Hovering over your head part 1

It was a chilly Thursday evening in Choba Campus, at the University of Port Harcourt; it had rained for the most part of the day, and as the rain tapered down to a drizzle, Ifue and I decided to oblige ourselves a treat, just to add a little zing to the weekend eve. Tucked in our sweaters, we pranced down the flooded road, giggling away like newly recruited witches to The Crab, the famous drama theatre in Delta Park, a very busy area in Uniport by default, for the obvious reason that the female hostel was situated there. We were barely seven months old on Campus, and there seemed to be little or no time to gulp all the amazing things that the Garden City of Port Harcourt had to offer. Who in their right minds blame starry-eyed eighteen year olds, convinced that the world was their oyster?
However, I didn’t envisage another drama, an unsavoury one for that matter, neither had Ifue, after the one we watched at the crab.
“Wao, let me get it, so it didn’t happen?” Ifue’s eyes tore into mine, while her lips twitched involuntarily, one of her idiosyncrasies whenever she was upset.
“But I’m not in a hurry, Ifue” I cried. The look on her face was a clear indication that I couldn’t have won myself an Oscar.
“Well, good for you, as for me I got tired of merely day-dreaming about it, so I decided to get it out of the way” she let drop, my jaw in turn dropped.
“Did you have to, isn’t it rather early” I cried.
“I wouldn’t be waiting for one lily-livered chum of mine to approve, would I?” she snapped.
“I guess I can still hold on to mine for a little longer” I muttered.
“Great, you can even build a monument there” she said, and stuck her tongue out at me.
“Or perhaps I’m still planning how to make that day memorable” I snapped. Ifue shouldn’t have the exclusive ownership of sarcasm, no way.
“By all means, if that’s your life’s trophy” she blustered and stumped across the other side of the road. I stood transfixed as I watched her hobble along the walkway of Delta Park without as much as a backward glance. It looked more like a movie scene, only that there were no cameras on us.
I couldn’t help wondering how an evening that started out greatly turned sour, just because my friend of over fifteen years couldn’t wrap her pretty head around how I could visit a male friend and not gift him my virginity. No doubt, we had our campus fantasies, but there was no stipulation that the tops on our priority lists would be to rip our hymens, well, I personally didn’t plan along those lines or maybe I didn’t even get the memo.
As a lady on her third decade, who only recently managed to separate her ideologies from her realities, everything I thought I knew, well except for a few, now has lucid perspective, which is the essence of this short story.
I relish going back in time to my earlier years although they slather me with nostalgia. Growing up as a teenager, I had most of my expectations hover around uncertainties. I once aspired to be a singer of global repute; someone phenomenal like the late singer Whitney Houston, or slightly better. How I was going to smash such milestone from the most remote part of the Sub-Saharan extraction, was nothing my little head wanted to lose any sleep on; Mama was a chorister, so singing must be right up my alley, case closed!
But shortly before I hit my fourteenth birthday I had already jettisoned the “singer” idea, it didn’t seem feasible enough anyway, moreover, something more attractive had popped up in my head; to be a dancer of global repute. Everything I ever aspired to be, had to come with the “global repute” toga, else it wasn’t worth aspiring to. But as far as Mama was concerned, that ‘dancer’ aspiration of mine was ludicrous and had to be an indication of a huge failure at parenting on her part as an African mother, it was not in sync with our African values and culture, a dancer? What in Heaven’s name was that?
“What do you mean by a dancer of global repute?” Mama asked, and pressed the pause button on the TV remote control.
“I mean, contemporary dancer, a secular dancer if you like” I answered, trying not to make eye contact with her.
“African cultural dancer or what?” she continued, she had put off the television and I panicked, I wasn’t looking to have this ‘harmless’ dream of mine get this much of her attention, I was hoping this lousy aspiration of mine would merely slip through the cracks.
“No Mama, our Cultural dances might soon go extinct, it’s the pop culture era” I cried.
“Please, what exactly are you blabbing about?” she thundered.
“Mama, I’m talking about those Beyoncé dance moves, to be a professional like the likes of Teyana Taylor” I answered.
“Okay, you want to be dancing all over the place and be disgracing your Father and I? Who will then marry you?” she blustered, a furrow had formed on her forehead as her face contorted into a frown, in that instant I knew my “dancer” dream was already dead on arrival.
“Mama, Beyoncé is happily married with lovely kids and so is Teyana Taylor” I answered, while maintaining a safe distance. With Mama you never know which object will land on you; she was adept at hurling things at her offenders, for I was already desecrating African Culture by spewing ‘gibberish’ in her presence.
Being an African mother, her values were yet to be structured to accommodate such ‘unserious, morally-bereft’ career pathway. As far as she was concerned, the core reason I was born a girl, was to be nurtured to fit into an ‘ideal fantasy’ of some random man tucked away somewhere in the universe, waiting to surface someday and pluck me off, via marriage. And so there went out the window my dancing dream. I was as restless as I was naïve, so I hopped on another ‘dream’.
I loved airhostesses, I thought they were the cutest things to come out of creation. So, what other way would I crystallize this morbid admiration for them except to be one of them, and strut the length and breadth of the aisle of an airplane with that permanent smile of a sweepstake winner while attending to Humans of sundry continents and nationalities, I was giddy just by the thought of it. That dream, as thrilling as it was, failed to see the light of the day, because I needed to be a ‘six-footer’ to bring it to fruition; one of the lousiest fallacies in living memory, courtesy of aunty Jay, Papa’s first cousin. She knew next to nothing and I ignorantly fed off her intellectual impairment, inadvertently, my airhostess ambition fell through, sadly.
TO BE CONTD.