Careless in Love - TSR #1

Disclaimer: This is a true story. For more True Stories Recounted (TSR), click here.

Diamond was always a careless girl, but things seemed to get worse when she met Elisha. The first time they met, she didn’t really know how to behave. She didn’t mind his brute nature and the way he didn’t accept things unless they were exactly as he wanted. Even when he caused a scene by yelling too loudly and aggressively at the waitress for putting ketchup on his hotdog despite asking her not to, Diamond didn’t mind it. He was sweet to her, always made her feel special. The third time they met, he brought her flowers. Cheesy but very effective, especially in these times when chivalry’s corpse is nothing but bones, at this point. She thought he was perfect, and although she’d known him for only five and a half weeks, she felt like he was her soul mate.

But her carelessness was getting worse and it was beginning to cause a strain on not only her mental health, but also on her relationship. In the last two weeks, she had lost her portable speaker, two silver earrings, her Macbook charger, and an inscribed sapphire-blue external hard drive her brother had given her when her laptop got stolen some years back . She had turned the house upside down multiple times, tried to retrace every step she took and revisited every place she might have left any of the missing items, but they were nowhere to be found. She had complained so many times to Elisha at this point, she felt like a broken record. She knew he hated carelessness. She had heard him countless times rip into the employees at his tech startup for being forgetful or losing things. So to complain every other day about things going missing to a man who said as a direct quote, “There are only two things I hate in this life: lies and carelessness” , she knew she was losing him . She had to get it in check. But that was going to have to be when she returned from her work trip to Lagos.

As a photographer in Nigeria, Diamond took her work wherever it came. The days when photography thrived as a niche business were far behind, now that everybody had cameras on their phones. Her bookings had dropped from forty-seven during her golden years to just twelve in the year prior. So although this new job in Lagos wasn’t anything that would nourish her artistic hunger for more, it was a paycheck and she was going to do whatever she had to do to get that paycheck, even if that meant booking and catching a same-day flight because the client needed a photographer immediately. She left her apartment in Elisha’s care. He was already staying over for a couple nights a week, and some of his stuff was already in her apartment. When she ran out with her suitcase and gear, she simply tossed the key at him, shut the door behind her, and got on the plane to Lagos.

The job wasn’t as stressful as Diamond had imagined. Thankfully the shoot had gone smoothly that day, so much so that the client was requesting she stay in Lagos for an additional four days to capture more of the week-long series of activities her company was putting on . She expressed the sad news to Elisha and he was heartbroken to hear that she wouldn’t be returning the next day as he’d hoped. He promised to make sure her apartment was in good condition and blew all his love and kisses from Abuja .

On the third day of her trip to Lagos, Diamond ran out of space on her SD card. She was in the middle of shooting and needed one brought to her immediately. Since none of her friends in Lagos were photographers, she was stumped. Then, she had the brilliant idea of going to jiji.ng, a directory site similar to Craigslist, to see if anyone who was selling in the area could run one over to her. As soon as she logged into Jiji and clicked on the electronics section, she saw a list of featured goods. The second item on display was a sapphire-blue external hard drive inscribed with the letters ‘D.A’ . Diamond was looking at her hard drive, on sale, on Jiji.ng.

She didn’t know where her confusion should begin. Instead she put it aside, got a man in the area to bring her an SD card, finished her work, and then later when she was settled, she logged back into Jiji.ng and laughed. She laughed because she didn’t know what else to do. Laughter quickly turned to confusion, confusion quickly turned to worry. She called her friend Ijeoma who told her to check out who the seller was. Diamond gave her a name, a brand name not a person’s name , and Ijeoma requested the phone number so that she could call and set up a meeting since she was in Abuja .

Diamond followed the story as Ijeoma told it to her : She had planned the meetup for the exchange of goods with the seller the next day. She had involved the police. When Ijeoma told her that the culprit had been apprehended, she was relieved. Happy to have the maniac responsible for this in police custody. She asked Ijeoma who the culprit was to which Ijeoma responded it was nobody she had ever seen before, a strange man named Solomon. Diamond had never had any meaningful interaction with anyone who went by the name Solomon. Her relief had faded, replaced by a new more gruesome fear: that her house had been invaded by a man she’d never met. And she never even knew about it.

Immediately Diamond’s plane touched down in Abuja on the Friday after the week-long programme, Ijeoma drove her straight down to the police station where Solomon was being kept. After exchanging pleasantries, Diamond requested she see the man who was in charge of doing such an atrocious act to her. To her surprise, Solomon was Elisha . Actually, there was never an Elisha, that person never existed. The man that Diamond had allowed into, and given full access to her home was a man who didn’t exist.

His name was Solomon, an online developer whose resume included only one website, his. The rest of the time he spent, not tending to any startup tech company—because that too didn’t exist—but selling whatever he could find from wherever he could find it and as quickly as he could in the markets or on the internet.

Diamond was always a careless girl . But things didn’t get worse when she met Elisha…things got worse because of Elisha who had successfully sold both her earrings, the Macbook charger, and was in the process of selling her TV decoder and microwave.

After about two months, Solomon was released from custody. Diamond hasn’t seen him in two years and I’m happy to say that she is now with a man named Chris who is treating her just right.

CREDIT

Thank you to my friend Diamond for letting me tell her story.

Cover Photo by Suad Kamardeen on Unsplash.