If you haven’t read the first part of this story, here’s the link. Kindly read it before starting this one.
After calling off the wedding, I knew the days ahead were going to be difficult. I knew a lot of people will come to me and share their views. Some will support and some will say I should exercise patience. I was prepared for all that—or so I thought. On the day that was supposed to be our wedding, I had a call from a long-time friend. She said, “I’m at the location of the wedding but there is no one around here so I thought I’d come to the wrong location. I called the number on the invite and he told me the wedding didn’t come on. Alice, what happened?”
I said, “Sorry you didn’t get the message but it’s a long story.” She said, “I get it. You might be going through a lot right now. Please heal. Whatever the reason is, I pray it’s for the good. I have something for you. I won’t go back with it just because the wedding didn’t happen. Can you send someone to come for it?”
I sent my junior brother to go for it. Minutes later, he came back with an envelope. I opened it and it was money. I smiled. I said, “Just what I needed.” I called to thank her. The following day, I pack few things and traveled to our hometown. I needed peace of mind to assess my life and see how much is wasted and how much I could recover from the wreckage. I felt very lonely while I was there. Ben called me. He was still apologizing. I told him, “I’m ok. I’m not angry. I took that decision for both of us. What’s marriage if the two of us can’t be happy?”
The days I spent in my hometown was supposed to be my honeymoon days but I spent it being lonely. I called the office and told them I was returning to work earlier than scheduled. My boss didn’t agree. She said, “You can’t use work to hide away from the situation. This is the time to cool down. Stay your leave and come back stronger.” I spent three weeks in the village, thinking I could run away from the thoughts of disappointment and heartbreak but those thoughts followed me there.
When I returned, Ben called again. He asked, “So what happens to the place we rented?” I said, “You can live there if you want to but I won’t.” He said, “Then I’ll tell the landlord to rent it out so we could get our money back. A few months later, he called. He said, “The landlord got someone to pay for it. You can come for you your share.” I said, “I can’t come so send through mobile money.” He said, “No that won’t be right. Apart from everything, I want to see you too.” He was doing everything just to meet me and I was also doing everything just to avoid seeing him. I was running away. eventually, he sent the money and after that, he didn’t call again.
We called the wedding off in April 2018. Around December same year, Gyamfi proposed and I accepted. He wasn’t a new person to me. He had been around for a long time and knew my story very well. It’s the reason why I said yes to him. I felt it was safe to fall in love with people who already know your story. If nothing at all, they’ll live their lives trying not to repeat your story. Apart from that, he was a great guy who was known by my parents because we were in the same church.
On Christmas day, Ben called to wish me Merry Christmas. There were a lot of pauses in his speech. As if he was trying to tell me something but wasn’t sure if he should tell me. He asked, “Are you ok?” I said, “I’m doing great.” He asked, “Are you happy?” I said, “I’m more than happy.” He asked, “Have you found someone else?” I said, “Yeah, a few weeks ago.” He was quiet. He said, “I can’t believe you can move on this quickly.” I said, “I don’t have to mourn the death of a relationship forever. No matter what there would be moving on. I decided to do it earlier than later.” He sighed and said, “Anyway, Merry Christmas once again.” I responded, “Same to you.”
He dropped the line and I immediately regretted the fact that I told him I’d found someone else. “I shouldn’t have told him that. It will hurt him.” Then I said, “Why should I care if it hurts him? After all, he was the one who hurt me first.”
Gyamfi filled the void perfectly to the point that I forgot I was once with Ben. He was the reason I could share my story with you the first time because talking about it didn’t hurt any longer. But somewhere somehow Ben always had a way of appearing out of nowhere to destabilize my emotions. One day he called. He said, “I think I owe you this explanation because it’s the reason why we ended up the way we did. I’ve made peace with Agyeiwaa and her family. I’ve gone for the drink I presented to them. I’ve apologized for my mistakes and they’ve made me perform the necessary traditional rites so they could wash their hands off the whole thing. Going forward, I have no bone of contention with her. The child would be born. I’ll take up the responsibility and that would be all.”
I said, “If it makes you happy, then that’s fine.” He asked, “You don’t care right?” I said, “What differences will my care make?” He said, “Anyway, I felt you should know. How’s your boyfriend?” I said, “You can’t ask about him. I don’t like that.” He said, “Sorry.” And then he said bye-bye and dropped the line.
Gyamfi and I started having issues with commitment. He blamed everything on me. He didn’t waste time bringing in my past whenever we had misunderstandings. “You didn’t heal from the past,” he’ll say. One day he wanted sex and I told him I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. That also turned into lectures on my past. “You’re always not in the right frame of mind. It looks like you’ll never heal.” I said, “It wasn’t a good thing after all to date someone who knows your story. They use it against you when things go wrong.” I told him on several occasions to drop that conversation on my past but he kept the wheel grinding until January 2020 everything came to a standstill. We both knew it wasn’t working but we were not willing to make it work. We kept going in circles until I decided enough was enough.
When I told him I couldn’t continue, he said, “Fine.” I asked, “Fine? Is that all you can say?” He said, ”What do you expect me to say?” That was the end of us. I said to myself, “It will never work for me so I will go solo. We were not all meant to move with someone. Some of us are meant to do it solo and I will.
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During the lockdown, Ben called me. He asked, “Are you alright?” I said I’m alright. He said, “It’s been a while. I called to check up on you, especially now that everything looks like the world is coming to an end.” I said, “It’s an old world. It’s not coming to an end anytime soon.” He said, “Be careful. I said, “I will.” A week later, I called him. He said, “You calling me? That should be my testimony in church when the church opens.” We laughed about it. I said, “We are not enemies, are we?” He said, “Yeah, we are not but you don’t call.” We had a very long conversation. In the end, he said, “I mended my ways but you never forgave me. I said, “It was too late.”
Then he said, “I didn’t tell you this. I thought it wasn’t necessary but I’ve patched things up with Agyeiwaa. The reason I wasn’t going to marry her was you and you were no longer with me so I decided I would rather be with her and her child than start something new all over again.” “Wow, that’s nice,” I said. He said, “Yeah, now it’s her mother who is proving stubborn but I know she’ll soon understand.”
From that day, I stopped talking to him. I wasn’t angry. I was only trying to reciprocate his friendship but that new development meant he needed focus and I was the wrong person to give him focus. He said he was going to do it for his son so I wished him well.
–Alice
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