except that that sounds to me like an explanation and he doesn’t deserve one. So I decide to speak frankly.

“Listen. Don’t ever call me again, ok?” I tell him. Then I hang up. My heart is beating fast and I am so livid I am shaking. I decide I might as well take a few deep breaths and calm myself down before I call Chris as I might go off on him for no reason – and we can’t have that happen a second time.

And so, after a five-minute pause during which I wash my face and change into my night clothes, I tuck myself into bed and call Chris. “How are you?” he asks softly when he picks up. What a refreshing change from my combative conversation earlier. In fact it’s so refreshing that I wish he was here so that I could collapse into his arms and field shielded from the vicissitudes of life.

“Oh, man,” I sigh. I haven’t said anything but the one thing I know is that Chris knows me enough to know exactly what that means. “Difficult evening, eh?” “Yea,” I rub my head. “I haven’t seen you all week. Have you been avoiding me?” “I mean… you know how complicated this all is,” he says after a long, thoughtful pause.

“And you’re right. There are many things I want – need – to clear with you before things can proceed one way or another. And I don’t want to cross any boundaries….” “I understand,” I say. “We should talk. My reaction the other night, when I ran off… it wasn’t what you thought.” “I took it at face value. There was nothing else for me to do.”

“I know. And that’s why I respect you so much.” I take a deep breath and take a risk. “Can buy you lunch tomorrow so we can clear this up?” And so we end the conversation with plans to meet the next day and I go to bed feeling like at least one thing has worked out in all of these past horrible 24 hours.