Pepper Soup (excerpt)

I catch myself when I see a loose tear fall into my pot of soup. I know I’m an amateur cook. When I was younger and still lived with my family we had a rota for making meals each week. Whenever it was my turn- Wednesdays and Sundays, my sister would make a show of spitting the food into napkins when she thought me and my mum weren’t watching her. She was awfully dramatic about not liking my food. Some days, after dinner, she would hole herself in the bathroom and pretend she was retching. Some days were very convincing. I got the message, I can’t cook. 

But you know how they say love can make you do crazy things? For me that was buying a cookbook. 

I met Fajimi at what he referred to as a ‘farmers market,’ and I referred to as Aleshinloye. He caught my attention when I heard him poorly haggling with a seller for gbafilo. He was being extorted so badly it would have been immoral not to step in. I remembered that I had eyed him briefly and then turned towards the seller, exchanging a few words in rapid Yoruba. She hissed loudly and grunted but eventually she halved the price. When Fajimi let out a murmured ‘thank you ma’am’ both me and the seller burst into loud laughter. 

'Carry this your boyfriend o, make him no lost.’ The seller yelled after us. 

I might have taken her advice too seriously because all these months after, Fajimi is still nestled immovably somewhere between my solar plexus and my highest rib. He sits just outside my heart, forming a new body part all on his own. When I’m without him it feels like there’s this chasm in my chest. My heart starts violently ricocheting around the space, cracking slightly when it connects with my ribs or crashes against my spine. There are now a thousand fissures in my most vital organ. When I say he left me heartbroken, that’s what I mean. 

I stir the soup idly. In the pot, I’ve thrown in urheri, ehre, umilo, uziza, and alligator pepper. I left out gbafilo seeds because they reminded me too much of Fajimi. It’s the first christmas dinner I’ve had to cook by myself since I met him. 

Our first Christmas together, which fell just four days before our anniversary, my whole family had come to visit us in our apartment. My mum had frowned from the first minute of her stay to the very last. She scoffed at the vinyl player that sat on our coffee table. She fingered through the books on said coffee table with contempt laced throughout her features. She refused to go within six feet of the makeshift Ifa shrine that Fajimi had set up in a corner of the living room. The only time her disgust subsided was when she took the first bite of the food Fajimi had made. He’d spent hours in the kitchen separating beans from their shafts, hovering over it as it cooked, sieving and re-sieving, and dishing the soups on everyone’s plate in elaborate patterns. My mum, ever callous, swept up the carefully laid tessellate -with pounded yam that Fajimi had made from scratch- and threw it roughly into her mouth. She swallowed and then frowned deeply, looking between my (then) boyfriend and I. 

“Who taught you to cook like this in America?”

Under the table I squeezed Fajimi’s thigh, trying to communicate that it was a compliment but that she was too proud to ever give one so freely.

Fajimi understood. He always did. 

“My sister, ma’am- ma.” He quickly corrected himself. 

My mum narrowed her eyes.

“And where is your sister today?”

“She couldn’t be here, ma. She’s uh, finishing up her PHD and couldn’t take the time off.”

“Oh okay, so she just didn’t want to.”

“No, she…” Fajimi faltered for a second, “she just couldn’t.”

My mum grunted like she had been all evening.

“Keziah is here.” my mum gestured at my sister who sat across from me rolling the pounded yam along her plate with a fork. Fajimi had made her egusi soup because she’d sporadically become vegan earlier that year. “She works full time and”

“And she lives in Ogun, not Oregon.” I cut her off roughly, giving in to my temper.

I can admit that my anger is historically the brightest thing in any room. Everything people say about love is what rage has always been to me. When I’m angry the whole world feels like a scratch pad that I throw my body against, not minding the burns. I focus on the feeling with such a singularity that everything outside that orbit is vignetted and dim. In our earliest months together I thought Fajimi infuriated me, because every single part of my body broke into movement when I heard his name. My heartbeats would come three at a time, my feet would strike the floor in exceedingly quick blows, my pupils would dilate until my whole eye was one midnight coloured orb. Sometimes I fantasised about having him under me. I dreamed that I would press on every body part of his until they gave in and collapsed. I wanted him to feel how I felt. I wanted him to know what it was like for your chest and stomach to go concave because someone deftly stroked a manicured thumb from your chin to your ear. No one could provoke me like him. Sometimes I would remember his lilting laugh, perpetually warm hands, and the gentle way he would say my name- with the tenderness of a reluctant wave goodbye- and think, he is too good for this world. And I’m right, he is an aberration. In the moments we would fight, which was hardly ever, I think about how noble it would be to return him to where I know he came from. But then we make up and he kisses selfishness back into me. He deserves heaven, I know, but would you ever let go of something divine?