DISMISSING DISSAPOINTMENT

You are the best thing that has ever happened to me - the glowing moon whose light brightens my path, my priceless angel, more precious than the king’s ornament, more valuable than the finest refined precious stone. You are the definition of glamour, an epitome of beauty. Life without you in it becomes so dry and boring.

My lady, I have been caught in the web of your amazing love. I wish I could still the sun for the world to steal a gaze at you, I bet even the strongest men would melt at your magnificent visage. How I wish I could for few minutes lead the forest's finest vocals to sing of your uniqueness which I so much adore. How I wish I could catch the stars in the sky to knit you a shining garment deserving of a princess.

Bidemi my love, even the peacock’s beauty is a fallacy when compared to the splendor of your appearance. You don’t make the world go round; you make it pause from its rotating state to applaud the royal aura you carry.

Please give me the privilege of being that special one; I wanna be the melodious rhythm of your heartbeat. "Would you please be mine?" I ask, kneeling before the damsel. Blushing and stammering, she struggled to utter a complete sentence: "I, I, I .........."

Bidemi and I met some months back; she was a friend of my very good friend. My concentration skipped the very first time I saw her at an event and straight away I knew she was someone whose magical looks would be hard to pass by. Mother luck smiled at me as we met again at my friend’s place. What do you expect? I put up my best possible attitude, spoke the best of phonetics my agricultural university knowledge could avail me, polished with a not-too-fake accent. I managed to get her glued in conversation, all the while beaming with smiles to keep my handsome mode activated. I needed no prophet to tell me she enjoyed my company as we chatted like two little kids who had just escaped their parents' strict surveillance. We sure exchanged contacts and gradually became very good friends. Just some weeks after, there was hardly anyone who didn’t notice the blossom of our friendship. There was nothing we didn’t do together, from visiting the cinemas to attending events. We also helped each other, even in personal endeavours and, gradually, each one began to admire the other's brilliance. Of course, our friends envisaged the transformation of our closeness to a formidable union and like everyone had concluded, I also imagined that sooner than later we would become a love pair.

So I planned this very special day, selected some of our closest pals to be a witnesses of this golden moment. The clouds were friendly and the atmosphere was right, thanks to the gentle breeze which was so perfectly cool that it exuded a romantic aura. Of course, I had a man around whose sonorous song accompanied by the guitar wasn’t far away from us as we were really locked up having fun at a beach resort on the said day. So I took an opportunity to steal the show asking my admirable jewel if I could become the axis upon which her world would rotate. "Would you please be mine?" I asked, with our friends looking on with curiousity as I played the Romeo role more perfectly than Jack did in the Titanic movie. With tears in her eyes she replied, "Deji, it’s a NO." What!!! I thought a spaceship just fell on me. It looked like one of those Mexican block-busting heartbreak scenes. But alas, it was no movie; I had just been rejected. Tears strolled carelessly down my face, my world was gradually sinking. I wished rapture would just happen to save me from this embarrassingly ugly moment but the world chose that time to reinforce itself as I began to hear nature's symphony even more clearly. My hands found my face, head bowed in agony and a sickly shiver ran down my spine. I manned up and tried kissing the storm with courage. And as I lifted up my head, taking my hands away from my eyes, and as my tear-soaked eyelids parted way for the retina to see reality, I discovered I had just woken up from sleep. So all along I had been dreaming, my body having not gone farther than the four corners of my room.

Oops! With a big sigh, I recounted how I had just gone through a sleepy heartbreak. Well, even if my real life experience was not as brutal as that, I still know what it feels like to suffer a heartbreak, after all I had experienced a real one sometime ago as I had to part ways with the one I admired because of a difference that was beyond our control.

So I have also known how it feels to lose or give up that precious gift that was once in your hand or perhaps that gorgeous person that perfectly fits your dream partner as was the case in my dream. (And, of course, I realised how unfair it was to have broken some hearts in the past). It’s so painful not to have those things you had always wanted to have: that dream job, that certification, that Visa, that appointment, that business deal, that promotion, etc. Some of us had even been privileged to once have them but somewhere along the line they slipped helplessly away like a rolling tyre on a banana peel.

Dear Friends, disappointments and heartbreaks, fortunately or unfortunately, are the fruits life offers as breakfast. Do we however react like a king Ahab whose story we were told in the Bible, who went on sulking and had to agree to his wife's wicked plan of murdering the one who refused to lease him a piece of land? Or do we shake off the disappointment and give out our best like a Moses who having known he would not enter the promise land still diligently played his role in the smooth sailing of his kindred on their journey to Canaan?

Okay, how bad can the case be? Can it be as worse as that of David who as a powerful and prominent king lost his household to captivity at a point in his life despite being a great warrior? So tell me your story. You got sacked, jilted, abused, lost some funds, lost a business pitch or, perhaps, someone dear? Perhaps, the admired “HE” left you for a slimmer lady or probably the lady ported to a richer guy.

Hey, you got to move on, David we were told encouraged himself in the Lord. There has got to be that time where your strength has to rise up from the inside to knock out the darts life disappointedly throws at you. Like in a tennis match, you may have lost the first set, please brace up in time for the second, third or even the fourth set. Be the champion you are meant to be, bounce back using the setback as a motivating platform for shining. No matter how dear the thing we lose is, we must always remember the many gorgeous and wonderful things we are yet to win or acquire. It’s just a phase and the good news is the phase has just passed.

If truly Abidemi said "No" in my dreams, I am sure there's an Idera set to feature in the next episode of that dream and I am certain when next I wake up, it would be with a smile on my face this time around.

It’s past 10pm on the 15th of September 2013; I need to retire back to bed having grown with an un-dissapointing” sleep confidence. See you in the morning in a world where you have completely dismissed and broken up with every past disappointment. Your face looks better with a smile on it. I wish you the very best.

Yours sincerely,

Olukokun Adedeji.