In the Beginning, There Was No Beginning

They will ask me when I first knew I was in love with you. I will sigh and say I don’t know. It happened in fragments, piece by piece, separate moments over the years. Moments - that’s how I remember it. They will be surprised when I say you are the only man I have ever loved.

Packing my bags so I don’t forget the books I promised to take to the office for my colleagues, I find myself, out of habit, opening the first chapter of A Broken People’s Playlist by Chimeka Garricks. And once again, I feel the same ache, sadness, and grief I get when I listen to Never Enough by Loreen Allred.

I’ve read a fair number of books in my lifetime, if I dare say so; nothing extraordinary by any standard, but still quite a lot. And yet, I only remember a few openings, and this is one of them. Strangely, the others I remember are the first few pages of my high school biology and chemistry notebooks. Well, nerd alert.

The first time I read the opening line in Lost Stars (the first chapter), I put the book down almost immediately. I went for a long walk through my very unwalkable, dusty neighborhood in Ibadan, because I just needed to get away. From what, or whom, four years later, I still do not know, but home suddenly became too small, like the walls of the three-bedroom flat I lived in alone were closing in on me.

Because how does someone write something like that? Soft, yet laden at the same time. I was both enamored by the beauty of the words and unsettled by their weight as I pondered them.

I went back to it eventually, and by the time I finished that chapter, I was in tears. Tears for the breadseller on my street who had recently passed away, tears for the characters in the book, tears for death, tears for love, tears for myself, even. Of course, I wrote a little something on my WordPress blog when I finished it.

It has been years now, and I have read the book twice more and returned to that first chapter even more times than I can count. These days, I do not cry when I read it, but I still feel the same way I felt on that day in 2022.

Over the years, I have asked myself what caused my unravelling.

Could it be that I have removed my rose-colored glasses and now realize that, indeed, love does not happen the way movies and books often portray it? Not like a “click” or in a grand, unforgettable moment, as they often like to make us believe. But, usually in fragments and in things you almost overlook while they are happening. A conversation that lingers a little longer than it should, or a familiarity that grows without permission, or a friendship that causes a version of yourself to begin to exist around someone without you noticing when it started.

…and then one day, there is no beginning you can point to. Only the certainty that it is there. That it has been there, and you, my dear, are in love; no matter how long or short-lived it will be.

…or was it because, as I read that line, I realised the love that I had and do not have anymore? Or the ache of being seen, and then to exist unseen. Or to have known, and then (un)willfully forgotten.

Or maybe it was because at the end of the chapter, once again, through fiction this time, I am faced with the completeness, the finality, and sometimes the unfairness of death. To have loved so fully and then have lost it… in this case, to the cruel hands of death. That it existed, that it was real, that it is gone.

For a long time, I wondered why I reacted so strongly to this chapter, to that opening line. But now, as I write this, I understand why.

It is because I recognise something of myself in it… Something broken. Something lost.

But it is all good because the book and the chapter are living up to their names. A book for broken people like me and a chapter for lost stars.