“We don’t choose who we fall in love with. It just happens”

Marilyn Ossai

Quite a while back, when I first heard this quote, I generally expected it to be one of those truly messy, to some degree exaggerated, statements on affection from excessively delicate fans of the inclination. I never really plunked down to concentrate on the profundity of it.

I became an unwilling victim to the wild crazy force that happens to be unforeseen love when I left my hometown in Onitsha to Abuja, the country’s capital for my university education.

That was where I met Abbas, my solitary love.

I surmise I never genuinely knew or comprehended what love was until I met him. We got going as study pals before we really turned out to be adequately close to be our dearest companions.

Abbas wasn’t the most handsome young man I had seen in my life, no. He seemed to be a piece of art, wonderfully made and built to cause you to feel something when you behold him, and he did make me feel something.

He was my craftsman and possessed my heart.

Believe me, I tried not to fall for him. I made as respectable an attempt as I could to keep our relationship stringently non-romantic; however, this proved considerably more troublesome when he admitted to caring deeply about me.

Presently, this might seem like the ideal romantic tale: pure, reciprocated love and all that. Be that as it may, it truly isn’t. It’s the farthest thing from that, even.

I come from areas of strength for a family, where my dad even ministers to his very own congregation. All of my life, I’ve always been a pastor’s child. Furthermore, presently, the pastor’s child was proposing to bring a Muslim young man home to present as her husband.

Yeah, Abbas came from a severe Islamic family here in Abuja. There was no possibility that both of our folks planned to allow us to get hitched. Neither one of our families even knew about the other’s presence.

It didn’t help that I was the first born of my family, and there were sure assumptions expected of me from my family. Like being the ideal commendable good example to my more youthful sibling with the ideal grades, amazing position and wonderful Christian spouse.

All of this strain of flawlessness from my family had never truly bothered me up until now. I generally did what they needed; no inquiries were posed. I had consistently envisioned myself as somebody who would meet and experience passionate feelings for the right young man, one who my family would endorse. And obviously, if I wasn’t heads over heels in love with Abbas, I would have followed through with this plan.

It was a huge shock when it dreadfully dawned on me that I was in fact somewhere down in affection with my closest companion, and I especially needed to use the remainder of my existence with him, constructing a home and a family together.

I had attempted so often to drive him away or bury my emotions deep under, with the expectation that they would some way or another vanish. However, obviously, our adoration is an unavoidable one since, in every case, we in some way or another end up right where we began, in this cursed beautiful entanglement called love.

Neither Abbas nor I are adequately daring to pull off an elopement without the information on our families, so we were truly caught in disarray.

Now and again, I can’t resist the urge to ponder if both he and I are willing to jump into the fire, well aware of the risks. Why can’t our families believe in us enough to go through with it?

And all I could think of as reason enough is: This is Africa, where people like us are left as confused as vegans in a steakhouse.