Undo

Sori people, I can’t explain this absence adequately even if I tried. Its one of those complexities about waking up each morning…lost it and can’t reclaim one bit of it.

 

I thought I was the only one running away from football until I met Swipe at 19:00hrs in a café. Swipe was eating a pizza, a family size Pizza and he was nibbling, now that is a slow sign…like trying to finish a warm beer and you’ve only sipped a quarter of the bottle…the rest of the beer calm, hopefully waiting for your to swig it in another gulp or maybe spent the next hour sipping nervously…what a punishment. With your mouth alternating between dry sour and warm torment. Each time you pour the beer into the hollow that is your mouth; you get the unprocessed feeling, like you are about to let beyond your tongue into your throat something disagreeably obscene.

 

I had come to this café knowing they didn’t have a television, but no, they had rigged up something in one the corners and there was a crowd. Playing out the more common football emotions…. Yes…. No…. Occasional groans, ululation…! I was going away when I spot Swipe hunched over the counter. Studiously poring over the pizza with his gaze.

 

He was elated seeing me, asked me cautiously whether I was come to watch football, half expecting to hear me say yes, he immediately turned back to playing with his Pizza. Finding I was running from football he offered to buy me a pizza. He was healing from an outing gone bad, His girlfriend had decided to join the noisy soccer corner to push their team into scoring more goals.

 

Swipe detests football with a passion I never knew could exist. He claimed he was falling sick sitting there thinking his girlfriend was watching football. He was dying all of that time and probably reciting Ginsberg’s howl. Lamenting the change in fortunes. He couldn’t trim the scope of his concept of hate to even watch one match. He seemed at some loss with his incomprehension of this love for football by a girl of all things.

 

He had set out this day to savour the nature of the thing called love and yet had not calculated for the bargain football offered in terms of entertainment. Expecting his girlfriend to keep to his side but, Miller once wrote, “…No partner ought to be asked to contribute to silence…”

 

Swipe was near crying; in front of him was the Pizza with small nibbles all over it, like there were many people who had tried nibbling at it from all sides. He had created a messy pile of broken crumbs near the plate. I asked him whether I could ask the waitress to carry it away and he didn’t seem to see it as a solution to his misery…there had to be something he was attacking and the Pizza was doing just fine.

 

This was one day I didn’t want to be sad. I don’t hate football, I merely have no obligation to watch it most times. Here I was and I wanted a meal without football. And funny how you can’t avoid some of these things. I thought back to the other day, when ironically I was accused of being a football fanatic:-

 

“How much important is football to your life, eh?” The mantle that makes up the other half of the whole queried menacingly. Lips and cheeks sucked in fury, creating a thin orange line that marked the crease of old lip paint streaking skewed below the face. I think I was smiling, that’s why the eyes kept their glow long after I had dispelled any association with football and that’s how I came to miss the Ghana Vs USA match. Strange world.