• No matter how many updates you post about moving on, you never really do
Jane started a YouTube channel. I know this because the other day, she WhatsApped me a link to her channel. “Please like, share and subscribe,” she wrote under the link, along with prayer emojis, which I imagined meant her life depended on me subscribing to her stupid channel. Awesome!
You don’t know Jane. Well, we haven’t talked since campus, so I don’t really know much about her either. She is a lovely girl, or, she was a lovely girl back then. Infectious smile, easy laugh and she could talk, a lot. There are a lot of words in the English language and Jane knew just about all of them.
And then one day, she dumped my ass and I realised she wasn’t even that lovely after all. For one, she talked a lot. And it was not cute. She cooked just as well as Rigathi Gachagua understands the Bottom Up economic model. She also thought I was arrogant when the fact is I just happen to know more than anybody else. And I could go on and on about her shortcomings but I won’t because I am not a bitter ex. Also, we broke up in the second year of campus. I moved on.
But you know how it goes with the exes; no matter how many status updates you post about moving on, you never really do. Never really cut each other off. How can you, when every second you want to know how miserable the other person’s life has become without your awesome self?
You want to scoff at the little joy they share online and gloat when their waistline keeps disappearing as they love the woman they are becoming. You watch her lame attempts at making TikTok videos with her new boyfriend with no sense of rhythm, who can’t dance. And you realise the best thing that ever happened to you was breaking up with her. For you can’t imagine any other reality of yourself where you would be awkwardly twisting, jumping around and bending in front of a phone camera because some scumbag has shouted, “Give me some…”
We graduated. And we all went into the muddle of job seeking. Well, not all of us, actually. Some of us have good family names so job-seeking wasn’t exactly a muddle. Some are lucky to have had clever ancestors who realised that stealing a sizable land was way more important than stealing wives and cattle from the neighbouring tribes. While others actually have tall relations in high and mighty places on the land. And since nepotism is still alive and well, we have never had to look for a job. Jobs look for us.
Apologies to the ‘you can be anything you want’ battalion. But that’s just not how the real world works, child. You can be anything you are good at as long as they are hiring. But then again, it still helps to know somebody.
However, Jane, as far as I’m concerned, doesn’t have the right family name. Her ancestors had papaw for brains. And she is dating a loser. Every door she knocked on, they asked what is it she wanted to procure with her procurement degree. After a few months, she gave up on wanting to procure stuff and began selling deras like every other unemployed girl straight from campus.
For months, Jane’s WhatsApp status updates were a horror film of deras. “Hi fam, buy deras.” “Cheap deras for your girlfriend.” It was dera this, dera that every single day. Her WhatsApp status became such a grotesque space haunted by deras that I muted her.
And for a while, I actually even forgot she existed. Well, until last week, when out of the blue, she sent me a link to her YouTube channel. It wasn’t shocking that Jane would decide to be a YouTuber. I mean, there’s nobody I know who loves to hear themselves talk more than her. It fits her perfectly. Plus YouTubing is a creative and noble pursuit that I honour. And I can assure you that most people who graduate these days are basically numbskulls. People with virtually no brainwaves, no talent at all. Jane was doing better. Who knows? She could be the next Lily Sing or Liza Koshy.
I had already begun imagining Jane with over a million YouTube subscribers, creating content about horrible exes like every other YouTuber. Well, that is until I clicked the link. Now to say that I was disappointed would be an understatement. I was horrified. I was petrified. Apparently, she had married her loser boyfriend, and that’s all her content was about. Her ‘content’ was all about, “My husband this, my husband that.” Nothing the least intellectually stimulating.
It is amazing how some exes grow so dim with age.