Osama B

No matter how much time you spend with a person, you never really get to know them, and although you think you do, you’ll never understand them.

There comes a time in any relationship, be it one of love or friendship, when a certain event shakes the very foundation of what you thought you knew about your friend or lover. This event, often has enough life changing atoms to either make or break the relationship. You find out a friend has been stealing from you, or your life partner has been burning the lover’s candle from both ends.

I was unfortunate to find myself in one of those situations a week ago. I remember the day clearly, because somehow on payday the fogginess that normally lurks at the fringes of my conscious mind lifts and I’m more alert than usual.
B was unusually quiet in the car from work and I knew something was amiss. About halfway home she must have realised that the subject which had her in such turmoil, had to be breached, and she let it out.

As she spoke and the signs of relief slowly smoothed over her beautiful face, so I absorbed, and what had pained her, slowly became visible on my face. The lines on my forehead had deepened, and the sadness that had cloaked her face previously, now ran its cold fingers across mine.

B had come into the crosshairs of the United States of America’s Secret Service. She was thought of in the same vein as Osama Bin Laden, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, almost anyone associated with Syria, and of course Mulla Omar.
She was considered a terrorist. All the worlds’ worst nightmares about car bombs, suicide bombers, snipers and hi-jacking, right here beside me, contained in the petite frame that was B.

Standard Bank had frozen all her accounts and debit orders, pending investigation. “Our hands are tied”, they tell her. I ask her if she didn’t watch the news, say, about two or three years ago? Our great esteemed leader, George W. Bush had issued executive orders that everyone in the free world had to reconfirm their personal details with their banks, including home address, identity documents and so forth.

“No”, she said. “You know I don’t watch the news.
As her boyfriend for three years, I understand where she’s coming from. B is too carefree and busy with life to bother about the woes of the world. She never watches the news and only buys a newspaper when I ask her to grab me the Sunday paper from the café around the corner. Even then she might only glance at the TV schedule for a few minutes. I envy her for that. I however, tend to get a bit annoyed when someone tells me something of importance in world politics that I’m not aware of, first.

So the two thousand and loose change B had in the bank made the red light go off in the White House, and now she can’t even pay the water bill. And as she mentions that to me, I also start relaxing. Because I know, it is times like these where couples have to stand together and fight off the forces of evil as one unit.

“They won’t get us my love, we’ll fight them till the bitter end”, I say to her, as we drive over the pollution-darkened hills of Johannesburg, and into the Sunset