Oreoluwa Fakorede: The talking phase [NEW VOICES]

by Oreoluwa Fakorede

You move too slowly and interest is lost, too slowly and it burns out.

You finally took a step of faith and opened communication with the person of your dreams.

Some people slide into it, some stumble into it and others dive in. Doesn’t matter, a step is a step.

We’re trading actual words now, stringing them together into phrases and sentences that make actual sense.

Never mind that it’s often just small talk:

“What did you do today?”

“Have you eaten?”

“Just checking to see that you’re breathing.”

Humble beginnings hold promise and some highways began as footpaths. You won’t let anyone undermine your inches of progress and that’s okay.

You live for these quasi-conversations, these early signs of a life that might never be.

But you want that life to be, you want it badly.

You, like the rest of us, want more.

Oh, we do (even if we’re too falsely modest to admit it).

You want to fall in love recklessly and have this person fall right back in equal measure, no more and no less.

You want warm hugs, late-night ice cream dates and little gifts that say many things.

You want to cook for someone who doesn’t care so much how the food tastes because they’re too lost in the wonder that is you in a kitchen.

What mess? You’re beautiful.

You want to listen to a voice that dares you to not pay attention, a voice that wraps itself around your heart and squeezes gently with every syllable uttered.

You want a love most people can only dream of.

But one false move and the budding flower will be ashes.

One wrong step and possibilities will turn to dust, memories of a building that crumbled before the foundation was completed.

So you crawl when you want to run, you shuffle when you’d rather be flying.

It’s the talking phase and damn, what you’d give to get out of this place of deathly slow motion.

Things have died here, you can smell their decay.

You see ghosts of almost-loves past, bones of things that got stuck and were asphyxiated.

Things have died waiting here, crushed to death by the weight of unfruitful longing.

You look over your life and take in the corpses of relationships that never came to term, steps into empty air that ended in brokenness at the bottom of a ravine.

You’re still picking some pieces of yourself and there are some you will never recover.

Caution wins, you will stifle the excitement and wait.

Better to never fly than to take off only to crash before you reach the sky.

“It ended in the talking phase.” – An epitaph


Ore is a content strategist and self-professed feminist. He has previously written for YNaija and Y!. His literary work explores music, women’s rights and relationships

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