Five Years

I don’t remember the exact day I decided I liked her.

I remember the day I realized it had become a problem.

It was during one of those afternoons when the school seemed unusually quiet. Most of the students had gone home, and the few who remained were either waiting for their parents or hanging around the compound because they had nowhere else to be.

I was sitting beneath one of the trees near the classroom block, drawing in my notebook.

I had been working on a sketch of a car for almost an hour when I heard someone laughing behind me.

I knew the voice.

I didn’t turn around immediately.

I kept drawing.

The laugh came again.

This time I looked.

She was standing with two of her friends near the corridor, talking about something I couldn’t hear. She wasn’t looking at me.

I looked back at my notebook.

My drawing suddenly became difficult.

The lines I’d been drawing for the last hour no longer made sense.

I erased one.

Then another.

Then I stopped drawing altogether.

Tunde, who had been sitting beside me, noticed.

“You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

He pointed his chin towards the corridor.

I frowned.

“I’m drawing.”

“You haven’t drawn anything for five minutes.”

“I am thinking.”

“About her?”

I closed the notebook.

“Can you stop?”

He laughed.

“I’m only asking.”

“Then stop asking.”

He smiled.

“Okay.”

A few seconds passed.

“You’re definitely thinking about her.”

I stood up.

“Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

He followed me, still laughing.

It became like that.

Every time I tried to hide it, someone noticed.

Eventually, I gave up trying to pretend that I didn’t care.

I liked her.

There.

I had admitted it to myself.

The strange thing was that admitting it didn’t make anything easier.

If anything, it made everything worse.

I began looking for excuses to speak to her.

Sometimes I had a real reason.

“Do you have the notes from yesterday?”

Sometimes I didn’t.

“Have you done the assignment?”

“Which one?”

“The one…”

I would stop.

I hadn’t even remembered what assignment I was talking about.

She would laugh.

“You didn’t come to class yesterday.”

“I did.”

“You weren’t there.”

“I was.”

“You slept through it.”

I would smile.

She would shake her head.

Those little conversations became important to me.

I kept them.

I remembered them.

She probably forgot most of them before she got home.

That didn’t stop me.

I was young enough to believe that every small moment meant something.

Maybe she smiled because she liked me.

Maybe she waited for me because she wanted to talk.

Maybe when she looked at me across the classroom, there was something in that look.

I became an expert at inventing meaning where there might have been none.

My friends didn’t help.

They teased me whenever they had the opportunity.

One afternoon, Tunde leaned close to me while she was walking past.

“Your wife is coming.”

“Shut up.”

She turned.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

Tunde smiled.

“I said you’re looking beautiful today.”

She laughed.

I wanted to disappear.

“Tunde!”

“What?”

She walked away, still laughing.

I hit him on the shoulder.

“You are mad.”

“You should thank me.”

“For what?”

“Now she knows.”

“Knows what?”

He looked at me.

“You know.”

I didn’t.

At least, I didn’t want to know.

I wanted to remain in that safe place where I could like her without having to find out whether she liked me back.

The problem was that time doesn’t allow you to stay in one place forever.

Years passed.

We moved from one class to another.

People changed.

Teachers changed.

Some friends left the school.

New students arrived.

The school compound looked the same, but somehow everything felt different.

She was still there.

So was I.

And I still liked her.

That was the part that surprised me most.

A crush was supposed to disappear.

At least, that was what people told me.

Mine didn’t.

It followed me through school.

There were times when I barely spoke to her for weeks, yet the feeling remained.

There were times when we became closer.

There were times when we barely acknowledged each other.

There were even moments when I convinced myself that I was finally over it.

Then I would see her laughing with her friends and realize I had been lying to myself.

By our final years in secondary school, almost everyone who knew me knew about her.

She probably knew too.

I had never properly told her.

That was partly because I was afraid.

The other part was pride.

I didn’t want to be the boy who confessed his feelings and became the subject of jokes in the classroom.

So I waited.

I kept waiting for the perfect moment.

The perfect opportunity.

The perfect words.

I imagined different versions of the conversation in my head.

Sometimes I would tell her after school.

Sometimes I would write her a letter.

Sometimes I would simply walk up to her and say it.

Every version ended differently.

In some, she smiled.

In others, she laughed.

In one particularly embarrassing version, she hugged me.

I never acted on any of them.

Then our final year arrived.

Suddenly, everything had an ending.

Our last examinations.

Our last assemblies.

Our last time sitting in those wooden desks.

Our last uniform.

Our last morning rushing through the school gate.

Everyone seemed to be thinking about the future.

What university would they attend?

What course would they study?

Who would leave town?

Who would stay?

I was thinking about something else.

Her.

Five years.

I had carried the feeling for five years.

At some point, it stopped feeling like a crush and started feeling like part of my life.

I remember sitting in class one afternoon after everyone had left.

My friends had gone home.

The room was almost empty.

The late afternoon sunlight came through the windows and fell across the desks.

She was still there.

Packing her books.

I watched her for a while.

Then I heard myself speak.

“Can I tell you something?”

She looked up.

“What?”

My heart immediately began beating too fast.

I almost changed my mind.

Instead, I said it.

“I’ve liked you for a long time.”

She stared at me.

I could hear the sound of students outside.

Someone shouted from the corridor.

A chair scraped across the floor in another classroom.

For some reason, all of those sounds became incredibly clear.

She didn’t say anything.

I waited.

Then she smiled.

Not the smile I had imagined.

A softer one.

A confused one.

“Really?”

I nodded.

“How long?”

“Five years.”

Her eyes widened.

“Five years?”

I laughed nervously.

“Yes.”

She looked down at her books.

For a few seconds, I thought maybe I had finally said the thing I had been waiting all those years to say.

Then she looked back at me.

“I’m sorry.”

Two words.

That’s all it took.

I smiled because I didn’t know what else to do.

“It’s okay.”

She tried to explain.

I don’t remember everything she said.

Maybe that’s because my mind had already stopped listening.

I remember the feeling more clearly than the conversation.

It wasn’t anger.

It wasn’t even sadness at first.

It was embarrassment.

I had spent years building a version of this moment in my head.

The real one was nothing like it.

I gathered my books.

She said my name before I reached the door.

I turned.

“I’m really sorry.”

I nodded.

“It’s fine.”

Then I walked away.

Outside, the school looked exactly the same.

The same dusty field.

The same classrooms.

The same trees.

The same noise.

Nothing had changed.

Except me.

I went home that evening and didn’t tell anyone what had happened.

I put my school bag down and sat on my bed.

For the first time in five years, I didn’t have anything to hope for.

It felt strange.

There was an emptiness where the anticipation used to be.

I opened my notebook.

There were drawings everywhere.

Machines.

Cars.

Faces.

Ideas.

I turned the pages slowly.

Then I found one of the drawings I had made of her years earlier.

I stared at it.

She looked different in the drawing.

The version of her in my head had always been different from the real person.

Maybe that was the problem.

I had spent five years falling in love with a possibility.

And now that possibility had finally answered me.

No.

I closed the notebook.

For the next few days, I avoided her.

It wasn’t dramatic.

I didn’t hate her.

I didn’t blame her.

I simply didn’t know how to stand around someone whose answer had changed the story I had been telling myself for years.

School ended soon after.

People celebrated.

There were photographs.

Hugs.

Promises to stay in touch.

Everyone talked about the future.

I smiled for pictures.

I laughed with my friends.

I signed shirts.

I said goodbye.

When I finally walked through the school gate for the last time, I looked back at the buildings.

I thought about all the things that had happened there.

The projects.

The arguments.

The drawings.

The teachers.

The friends.

Her.

Five years of carrying one feeling.

Five years of wondering.

Five years of waiting for a moment that lasted less than five minutes.

I thought that was the end of that chapter of my life.

I was wrong.

Because somewhere ahead of me, beyond the school gate and the familiar streets, life was already preparing a completely different kind of lesson.

I just didn’t know what it was yet.