Road to Jannah

Chapter Nineteen • Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?

I have tried contacting Khalid Yuguda and asking him, more like begging actually, to take up the blame and tell Jannah's family the truth. But like the shrewd asshole he is, he straight up declined. I arranged a meeting for us a week ago and then, I apologised for my behavior at the party and when that wasn't enough to convince him, I offered him a cheque. He could write any amount he wanted and I'd give it to him. I could lose every single thing I have as long as I could get back Jannah but still, he declined.

I'm at a deadend, absolutely hopeless and if at this very moment I die, I would be nothing but thankful. It was selfish towards Mama but I just couldn't help it. Without Jannah, I had relapsed back into my miserable state of suicidal thoughts. Mama had noticed since I came back home to her eleven days ago only with news that broke both of our hearts and so, since then, she's been extra cautious with me. She's back to her overprotective, overindulgent behavior towards me and when she's around me, which is literally all the time, she behaves as if she's walking on eggshells. She has stowed away all my bottles of pills and now even when my intentions are innocent and purely just to cure a headache, I can't find even a tablet of paracetamol nearby.

So with a banging head and a lack of any medication, all thanks to Mama's fear of me making my sweet escape from this world by hitting an OD, I lay myself back into my bed.

It was barely two weeks to November and the approaching Harmattan season made the night chilly. Though my t-shirt was doing little in protecting me from the cold, I didn't bother pulling up the duvet over me. I wanted the cold to pierce through me, through my bones and freeze me. Then perhaps, I'd be alleviated from even if it be a fragment of this mental torture.

I close my eyes yet again and this time I was adamant on sending myself into a state of comatose sleep but the urgency with which my room door flung open made me instantly sit back up.

Thinking it was Mama making her usual checks on me, I was about to tell her that I was fine and she should please leave me alone so I could get some sleep but then I sense something, something different from Mama's scent, from her footsteps and my heart contracted in both pain and pleasure.

Was I imagining it? I had somehow already lost half of my sanity so it won't be a surprise if now my subconscious mind has resorted to making me hallucinate scenarios. But when she collapsed into me and wound her arms around me, and that sweet scent of hers I've been craving for flooded my nostrils, I was sure, without a doubt, it was true. Jannah is here in my arms.

There are moments in life when you feel you are created for no other reason but to live that exact moment in time. When your past, your present and your future all dissolve into a meaningless haze and nothing matters except this exact second, this exact moment you're holding on to and never want to end.

For me, that moment was right now, it was when I felt Jannah holding me closer and with an urgency and desperation none can understand except maybe the fabled lovers of days long gone; Romeo and Juliet, Laila and Majnun, Tristan and Isolde, this must've been the depth of love and desire they had experienced.

My mind became jumbled, thousands of thoughts invade it as thousands of emotions invade my heart and quicken my heartbeats. I was still in processing mode perhaps, I knew what was going on and though I never want it to end, I don't t know how to react to it.

I was faced with an internal battle of either hugging her back and giving in to what I've always wanted to do, especially now after more than a week of separation from her, or do the sensible thing and let her withdraw eventually but when have I ever done the sensible thing in my life?

So I held her back, with everything I had, with every wild emotion I had tamed and kept controlled for so long, in that very moment of the reunion of two hearts, I set it free and handed all the reigns over to my heart.