Gift, from a distance, was the dishevelled kind of beauty, the type easily glossed over, because staring at her as in a perspective, she did not particularly catch your interest as would a painting by Massaccio, or Leonardo Da Vinci. But for me, a sapiosexual, I was fortunate to notice the ethereal beauty she was, I had trained my gaze to only notice broken things, to see the fairness in them, and that is how I knew, from the very first day she walked into class, holding her black folder, with a rose-coloured rimmed spectacles on and a flowery, pleated skirt, that she'd met my criteria of a damsel in distress(someone who needed my 'saving').
Although how Gift and I began talking is all too comical, rare even for this sort of story, as she was soaking her digestive biscuit under the running tap, in the dead of night, when I left my dorm out to urinate and a slap awakened me to the realization that I had sleep-walked nearly a mile to the Central Water Heating System, where I'd begun urinating on her hands beneath the running tap, ruining her soaking-wet digestive stick she'd intended swallowing, let's just say we easily got past the serendipity of it all and became very good friends.
I will be honest, many times I'd imagined Gift on TLC's How Do I Look? I'd imagined myself being the cause for her much talked about need for a make-over in school. Every time I suggested we go shopping, bills on me, she would say, It's much ado about nothing, Uche. I'm fine the way I am.
Even though I wasn't one given to idle talk, I will be honest, I'd always imagined, as in Beauty and the Beast, when Belle kissed Beast and he transformed into a handsome prince, that same would someday be said of her, Gift; that someday, everyone would come to notice what I'd always seen: that she was gorgeous, inside and out, and all she needed was a few years of exposure on her hands to make her radiate with incomparable shimmer.
You could call me the best friend, the one always quick to make Gift realize the oddity of a boys' stare, a lecturers' salacious demeanour towards her, or the power of her looks.
"You don't know what you have," I would say. "If only you could see yourself as I see you."
"Washerholic," she would quip. "Uche, you would never change."
I do not remember when exactly these feelings for Gift began growing; I have assured myself time and again that it did not begin the first day of our meeting, at CWHS, but the night was chilly, the moon looked like a silver chandelier with candles burning bright, and stars, blinking shyly, likened to an orchestra, beckoned me to kiss her, that I have to, sadly, admit that I am that much of a hopeless romantic, and, that that night, while all she could see was an overgrown baby, what I could see in her eyes, however, was the moon and stars. Yes, that night earmarks the beginning of this imaginary affair.
I will not say Gift was entirely faultless to my eyes, I mean, once, she'd forgotten her underwear inside her schoolbag in my house off campus, and I, being the snoopy marauder that I am, had rummaged through, felt the cotton, taken it out and obsessively inhaled it, only to be confronted by a staggering, cataclysmic odour which sent me reeling into a state of dysphoria. Still, character-wise, she was okay, seldom on the temperamental side, but when on it, throwing pins and needles to the aggressor.
How do I describe myself, so you can get a perfect picture of how I looked, who I was, and why, perhaps, Gift never found me suitable for a partner? I was as lanky as a praying mantis blowing in the wind, my dentition yellow with two central incisors cracked at the bottom, and my face a map of chocolate and lemonade(eczema).
One night, after three long hours of studying in my bedroom, lying on the sofa while I stretched on the carpet, Gift said to me, "Uche, can I confide in you?"
"Why not?" I said. "Sure. You can tell me anything."
"Promise me you won't freak out."
"Ah, ah. For you again?--freak out?... C'mon."
"Okay... I-I feel..." She paused, sighed heavily. "Uche, I feel trapped in my body."
Need I remind you, we were young: say twenty, twenty one years old. I, considerably ignorant and had never imagined that a person as buoyant as Gift be sometimes lugubrious.
"Aren't we all," I said, "trapped, one way or another, in our bodies."
"You don't get it," she said, hesitant to clarify. "I feel...I feel like this body I walk in doesn't express how I feel on the inside."
Drawing close to her, I rested my chin on the fringe of the sofa and said, mindlessly, "Don't beat yourself up over it. It's a phase, it would pass."
Gift never brought up the issue of her conflicting identity after that day. That night, staring at her heaving breasts tightly knit between her spaghetti strap as she laid on the sofa while she stared at the bulge in my jeans trouser, vacillating between thoughts of whether to slid my fingers into her or not, she, on spur of moment, held my wrist and drew my fingers close.
As my fingers invaded her slippery wet vagina--a feline animal she was--her body became silky, running in waves, and as she purred soft buzzes of contentment, and I gulped to the very last drop her sweet nectar, I fancied she was a cat breaking forth, one truly trapped in the human anatomy.