A Somali Christmas in Montreal

What do you want for Christmas, sweetie? That's the question my girlfriend Maryam Haddad asked me a few days ago. The damn teaser happened to be coming out of the shower with a light blue towel wrapped around her six-foot-tall, curvy body when she asked me this. Instant boner on my part, and I got up and went to her. I kissed her on the lips, and palmed her big brown ass. I definitely wanted a piece of her but she smirked, patted down my bulging erection and told me that she had to run. I smiled politely, and went back to playing Gears of War, my favorite video game. I was so frustrated that I died in the game, and my groan of frustration got a laugh out of Maryam. Women are evil creatures, man, seriously.

In case you're wondering who this is, I'm Kelvin Joseph Mathieu. My friends call me K.J. for short. I was born in the City of Cap-Haitien in northern Haiti, one fine day on November 8, 1989. Five years later my parents, Harold and Marianne Mathieu moved to the City of Montreal, province of Quebec. I grew up in La Belle Province, as Quebec is affectionately called by its residents, and presently I study Criminal Justice at McGill University. I'm in my second year in the program, and eight months ago I met a gal who changed my life forever. Maryam Haddad, the tall, chocolate-skinned Somali goddess with the curvy figure and heart-shaped booty that just won't quit. Truly a vision of loveliness.

I spotted this fine black woman coming out of the campus bookstore with a Psychology Today book under her arm. I couldn't take my eyes off her pretty face or her mesmerizing ass. Still, in those days, looking at women was all I did because I'm painfully shy and black women tend to overlook nerdy guys like myself. They prefer black guys who are sporty or thuggish. As a video game-addicted, computer-loving, comic book-obsessed nerd, I was straight out of luck. Like a lot of men in Montreal, I found Somali women gorgeous but also forbidden because of their conservative mindset. Women from the Islamist world tend to stick with men from their faith and culture. I'm a Haitian guy brought up in the Catholic faith. A guy like me doesn't stand a chance with a chick from that world, given how different we were.

As luck would have it, Maryam Haddad had a lot more in common with me than I thought. You see, as amazing as it sounds, this Somali gal was not Muslim. She was born and raised Christian. Maryam's father, Mohammed Haddad, was born in the City of Nabatieh, in the Republic of Lebanon, to a Somali mother and Lebanese Shiite Muslim father. After his father's death during a Hezbollah raid in Beirut, Mohammed and his mother Anisah were chased out of their home by his father's family. They returned to Somalia, where they tried to build a life for themselves. While struggling to adapt to life in Somalia, a country he barely knew and didn't understand, Mohammed Haddad encountered a group of Christian missionaries from France on their way to nearby Ethiopia. They offered the starving young man food and water, and also taught him about the Bible and the Lord Jesus Christ. The missionaries kindness touched Mohammed Haddad so much that he would eventually convert to Christianity before moving to Canada.

Upon arriving in Canada, Mohammed Haddad moved to the region of Quebec, having grown fascinated with French culture thanks to the kindness of the French-born Christian missionaries who changed his life. He would meet a beautiful Jamaican woman named Christine Thompson and marry her, and they would have a son, Samuel, and a daughter, Maryam. The lovely Maryam Haddad, daughter of a Somali Christian convert from Islam, is the woman I felt I was destined to be with. I couldn't forget her after seeing her at the campus bookstore, and one day I worked up the nerve to approach her. At that point, I didn't know that she was of the same faith I was. My eyes told me that she was Somali, that much was plain given her very Somali features, and skin tone, but I still wanted to know her.

I'm going to be brutally honest here, ladies and gentlemen. I have never had that much luck with women. I was entering my twenties and I'd only been with one other woman, a mixed chick named Amelia Carlos from the island of Barbados. We had a good thing but she moved to the City of Toronto to attend Ryerson University after our first year at McGill University in the City of Montreal. Amelia was the only chick who showed me any love ( before Maryam ) in my entire lifespan. Lucky for me, Maryam Haddad wasn't stuck up like most of the really beautiful girls I saw at our school, and she was surprisingly friendly and easygoing. I was definitely in luck.

Maryam Haddad and I began hanging out, just casually at first. What a pair we made. She's six-foot-tall, curvy and gorgeous, like a supermodel. Oh, and she's not snotty, stuck-up or brain-dead either. This gal is studying civil engineering, and it's definitely not a major for those who lack the smarts for it. Me? I'm six-foot-one, a bit chubby and dark-skinned, and I have a round, jovial face. People keep telling me I look like actor/rapper Sean Kingston and I absolutely hate it. I wear glasses, and every day I wear clothes that are considered either churchy or business-casual because I can't stand jeans and T-shirts. You see, there are a lot of brothers walking around with their pants hanging low or quote unquote thug-style urban wear. Not my style at all. I believe in dressing sharply, thank you very much. If you don't like it, you can kiss my square behind.

I lived in my neatly ordered world. I went to Sacred Heart Church every Sunday, and sometimes showed up for Friday night service. It's a big Catholic church in Montreal. Eighty percent of the congregation is made up of Caribbean folk like Haitians, Jamaicans and Barbadians, along with some Africans. The rest of the church is made up of Hispanics and some French Canadians. The priest, Father Antoine Pierre-Louis, is Haitian. I am the president of the Student Entrepreneurs Club at McGill University. I'm also in the top two percent of my class at school. Always been the brainy type. I'm smart and driven, but also a bit of an introvert. I won't win any popularity contests, not because people don't like me but because they don't notice that I exist. Well, Maryam wasn't like the others. This fine-looking sister seemed to like me for me. And we had an awful lot in common. During one of our early hangouts, I took her to my favorite comic book shop. I love mainstream comics like Batman, Superman, Spider Man, Iron Man, the X-Men, the Justice League and the Avengers, but I also support so-called dark horse characters such as Blade, Spawn, The Black Panther, and other comic books featuring African guys or African-American men as superheroes.

I didn't think there were chicks out there who could spend hours arguing over who's the better superhero, Superman or The Hulk. I thought it was something guys did. Not out of sexism but because women typically laugh at the whole comic book genre and prefer other stuff. Well, Maryam possessed encyclopedic knowledge of all my favorite superheroes, including the Black ones. She showed me an autographed picture of herself and her parents at the premiere of that movie Blade Trinity in Los Angeles a while back. They got their picture taken with Wesley Snipes and Jessica Biel. Nice. Real nice. Yeah, Maryam was something else. I found something new in her. Someone who liked me for me. I still remember our first kiss fondly. We were coming out of the movie theater, having seen Men in Black 3, and she leaned closer, telling me I had something on my chin. I'd been sipping on my Tim Horton's coffee throughout the movie and thought I had gotten some on me. It was purely a ruse on Maryam's part, and she kissed me. I was surprised, to tell you the truth, but I returned her kiss passionately. From that moment on, we were a couple.

I thank my lucky stars every day. I've got a lot to be thankful for. Maryam and I have gotten to know each other's families, and she sometimes comes to church with me. School is going pretty good for both of us. Yeah, life is cool. I was deep in thought when Maryam came back that night, and we made love like never before. I don't know what got into her ( other than me ) but we fucked like there was no tomorrow. Together we tried some wild stuff that I honestly didn't know she was into. After making love, we both lay in bed, holding each other tightly. How I wished this moment could last forever. The next morning, I had a little surprise for Maryam when she woke up. A shiny little something in a small red box. When she found the ring, she jumped for joy and kissed me so hard my lips frigging hurt. She looked at me with tears in her eyes and thanked me for being a wonderful man. I smiled and told her I was lucky to have her. Maryam grinned and told me she wanted to cook for me, then she sent me to the nearby Loblaws supermarket to get her some cooking oil. We kind of used the last of it as lubrication during anal sex the night before. Yeah, we're naughty like that.

The Loblaws supermarket is located exactly six hundred feet from our off-campus apartment, and I went there with a song in my heart. Anything for my beloved Maryam, the most wonderful woman in the world. It was Sunday morning. I looked at the sky, and thanked God for making me happy. I'm just a nerdy, chubby guy from Haiti who got lucky. I'm attending the best university in Canada, on scholarship no less. I'm dating a wonderful young woman. My parents are still around and they're doing good. Next year they're going to retire. I can't wait to see their faces when I tell them that I proposed to Maryam and she said yes. Yeah, life is good. I walked into the supermarket, and what I saw amazed me. All around me, people were hunkering down. I soon saw the dreadful reason why.

There was a guy with a gun, a red-haired fat white guy, and he was facing two uniformed Montreal police officers, a tall black man and a white woman. They had their guns drawn and told him to drop the gun and he still refused to comply. They fired. So did he. I watched him go down in a hail of bullets. Slowly, the shoppers who had been lying on the floor began to rise. A little old lady standing next to me stared at me with wide eyes. There was fear in her eyes. I smiled reassuringly at her, and told her the bad guy was gone. She pointed to me, and I followed her finger. I saw the fast-spreading puddle of blood spreading from my chest across my shirt. I'd gotten shot and never even felt it. How come I didn't feel it, I wonder? I love you Maryam, I thought as I fell, and then all went black.