A diary of my campus affair

I giggle like a two-year-old every time I look at him. He makes me feel so giddy even when I don’t intend to be. We have been together for a while now but my heart still flips like the first time I saw him.

I was told it would never work. Campus relationships are doomed. It is always about sex sex sex nothing more. I was sure I wouldn’t get in one. Not so soon anyway. I was eager to finish high school in order to get in to a relationship that will attract jealous gazes from every corner. I searched but I did not find my campus love.

I stopped searching, not because I had given up, but because I was ready for him to find me instead. He literally showed up on my door step and since then he has been my Romeo.

I am the furthest thing from a hopeless romantic but I have to say, cupid got me there.

For three years I had seen relationships go from “heaven sent” to “b*tch from hell” situations. My shoulders were wet from offering them as crying palates for friends. I knew the trend too well, but here I was, opening my door to a stranger. The loveliest stranger yet.

From violence to suicide to attempted murder, all these were the recent love extremes that had occurred in the campus. Ladies were losing it while men were doing what they do best, playing cool. Alcohol was the backbone to most of the relationships I came across. With alcohol came heightened emotions like jealousy, with these came subsequent involuntary acts that led only to the police station.

“Are they all this dramatic?” I remember asking myself severally. At one point I got scared of being in a relationship because of what my eyes had seen over the years. I had not witnessed something I would want for myself.

The handsome ones cheated, the cool ones drunk while the weird ones… well, they were just weird. I was certain I would never have a campus affair; not with any of the above mentioned anyway.

Something in my heart told me to be patient, unlike many, that is exactly what I did. Being in fourth year makes me a veteran observer of “freshman thirst”. Their lives are the very definition of impatience. I do not have to recognize a face to know whether he or she is a freshman, I just have to observe him or her for less than 5minutes and I will be 100% sure where to place them.

A good number of freshmen are a cliché. It is the sad truth, but it is still the truth.

She is dropped off by her humble parents on the first day of campus. Having taken a matatu coming to school she is quick to notice the big Prados and Harriers dropping the others off. She is keen not to pity herself but instead smiles and looks like the rest.

She notices the pretty girl that already has two boys talking to her. The girl has long brown legs that beckon to be gazed at. She looks down at her barely fitting jeans and shrugs.

“I have nice long legs too, it’s just that they are covered up,” she says.

And that there, is the beginning of the most trite story ever told. Campus is a small bowl of half-adults. The girls trying to get attention from the guys with the most “girlfriends” while guys trying to get the prettiest girl to get in bed with. But who said you have to live the hackneyed story all over again. I am in my final year and I got my exceptional campus love, it is certainly not the easiest challenge, but it sure is surmountable.