The Bed

4 am; she knew he wasn’t asleep. April had seen his type before. The good type of guy who falls in love easily and is immediately clingy from the moment you  have your first sex with him. At first, Jamie looked like the kind of guy any fun loving chic would want to have fun with. No strings attached. She liked the way he spoke. Careless and never a sentence without an obscene word. He smoked, he got drunk, he lied and he flirted. Perfect. This was what April had seen and gone after. Here she was, thinking how big a mistake she had made. She hadn’t seen it coming albeit the dates, the coffees and the special way he treated her. All she wanted was a casual fling not what she was facing at the moment.

She slid from the sheets, picked her phone, blouse, lingerie and pants. Slowly and silently. She hated this part most, despite having done this countless times before. She headed to the washroom and texted her cab guy. In fifteen minutes every detail about this night would begin to fade from her memory. The radio in the other room was condemningly playing Sting & Police‘s Roxanne on low volume.  For a moment she felt sorry for Jamie, but she had already made up her mind. He wasn’t what she was looking for. She wasn’t even sure what she was looking for.

“There goes karma again” Jamie thought as he lay on the bed staring at the green digits on his alarm clock. It had become a normal thing for him to be ditched the morning after. He thought he had tried his best with April. The dates, the nice texts and the good times seems not to have had any effect. Here he was at 34 years, feeling wounded and the knot in his throat wouldn’t go away. He hated himself for being so gullible. He felt like a little girl.

You see Jamie is a player and ruthless womanizer. He is used to the fast life. Meet a girl, go out on a drink, take her home and then chase her off before daybreak. Of the women he’s bagged, three quarters are either married, engaged or dating. It is why he doesn’t believe in love. He know it is likely that someone else will do it to him too. ‘Heat the bathing water just to have someone else bathe in it.’ Life is fair. It’s just that the truth is too much to handle. He wants to live a normal life. He desperately wants to fall in love and quit this rat race once and for all. Tomorrow he meets up with Kiki. He knows she feels something for him and that she is a good woman who is single and ready to mingle but not her. He will just bag her, like the criminal he is, while he waits for the right one.

Enter April, she is 29 years old. Like her name suggests, April has fled the alter (literally) five times. Let me explain. She believed in the movies. When she was young, her mother took her to see John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John in Grease the musical. That proved to be her undoing. She has never met her dream man since. She loves to be looked at and adored. In fact, she believes she’s some sort of fairy princess or maybe a doll or just some wonderful character in a story book. She loves sex. She cannot understand why she never has enough of it. April is a control freak. Any chance to be in charge will not be wasted.  She is beautiful and stunning. One  thing she doesn’t seem to understand is why she attracts the ‘wrong’ type of men. She’s always wanted to date a good serious man. For now, she chooses to enjoy the ride. She knows it is a crime to play with someone’s heart especially when they are unsuspecting but she does it anyway.

What a miserable lot we have become. As the earth races to it’s demise, everyone is just looking to be appreciated and treated differently. For those who have found love, it still doesn’t feel enough. We are not happy. It feels like a prison. The sex is never enough, however good it is. The love is never deep enough. This is the bed we made, therefore we must sleep in it. And it seems we will never really get what it is we’re looking for. Wait. Do we even know what we’re looking for?

….
Yesterday, my brother Victor called me up with the concept for this article. He said that I should observe how people behave at a bus stop. No one wants to board the bus with many stops along the way. We all want the one that goes straight to our destination. The fast car. No stops. Such is life. No one wants to commit to a partner that seems to have many ‘stops’ along the way. In the meantime, we shall stand at the bus stop of life and admire these beautiful buses as we wait for our express bus to arrive.