The door was shut.
I looked between it iron bars and saw it lie,
My garden, mine, beneath the sky,
Glowing in the moonlit starry night,
Pied with all kinds of flowers, bedewed and green.
From bough to bough the songbirds crossed
From flower to flower the moths and bees,
With its nest and stately trees.
It had been mine, but now it is lost.

***********

It has also been said many times that the past is not something to dwell on or brood about, that is true, but it is truer that the solution to the problems of the present lies in the past and the key to understanding prospects of the future lies also in the past.

I have a habit of keeping old notebooks, a trait I got from my mother but hers isn’t just books, it could be anything. There is a table in my house, an old almost dilapidated table that is always bent either to the left or right depending on the weight on it. My niece called it the dancing table because it wobbles whenever she rest on it. Mother has refused to get rid of that table, she said it reminds her of when we had so little. “you can’t forget your past, you can’t get rid of it either”she would say whenever we wanted to throw the table away.

I had returned home from school one evening tired, hungry and worried after a five hours chemistry lab session. I was in my second year in the university then and though I was staying on campus, had returned home unexpectedly for no reason but because I felt like. That evening, that table was bent to the right. I dropped my bag on itand it wobbled to the left as if dancing the“ikoro”dance. I stooped to straighten it and underneath it, I saw my bag of old notebooks, beside the bag was a page from one of my early secondary school note where I had scribbled something about love and fire of passion. I felt so drawn to the bag that I forgot all about the chemistry experiment and the hunger. I started removing the content of the bag one after another, thinking about each memory attached to them and reliving it. I saw my JSS1 computer note and remembered how a teacher had made fun of me because I couldn’t define the function of a computer mouse. The only mouse I knew then was a type of rodent and that was what I told her. “A mouse is a type of animal that is similar to a rat and is found in the home”. Some students in the class, the ones that had little knowledge about computer had laughed while the others hada look of confusion on their face. They were as confused as I was; what could they be laughing at, a mouse is a rat nah, abi..just like jerry the mouse? I saw her note, the economics note she gave me days before she went away. I traced the intricate but fading lines of her handwriting and smiled as I recalled how I had teased her that dayas she was writing her name on it. I had asked her the day she gave me the note why she would give me her economics note and she had replied “just for keepsake” then she had added “one day sooner or later you will find out the real reason I gave you this note”. I’d always thought it was because I told her I liked economics or maybe because she said one time that it is rare to see a science student who knows more about economics than a commercial student. I had never really thought much about the note, not even after she went back to Abuja from where she had come to stay a while with her sister.

All love stories are the same, and it always begin with the girl...