After having my heart ripped to shreds by an immigrant worker with whom we had worked for an NGO in northern Uganda, I was quite skeptical on exploring any romantic adventures. Katherine had joined the ‘Extend a hand program’ as a social worker from California. I would later learn that she was doing her masters as a Gender specialist at a university that she mentioned a handful of times although I struggle to remember it.
We had sauntered our way into a relationship. Having acted as her liaison with the local field agents and other program officers who had deemed her English a little too fast and sometimes sophisticated for most to grasp, we had quickly become friends.
We work together day in day out, dined together and I had become her point person to explain places, people and culture if we found ourselves visiting new territories. Our bondage as friend was quickly growing, and eventually one thing led to another.
I had chanced my way into meeting her mother when she came to check on her daughter. Although we only spoke briefly, I felt a welcomeness about her. Our mini-chat largely focused on her daughter, her performance and how she was coping generally with life in the Pearl of Africa. I did point out her struggles in copying with the scotching heat in the first couple of weeks and also commended her inter-personal skills that made things easy for her to relate with others both at and away from the confines of work.
As her mother and I chatted it out, Katherine literally just laughed through the moment, often noding in the affirmative to acknowledge my assessment and frowned her face slightly once when I loosely mentioned her dark humor that I was learning to play along with.
Exactly eight months later, Katherine returned to the United States. To this day, I still find it hard to open that memory drawer to try and describe the indescribable feeling, the overflow of emotions that characterised our goodbyes the morning of her departure.
We had sleeplessly spent the night together, talking about what felt like a Bible of things, the Old Testament summarised in how she had found life in Uganda, the people, the culture and everything else in comparison to what she was accustomed to in the US. The New Testament largely revolved around how we were going to miss each other’s company, how we would stay in touch—noting the time difference, the tight schedule that awaited her back home as a working student. We discussed the possibility of me moving to the US so we can forge a life together.
But two months after her return, we had started to feel our communication start to dwindle, our spark beginning to burn out like a pencil-thin white candle on a night without power. Our video calls started to fall far between. She was preparing for exams but also working two jobs at the same time. Back home, I was also trying to grind it out with a new highly demanding job with a start-up that offered me a safe haven following the expiration of my contract with the NGO.
To cut the long story short, six months down the road, Katherine braved up and dropped what felt like a bomb. She lightly asked for some space, as though she was a player asking for a time-out in a pick-up basket ball game. It felt like a polite way of saying, “it’s not you, it’s me”. During that long call on a Sunday mid-morning, we both acknowledged the difficulty in having to sustain a long-distance relationship, the communication that was starting to feel scanty at best amidst the focus we were all dedicating to our respective careers. Seen in what came off as diluted emotions, in some part, our engagements started to feel like a mere fulfilment of an obligation, a responsibility that we owed to one another.
Knowing too well that this step often ends up in a total breakup, I could feel the crack start to develop in my heart and the adrenaline rush that characterized my body. Standing outside, with one of my shoulders leaning against the wall, face down, I felt my boxers start to gently slide down—as if I had lost some weight in a heartbeat. Speaking with what sounded like a chocking voice, although I don’t recall myself shading a tear—at least not during the call, I tried to make my case, one motion at a time, citing examples, both from movies and one in real life, how we could still keep the candle burning without having to dim it ourselves.
Although she didn’t say it specifically, she seemed to suggest that we would resume this thing we were having after she was done with school, that if the spark was still there, we would explore our romantic possibilities for the future. But I also knew that after her current semester, it would be another six months to endure through before she would finish school. For love is patient, and hence worth the wait, I knew I could do the time, like a petty one-time thief serving a sentence in a county jail. Nonetheless, it also felt in some way, that I was going to string myself along with “false hope” that by the end of school everything would be as we had hoped.
Before ending that long phone call, we had agreed to maintain a reasonable level of communication, although just as friends, as a way of keeping up with one another as we both wait. Every once in a while, we would revisit our fantasies, flirt a little and reminisced about certain special moments during our time in Northern Uganda.
But as time went by, I gradually felt the last thread that was holding the two chambers of our hearts fall away. It felt like a cut with a stake knife. It hurt, more than you can imagine. Every time I revisited some of our chats, I felt overrun by emotions. I couldn’t help it but feel that things were never going to be the same again between me and Katherine. We were now a living testimony of the saying that; “out of sight is out of mind”. Well, she wasn’t for me but I sensed that it was true for her.
After many months, I started to tell myself that perhaps it was time to move on even though I didn’t feel ready. I decided that if I was to entertain anything romantic, it was going to be casual and nothing more, rendering myself emotionally bankrupt to explorer any endeavors.
Cover Photo Credit: Freepik
R.K.Circles 