That one time in Georgia the country had to have been a sign. Visiting Georgia served well to shape up my summer into something I could care about. The sublime Asiatic ambience that wafted through the quelled the inconvenience I always felt from feeling at ease in a too-European place. I felt at ease in Georgia, not because it had the airs of a comfortable, ‘organized’ place with a baroque architecture that only seemed to become more beautiful with time, but because the terminal afflictions of nation-ness visibly spread through its landscape like leeches feasting on a rotten finger. It was terribly a nation with touristy attractions, breathtaking, arched-towards-heaven landscape, graffitied alleyways crowded with shops of struggling nationals, spray-painted walls asking people not to commit suicide, a historical old town that cuts through to new, commercially boisterous streets mobbed by buskers who offered a taste of good music for trifles and homeless people unabashedly stretching begging hands to foreigners, not caring to hide the haughtiness in their eyes.

Georgia could, unlike other European countries, not afford to pose as Eldorado trapped in Pandora greenhouses in order to shelter them from the pollution(s) in the rest of the world. True enough, my affection for Georgia is voyeuristic; I loved her/love her because I could see her naked parts – the blobby tommy folds that, if parted into nooks and crannies, contain grubby dirt, perky mountain-mold breasts that make eyes breezily shoot to the sky in awe, parted thighs with moist teasing delights that mirrored the poised showiness of a slim-bodied woman on Chaturbate moaning in the Russian language.

I felt at ease in Georgia. It could have been home. That must have been why I didn’t notice the loneliness that had caked into a wanting for someone who wanted companionship beyond that which a casual, you-do-you-i-do-me friend could offer; that must have been why I was beguilingly receptive to the un-demanded touches when they came.

He said his name was Otto. Otar? Or Arthur? I don’t know. I was, through Google Map, finding my way to the national museum but had decided to stop by one of the big malls in Tbilisi to explore the possibility of getting a gift for a friend. I can’t remember who talked to who first but I know our encounter (however way it took off) happened right after one of the young street sellers had tried to get me to buy an original Chanel perfume. I had gently warded him off not with the genuine truth of being broke despite being a tourist but with the tangential excuse of being allergic to strong aromas. It was clear on his face and from his constant request that I smell his product that he did not believe me. I did not believe myself either and it was with this “Igboju” that I walked into the mall and started roaming around, looking for a cheap souvenir sales junction. I finally landed on a sock-selling shop, and it was while I was trying to bargain for a fancy Georgian-reflective pairs of socks that Otar/Arthur/Otto walked up to me and, for the first? second? time we were meeting, he said matter-of-factly that he liked my hair in an accent that was clearly trying to imitate Jamaican Rastafarians.

“You are African, right?” he asked in his unnatural accent

“Yes,” I replied

“Where in Africa? Jamaica?”

“No, Nigeria.”

“Ah, I see. Your locks don’ look Jamaican, I can tell. But they are beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

He was saying all these while I am standing in front of a petite, fine-faced shopkeeper serving me a polite smile. But rather than feel annoyance at his interruptive praise giving, I felt a sense of elation. At the time, I had excused this feeling as emanating from my practiced response to the kajillion praises I had gotten from Georgians and Russian tourists about the beauty of my free-form, messy locks.

Something in how I received his compliment must have encouraged Otar? Otto? Arthur? because he continued to hover around me, following my hands, my movements as I checked out different socks, looking at the custom prints on them spelt out in English and Georgian languages. He deliberated alongside me, giving his opinions on which pair of socks was gift-worthy for a friend and which was not. No, he did more than give his opinions; he made decisions for me.

Yes, this. No, not that. Don’t you know? This has bad writing on it. Bad writing. Means bad thing in Georgian. Supports bad people in Georgia. Communism. Nooooo, Noooo, you can’t take that, Fun-mi.

Had I told him about my name at some point? I could not remember. All I could picture in mind was his languid yet fixated attention on me, a Nigerian girl with messy locks he thought were beautiful.

I had loved a black pair of socks with Georgian scripts on them; had thought it was fitting for the personality of the person I was getting them for. But he had said no because the English translation of the word written on it was “brother”.

I listened to him. I listened to him and didn’t get the socks I loved. Instead, I bought one cutesy kind with the word “Fabrika” written on it. I also bought another bearing the zodiac sign Aquarius. Was I happy with my choices? Funny enough, that didn’t matter. It mattered more that I had someone with me to make the choices even if that someone was a strange Georgian, Rastafarian-speaking person whose name I had not even asked for at the time.

Otar? Arthur? Otto? stayed with me throughout my socks-purchase and went me into HM as I cursorily browsed some clothes. Then, he stepped out of HM with me and, outside the hall where the summer heat beat out the freshness I had taken with me from the mall, I heard him say cursorily that he thought I was beautiful. I didn’t pay attention then. I was eager to leave, realizing then that I had to leave for the museum if I intended to not miss the chance of drowning in the artistic serendipity museological experiences afford for at least 2 to 3 hours. I bade him goodbye and walked forward to cross the road to the other side where the museum was. But Tbilisi roads, as I had come to discover within the period of my short stay, were not made to be crossed. They were made for cars and buses, fast-moving vehicles that didn’t care hoot about running into pedestrians. Why should they care when pedestrians had a network of underground tunnels through which they could get to the other side?

Even though the tunnel closest to me was quite a distance away for my mall-tired legs, I didn’t think it was a good decision to brave the wide, unfriendly road. Just as I made to start walking to the tunnel, I felt a hand on my wrist.

“The museum is not far. Just on the other side.”

I couldn’t remember when I had told him about the museum or if it was from him that I had asked for direction, but I was comforted by the warmth in his hand and the attentiveness he had paid my movements.

“Oh, just the other side?” I asked, as if I didn’t know that to begin with.

“We cross here, and we see the museum.”

After that statement, he mumbled something about the road being free and swung me right onto it, with his hands and whole body in tow. We ran across the road and, even to my beware-of-strangers-i-hate-chivalry mind, I felt like a movie star in love with Otar? Arthur? Otto? crossing the road while holding my wrist in his hand. Even then, I could think of a thousand K-dramas I had watched where love had started or were cemented through road-rain shenanigans. As we crossed, I thought to myself, fuck my feminist principles. I liked being held.

However, when we got to the other side of the road, I became self-conscious again and in keeping with my character, I withdrew my hand quickly and stressed the importance of my leaving/going to the museum/staying away from him/wanting to be left alone so I can feel sane again to Otto? Otar? Arthur?

He listened, sat on a roadside bench, and watched me see him watch me back up from him a few steps with a trail of some sadness in his eyes.

I didn’t walk too far away before he felt up the hand that he had held a little and pulled me down to sit beside him on the bench.

“Wait. Stay with me a little,” he said with a pleading voice.

I stayed. Stopping in my tracks and looking straight at him for the first time, almost as if I had anticipated his action. I stayed. Taking in the sight of him and noticing for the first time that he was a scraggly, unkept, near-homeless looking person, yet feeling pleased with him that he had asked me to sit with him, feeling pleased with myself that I had elicited desire in a man who clearly didn’t have his life together and would probably have stopped any stranger who was dumb enough to give him attention.

I stayed. Listening to him talk about his love for Jamaican reggae music, his dream to be a Georgian Rastafarian traveling between Jamaica and several inner towns in his country, mixing Georgian folk songs with reggae vibe… Listening to him tell me that Georgian folk songs are indeed reggae music of a different sensibility, that he busks/could busk/or will busk out the reggaeness in Georgian indigenous beats, that he will make a name for himself as a reggae icon on the streets of Tbilisi. Listening to him ask me questions I had no answers to, listening to me ask him questions about his love for Jamaica to which his only answer seemed to be how he loved the country, how he loved Africa too, and the beautiful women in it, beautiful women like me.

I stayed. Dangling my crossed legs and smiling sheepishly to his words while I smelled the stench of alcohol(ism) coming from his breath and felt his hands crawling around the tip of my locks, down my neck, my shoulders, teasing the bare areas around the neon tank top I was wearing. I didn’t feel cringe at any of his actions. I felt something. I hardly knew what I felt. It was more the cautiousness about the ticking time than anything else that got me to interject in between the YouTube videos and his attempt to make me follow him on Instagram.

Wait. Did I follow him? Or did he follow me? Someone followed someone but it couldn’t have been me. Or was it?

I told him again that I had to leave. Leave for the museum, the one right in front of us. This time, he obliged me after I had duly made a promise about learning more about his Georgian folk-reggae fusion and the possibilities it presents. However way he managed to do it, as I stood up and finally walked away, he manufactured a staring look that left me feeling queasy.

Was that desire I saw in his eyes?

I kept thinking back to his indecipherable all through my hop from one museum space to another – archaeological, numismatic, historical, artistic. In the rural art of Niko Pirosmanashvilli and the mythical city compositions of Dimitri Khakhutashvilli, all I saw were the lines of longing drawn out in the eyes of Arthur? Otto? Otar?

It was not until I scooted over to gazing at the impressions made by Zura Apkhazi from the noise of stones that I realized that it was me all along. It was me who desired, who wanted to be desired. It was me who wanted to stay. It was me who wanted to do small talk. It was me who encouraged the flirting and touching. It was me who asked all the questions that made it possible/necessary to stay longer.[1]

Now that I look at pictures from my time staring at Apkhazi’s abstract scrawls from the scratching of stones on canvas, I can easily tell that there was a certain knowing yet lost gait I possessed almost as if I was in solidarity with the grey areas that had vanished into the craggy black-white stone scratches that filled the length and breadth of the canvas. The grey areas, like traces of confusion and uncertainty in the face of confronting one’s subconscious craves, would forever remain grey, inscrutable, unknowable…

There is a lot more I am not revealing. I haven’t, at all, mentioned the dreary feeling that came with the realization that going to Georgia with a travel buddy and close friend would not do anything to quell the feeling of loneliness that had been building in me before my journey and had culminated into puzzling feelings that held my heart in a tight knot and kept my head constantly excavating…

In fact, my lonely angst had only become worse with the presence of someone else.

The few times I had traveled before Georgia, I was alone. And if I was with people, then, half of them were strangers, the other half were familiar faces who were more interested in making memories they would never forget with the strangers they might never see again. I enjoyed this, though, the feeling of traveling at one’s own pace. People-watching while taking long walks, exploring little amusements while missing out on big adventures, having locals take you hurried, unflattering pictures, staring endlessly at medieval sights while running a commentary in your head about how the unbelievable histories confined in the bastions of the old world would make for a good story, getting lost in the abyss of museums with no intention of being found, and stopping for long periods on end at souvenir shops with no intention to buy anything.

I enjoyed all that mopping around alone, but travelling with a friend made me realize how much I wanted/needed/yearned for someone to be with me at all these places I had been, it made me realize all the things I wanted to do with this someone in all the places I had been, it made me realize, even in Georgia, I still couldn’t do all the things I wanted to do because I still didn’t have that someone. All I had was a friend, closer than familiars, who was more interested in making memories they would never forget with strangers they might never see again.

It explains it, why Georgia became my lovecraft, why in the ruin bars of its capital, the dilapidating structures of its inner cities, and the abjection of its poverty-ridden locals, I chose to see life and liveliness, I chose to morph my shashibo cubic gaze into the shape of love.

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I am not even sure that what I am feeling for is love. It can’t be love because I would know where not to find it. It’s desire. The desire to desire, be desired and to appreciate being desired without feeding someone else’s desire in a non-desirable way. The desire to fuck but fuck someone who desires me not just because…, but because I am desirable to them not just for a desired period but for as long as we don’t run out of the desire to find our bodies, our shared existences desirous. Yes, the politics of desirability is, according to YouTuber Khadija Mbowe, a “hard middle ground” [3]. Maybe what I am feeling for is love.