Notes on Living is a column about how we are co-creating this life. What stirs our hearts? What feeds us? How do the challenges that animate our most frequent thoughts move through us, individually and collectively? What has life shown us about itself? How are we finding belonging and making meaning/healing in all this?
Here, Ifeoma Aroh, recent graduate and brand storyteller living in Nsukka, Enugu shares a conversation she’s been having with God about an often-overlooked byproduct of situationships.
I wrote a letter to God two months into getting my first apartment and starting life properly as an adult. This was 5 years-ish after making a ‘no touch’ promise to God and three years after breaking the promise. I wrote that letter anyway and it reads:
Dear Yah,
I think I have come to that point where I crave hot sex, the kind that keeps me in bed for three days and on the fourth, I'm in the confessional, making the sign of the cross beside a priest.
I like to imagine that this is the part where God chokes on His hot coffee and sets His mug down to get the full gist, but then I remind myself that nothing ever shakes this big guy.
Don’t get me wrong, I want it soft, really soft and I want it with someone who knows exactly what intimate worship is. I mean, someone who knows what it is to worship you and at the same time, worship a slim woman’s body. I want it with someone who loves me like you love me, but I don’t know how much longer I can wait to get this legally, hence the confession.
Does this make any sense to you?
I'm trying my pitching skills to rattle you a little bit into considering my application for a hoozband, you really should look into that, because I'm beginning to wonder exactly what this weather is up to this year, with the whole climate change and everything. If I were back home in Abuja, I'd have loved to plant some corn in the backyard. Maybe a little groundnut as well, but I'm all alone in this big house, far away from home and these droplets have a very funny way of leaving a cold behind that these three cardigans and a blanket could never shield me from.
I think this is the part where God chuckles and asks me in this big, husky voice “So this is what you need a hoozband for, mm? To keep yourself warm?”
It’s not me, it is the weather… refusing to allow the seeds in the ground to grow, but somehow managing to blossom this seed of lust that my last situationship planted in me. So I don’t care if this sounds a little selfish, but there is nothing wrong in wanting a little warmth for myself, now is there? I get these really bad backaches on tough days after work, yunno, and I could do with a really good massage afterward.
I know you want to tell me that I'll get tired eventually, maybe as quickly and as heatedly as the urge came, but I like to think I am a pro at rekindling flames. I guess that is one of the reasons why I'm making this application to you; so you could get me someone who believes in relighting dying fires as well. Someone who believes in making things work. And if you think I am not ready, I know for sure that I love to figure things out along the journey.
I paused to think about all of the things I had tried to figure out by myself in years past. I thought of my blog and how I had abandoned it so I yinmu-ed with my nose at that one. This one was going to be different oo jaare. Besides, I didn’t completely abandon that blog, I am just waiting for the right time to execute all of the plans I had for it.
Let's get this thing straight, I have always craved companionship, but this feeling, this crave for a little touch in deep and intimate parts of me is new. I knew my letter was beginning to look confusing. Do I want a partner as hot as it comes, or do I just want to get laid?
Maybe I was trying hard not to get too close to the bottom of God's list of top 100 good girls any more than I already did, which was why I shifted the focus of the letter just to let him know that I still wanted to have my hot sex under the right institution, in the right way.
But in between writing that last line in the letter and looking up the definition of a word which I wanted to use in my next sentence, I saw on X that a lawyer had ‘pestled’ his wife on her head and streets of the bird app were on fire.
I immediately did a rethink on the whole companion thing because that was the part where the fear came. The fear that had always lingered, but I somehow managed to push hidden somewhere; the fear of finding companionship in a “pestle-loving” lover.
“God won’t even do that to me,” I muttered several times while I scrolled.
I didn’t forward this letter because I did not get to finish it but I started another one a few days later that began like this: I’m curious, do you know what it feels like when a woman wants to be touched?
I still want that hot, steamy sex with a really good worshipper, so maybe I’ll get back to rewriting soon.
*Ifey is a recent graduate and brand storyteller living in Nsukka, Enugu. She is currently building a natural-haircare brand. “I write, of course, and I think I really find it amusing that people refer to me as interesting when all I do is sip cold garri and braid hair,” she says.