Segun Ozique

This is a story about us. An ‘us’ that is perhaps a construction of my imagination: an artist wishfully in love with a girl who conceivably may not feel the same way as he does. It is the same as these thoughts of mine that also may be construed but not confirmed. Before you travelled, all of you, without reserve, presented a sweet, luscious, caring, and sensationally unrivalled. Everything about you was a dream; a conception of meeting an angel in human form made me pinch myself every morning to reaffirm I was not in dreamland. Your laughs was infectious, coming from a profound, sincere place and completely oozing with happiness and joy. You would have answers to anything I said to you without a thought of judgment or connotation and always have the equivalent weight of response to what was said. You continually displayed a never-could-be-cornered personality; often, you never answered questions straight, which was annoying but bizarrely sweet. It pushed me to want to convin...

I am sitting in front of the head psychologist waiting to begin what he had called me to his office for. He rubbed one hand against the other, and smiling gleefully, said ‘hey Al, how are you feeling today? Good?’ I shrugged but said nothing. ‘Good?’ he said, ‘you should be because it’s good news, really good news - trust me, it won’t be long now before we’ll be talking about the last session. I’d hate to let a client like you go, particularly because over these past,’ he looked down the papers in front of him, up again and then asked, ‘two years?’ then answered, ‘yeah, two years it is. In two years, you’ve become my most interesting client and a friend.’ He then went on to inform me of how through personal observations and reading through the transcripts of all the other doctors, he has noticed remarkable progress. I want to believe him, I really do. Because that would spell the beginning, a new start to my freedom; to reclaiming all that I have lost through one night of drunken mi...