Ahlafyu!

Love and war! (Sort of)

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My parents and I are close. Partially, perhaps, because I’m an only child, but throughout my childhood, my parents intentionally cultivated our relationship such that it was filled with mutual love and respect and thoughtfulness and a sense of inter-dependence. Being twenty-five and now both geographically and fiscally independent from my parents, there is little need to rely on them the way I did as a child, but I still seek to actively involve them in my life; I ask my mom for recipes, I ask my dad for book recommendations. Every weekday morning (or most, I occasionally forget), as I walk over a particular bridge on my way to work, I send my parents a quick voice note about my life. Though it’s me we’re talking about and practically nothing I say is said quickly, so I dump a five-minute-long, sometimes rambling message in the lap of my parents each morning. I think they like it. Not only that, but we try to video call at least once a week, too. Just as we did when I was a child and I was being waved off to school or to Granny’s house, every time we hang up the phone and at the end of half of all the voice notes we send one another, we say ‘I love you’.

Although we never actually say, “I love you,” anymore. For the first year of our relationship, my girlfriend and I had a long-distance one. Five months after we had first met and two months after I had asked her to be my girlfriend, she came to South Africa for a week to visit me. While we were at a wine farm on her second day there, I told her that I loved her for the first time. Thankfully, she replied in kind. We then continued to repeat it that week, as young lovers do, over and over, not quite believing our own giddy voices. Once I had put her on the plane back to Germany (and dinged my car in the airport parking lot, I was in such a state on the way home), we clung to our new phrase. It would be another two months before we saw one another; this time, I’d be visiting her in Germany. I think partially because we were brand new and all couples go through that phase, and partially because we couldn’t hold each other, because there was no other way to process our newfound love, we continued to repeat I love you to one another incessantly. Of course, we found it to be perfectly normal and practically necessary, but in the process of repeating the words so much and with such excitement, they began to morph. The plain English turned sing-song, and the distinctions between words began to fade away until what was said was one conglomerate phrase: Ahlafyu!

As part of our weekly communication, my father sent me a voice note on Tuesday night. He was referencing my thoughts on an article he had sent me earlier that day, one that reflected on how phones are making people worse at tolerating boredom, especially in the small moments in between activities, like sitting on the bus (these moments are called interstitial time, I learned). The article is very Dad: smart and niche and thoughtful. I enjoyed the piece and had felt (as any YouTube shorts addict might) vaguely attacked, and processed my thoughts on the article with him. His message in response was, again, very Dad: wisened and sensitive. His greeting, though, was entirely my girlfriend. After his clear and concise summation of my thoughts, his voice sing-songed Ahlafyu! through my phone’s speaker. I realised on Tuesday evening, after listening to his voice note, that my dad and I now say I love you to each other the way my girlfriend and I do: with audibly upturned lips and an unabashedly silly tone. Upon reflection, I realised that my new expression of adoration is sung to everyone I hold dear.

My girlfriend is far better at being silly than I am. Though, in the last three years, she has done rather a good job of eliciting my inner silliness. About a month ago, she and I bought Nerf guns and ran all through her apartment, hiding behind doors and giggling through the kitchen, shooting foam darts at one another. My idea. Our silly, sappy, fabulous sing-song ‘I love you’ is a credit to her joyful, exuberant spirit. How wonderful that it has spilt into all of my relationships. My mom is really good at going ham and singing Ahlafyu! into her phone at the top of her lungs, regardless of where she is. I don’t often wonder how my girlfriend has impacted my life. I live in Germany and speak German at my day job, the answer is fairly plain. I don’t, however, ask myself how often she’s impacted the lives of the people I love. It’s surely in more ways than this, but I think that introducing a little silliness, a little more joy, into a phrase my parents and I share almost daily is a wonderful legacy of love. Don’t you?

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I know you’re curious, and, yes, I absolutely demolished my girlfriend playing with Nerf guns. I blame her parents for giving her only sisters to play with and hundreds of books to read as a child. If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.