A.B.C.D. [A BOY'S CARAT DREAM]

It’s the last year of the century, 1999, to the uninitiated. As the sun sets that fine day, you drive the sheep to their shed, satisfied that you weren’t tempted to drive them early so that you could afford uninterrupted play. You remember the time you risked your mother’s ire by forcing the sheep into their shed in the afternoon and marveled that they've ‘entered by themselves.’ But that was you, being the kid that you were, you never saw the bigger picture. Somehow instant gratification was what drove your decisions.

On this day, a Thursday, it’s special in some way. It’s a market day and mother doesn’t usually go the market often. You think maybe she’s gone to buy fruits for the family or maybe vegetables, being January, the driest month in the region. It’s all you can think. At sunset she arrives with a baggage. Your siblings were the first to spot her and ran to her, helping her with the baggage even though they couldn’t manage to lift it off the ground. They try and try and finally give up.

Mother places the yellow paper, sits down and asks for a cup of water. In the mean time you and your siblings forage through the bag, claiming the goodies that came from the market. You fight over one thing until mother decides whom it belongs. If it wasn’t meant for you, you either sulk or go through the bag one more time; maybe you can find something meant for you. On this day you don’t find anything special for you. Instead mother rises from her chair, and dips her hand into the bag and fishes out a maroon sweater and then asks you unceremoniously to try it. It fits you perfectly, of course with plenty room for improvement. You look at yourself quite amazed for speech.

And that’s when it hits you. It dawns on you that you are finally beginning a chapter whose ending you don’t know. No one knows. You contemplate asking your mother why she’s punishing you, for the tales you’ve heard of school weren’t appealing. Teachers were bad, they beat people for no reason. There was no joy in school, except a ceaseless routine, day in day out. Go to school early enough, sit in class, break time at certain intervals and then lunch time.

The following day you accompany your mother to the trading centre. There you meet a tailor with a ‘bad leg,’ he has a walking pole, one that was fashioned out of a blamelessly straight tree. He takes your measurements. He engages your mother but you are too busy smelling the aroma of mandazi that rule the entire place. Back then a mandazi was everything. I think it was easy luring a kid those days. All you needed was a mandazi. How they packaged it in empty flour bags!! Shit you loved it more than anything else. Put it in your dairy, grown ass man, mandazi was your first love.

A week later the uniform arrives mysteriously. Mother didn’t leave home that day. She accosts you before you go to bed and orders you to try the uniform. A pair of dark blue shorts, a light blue shirt and a maroon pullover, there were no shoes. The shorts are tiny as hell, but you are tiny as well, just six years old. The next day the journey of schooling began. You and your brand new uniform, accompany your mother to the nearest school. Mother enters an office with you in tow, your name is scribbled down on an old tattered book by an old bespectacled man.

Kipchirchir Kiprop.

That’s your name. No fancy English name. Back then you hated that name that it was almost abusive, it was actually an expletive term to call someone by their English name. You guarded it like nuclear launch codes. Any moment someone discovered it you were doomed, just like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As far as you were concerned you didn’t want destruction. But then richer kids used their first names, the sons and daughters of athletes that lived within the precincts of the school. Of course this was a temporary arrangement before being  shipped to better schools.

After a few exchange of pleasantries, mother is instructed to take you to a classroom near the gate. There she talks with the teacher, and the leaves. You are scared shit of being alone. It dawns on you that the only place you were assured of security was being your mother. Now you are all alone in a sea of unfamiliarity. You want to cry but she assures that it will okay. At that moment your pour all your hatred on your mother and douse her with unspoken juvenile expletives.

The teacher turns out to be motherly as well and ushers you to a class full of kids. That’s when you realize you are the tallest among them all. You don’t remember but for once in your life you had to ‘borrow’ permission to shit. And there was a designated place to shit too. Back at home the bush came in handy, for the hole in the pit latrine looked huge. It looked like you could slip through it and die a slow painful death, corroded by feaces. The ‘borrowing of permission’ was the hardest part. Unfortunately there was no manual for that. Now, you wish you could tell people that you didn’t shit on your brand new uniform on the first day of school.

The saddest thing about school then was that you didn’t know the reason why you went to school. It felt like you went there to wait for holidays. Or get promoted to the next class after a year. Nevertheless you gave your best shot. You learnt how to hold a pen and scribble things down, though incomprehensible. It was deemed a good step towards progress.

Then came the singing. Endless singing. When you thought you were done, then came more singing. About alphabets, numbers, days of the week and months. The only singing you truly enoyed was the one before you went for lunch.

Naskia sauti, sauti ya mama

Sasa ni saa sita, sasa ni saa sita

Kwaheri mwalimu

Bye bye teacher

Mungu akipenda tutaonana kesho na tusome

********

A few years later you make friends who you played with, went home with for lunch. And as you grew, it became apparent that you didn’t deserve the kind of education offered in that school. Your parents begin head hunting for a new school, where you’d get quality education. But that wasn’t what was on your mind. It was a matter of affluence. Relatively rich homes didn’t keep their kids in day schools where they scored 200 marks. No, they aimed big. They take you to interviews in schools so far away from home, schools hidden in the bush that to reach you must board matatus, alight and board another before you get there. It seemed god was reading your mind for the interview was as hard as Wabukala’s next job.

When everything had been exhausted you went back to your school.

“Are you sure you are not transferring?” asked the teacher, a slightly bulky woman. She doesn’t want to enter you into the class register. She knows somehow, that your parents have already handed in a transfer request.

“I am not transferring,” you reply back. As far as you were concerned passing interviews were a mirage. Even if there was one in the offing, you were sure as hell that you would not be offered a place.

The next day you fail to show up for school. There’s an interview to attend. You don’t give so much thought about success. The last three amounted to nothing but failure. In your mind you’d be back to continue with the same people you’ve known all along, get your 200 marks and live an adulterated village life, a life without too many complications and ambitions. But on that day the gods were on your side. You passed the interview. All of a sudden, you were going to a new school, an academy, and most importantly a boarding school.

A new chapter began in 2005, six years after you began school. With new friends, new mode of teaching, and getting used to badly cooked food and doing your own laundry. In class a few were curious about how you used to perform in your former school.

“I was number two,” you blurt with a sense of triumph. You saw the disappointment in her face. It meant she has to be pushed further down the performance index the next time an exam was done. But then something nags her and she asks the marks you got.

“296,” you say with a sense of pride. Truth is that was the best performance ever in your entire upper primary education. A new comer had beaten you. She settles to her book assured that you are not an academic threat.

A short, slim man pops into the class room and hands you a 200 pages exercise book. There’s fear and reverence that abound the man. You later learnt that he was dressed in a pullover, a hand knit brown turtleneck one, that spoke of his foul mood. When you spotted him in it you watched how you breathed lest your violate one of his many unwritten rules. You would curse the day you were born, the one who bore you and the canal you passed. He was a Kisii by the way. You promise yourself to look for him one of these days, get to know him on a level you aren’t afraid of him.

Three days later, the slim man pops into the classroom with anger. Everybody in class stiffens up as he grabs you by the collar. A sigh of relief ripples through the classroom when you are picked and man handled like someone who just murdered a brother over a plate of ugali. The previous day, the class had been given a composition to write and apparently you had written nonsense.

“What is this?” he fumes, pointing at a single page of the nonsense you had managed to craft.

He flogs you with vengeance. Eight strokes fall on your buttocks. You don’t flinch or budge. The strokes fall one after the other, you don’t even bother to count, you classmates do it for you. You don’t shout, you don’t cry.  When he’s done he tears the page and orders you to rewrite the essay. You rise, dust yourself and you are greeted by something more than awe. They had never witnessed someone who would withstand the man’s wrath, without flinching. You stare at the page he just tore and slowly put it back into your locker desk. He never asks for it later on.

A year down the line, you score 400 marks. You can’t tell the joy that rippled through your being that day. Lagging behind for the better part of your infancy at the school, made you realize that everything is possible, of course with a few floggings here and there. Two more years and you manage decent marks that enabled you to join a secondary school, a provincial one, where you began seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Good grades and your life was all but a guaranteed bliss. You had to surmount the challenge of chemistry and physics. There was no way you could defy the laws of physics because there was no chemistry between the two of you.

Thank god you emerged victorious at the end of the gruesome battle, drained but at least breathing. For the first time you breathe a sigh a relief, you dad’s money didn’t go to waste. Many times before you entertained the thoughts of how best he could have used the money he spent on your school fees. He could have visited every holiday destination around the world, or probably have bought a mansion at Beverly Hills Los Angeles, singing to Jay Z’s Forever Young. Attaining grades that ensured direct entry into university wiped all those thoughts away. For once he asked you what you wanted to do with your life (he never did before).

*******

The devil is always out there to rob people of their happiness. He just can’t stand the sight of people being happy, even for no reason or just for reaping what they sowed over the years.  Right now he’s waiting to rob you a chance for a job, a prospective lover, a dream you’ve held since you grew conscious of your surroundings. The devil is always there waiting for a chance to strike. And strangely the devil is sometimes hidden in us, within us, probing us to make decisions that are conducive for his growth and manifestation.

Before you have digested the results, your parents, having not gotten so used to your presence at for longer periods, decide that you need to do computer studies. Your father sends you to scout for a college within town and off you go, one fine morning. While in town, still prospecting, not actually prospecting but finding a way of writing a receipt to reflect the amount you've told him, and of course pocket the rest, he calls you and triumphantly announces change of plans.

“I have changed my mind. You will study a diploma course. I want you to help your sister out, “he says when you get into the car.

Just like that you find yourself doing a course in purchasing and supplies management. But this time round you are commuting from home to town, an hour work and another hour in a matatu. For a seven am class, you had to be up by 5 am lest you be late. That’s the earliest legal time you’ve had to wake, not forgetting the chilly mornings, plus morning dew.

Amid all the angst, the hating, the skiving of school and the eventual spanking, you decide to man up and complete the course. There you found love that you still doubt if it is, after that really bad let down from her part. After a year you had your diploma, something you couldn’t even celebrate. In it you lost the meaning of learning of education. But you had, it belonged to you and nobody else.

Enter university, the last phase of life. Here you take journalism, a roller coaster and the struggle to beat deadlines. The hardest part of university is deadlines. Nothing else. And worrying about exams and cats. It’s here that you finally taste the night life, the fable that had been narrated in high school and for once it hits you that it’s for those whose wallets are faint hearted. The night is prone to brawls from mean who, after taking three or four bottles decide that every man wants to snatch their woman, or because he sees himself as the undisputed heavy weight champion of the world.

*******

Officially you can sing Kanye West’s song Can’t Tell Me Nothing.

Class started two hours ago

O am I late?

Nooo, I already graduated

Suddenly you learn that there are no jobs. Nobody tells you this in university, you learnt to write a business plan though but for the purposes of examination. Right now you have no clue of what you wrote about.

And that’s your ABCD of life; A Boys Carat Dream

NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS

The New Year is here. Just like Christmas it shall find me holed up in some god knows where. Apparently it’s already New Year, biblically. Got this news from a highly placed source who requested anonymity. And typically this New Year shit is already late by a few hours. Let’s make resolutions, right? 

I don’t belong to those New Year new me kind of folks. It’s outdated. It’s for people who are disillusioned about life. Why wait until one a number that has been constant in the calendar for a whole 365 days, changes? It’s just a subtle way of hoodwinking yourself. For me its same old me, same old shit, for another 365 days. Trust me I do expect different results, that’s how I’ve gotten results any way.

But here are some of my prayers for 2016.

Blessings to everybody who owes me money

I project a tough year ahead and I am already toughening up by asking God to bless every single soul out there who owes me money. And let it be enough that they don’t find it painful paying me back.

Let me have airtime when in deep shit

I won’t call you all the time, in fact I am not calling you at all except when I am in deep financial trouble. And times have been kind; I have seen few of those. But then 2017 is a different beast all together. On times such those let me have plenty of airtime to seek help from people we might have even talked the entire 2016. I won’t ambush you on the material day, rather I will start rehearsing a month early. I am the kind who knows what will happen ahead. If I suddenly start calling you regularly, even wishing you a good night, please start saving.

Let Man Utd finish ahead of Arsenal in league

Arsenal fans! These are so good at telling you how your team sucks. They are like a bunch of single guys who constantly tell you how your girlfriend is ugly, but contend dry spells like no one’s business. At least every night we look at a trophy. It’s better to have won a couple of times than to have not at all. Come May, it’s my prayer that we finish ahead of these noisy fellas.

I wish for sanity in people

I am among the many people out here who never quite understand why people do support the politicians they do. Why would you want someone’s meat so badly? Why don’t you just go and hunt your own, a fresh one? I wish that people are sane enough not to let their difference in choices come between them. After all we are all one, aren’t we?

Truthful Voices We Ignore

Sometimes there are truthful voices we ignore. 

17^th October, 2013. It’s was Sunday. It’s a wonder that you remember things that don’t really have much value depending on how you view it. Things that are tested in exams take so long to remember when you need to, but some events last forever. May be its time we give value to things that we don’t easily forget, more than them being mere memories.

On this day I was heading home from Nairobi. I had never been to Nairobi before and as fate would have I got selected to join this school inches from land marks that really identify Nairobi. My raw vie of Nairobi was one large concrete jungle, street after street. I was amazed to see trees and more so a park just beside the city. Marvels from a village boy that was me then.

I had been to every single place Nairobi, had to offer. The night life was something I had yearned. Blame it on these cool kids from considerably rich families. Looking back they weren’t really rich but confident. They grew up watching movies and TV, whichever come first. They told stories of clubbing and shit. And when we stepped into the city, having a taste of became an obsession, the first thing to check off our bucket list. First to Simmers Club, then a myriad of others before we got whisked out of one, at 3 a.m. Then the reality of being murdered by mongrel humans hit us as we strolled atop Thika Super Highway to Ngara. To top it we had to climb a wall back to the hostel considering the watchman had already slept. Then imagine doing that while high.

It dawn on me that night life wasn’t for those whose wallets were faint at heart. I had to redo my bucket list, strip off night life and replace it with something more interesting, something I didn’t manage to up to now. Still redoing my bucket list.

To truly bid bye to city, anybody from the rift will tell you North Rift Shuttle is the choice. Early that morning, I was at their offices ready to carry my city lessons back to my village. I booked the back right seat. I don’t remember if it was the only one remaining or I chose it out of my own volition. I realized it had been a mistake, later on when we had successfully navigated our way out of the congested city. Up to date I still wonder why there are so many people, moving unceasingly all the damn time.

You see I sat beside a couple. Judging from their dressing they weren’t that well off but weren’t struggling. The lady was in a long sleeved rd top and cheap jeans trouser, those that they sell by the roadside. She was happy, that I could tell. The man on the other hand was stone faced as if he had been forced into making the journey.

The lady kept receiving and making calls until her battery ran off. She asked for her man’s which he did without a second thought. The lady seemed to have a business that necessitated her instructions from time to time. Once a caller inquired where she was and triumphantly said she was being ‘taken out’.  There was a pride in the way she said it, like she had won a wager. It seemed the man was keen on taking the relationship to the next level.

Later the calls became scanty as the journey wore on. She’d lean on her man’s chest and ask those questions ladies ask, in a childlike awe. If there’s anything amazing is the way ladies ask questions. Like why is a zebra stripped? Beb si tutaenda Mombasa? The dude never smiled. He answered her questions nonchalantly, like he was absent and his body was inadvertently in a Matatu, travelling to god-knows-where with a lady it loved.

In truth I envied him. The lady was too much in love. In this day and age it’s rare to find ladies who truly love you. Like Chris Brown said, they ain’t loyal anymore. She would laugh in a sonorous way, teasing me at my corner. I couldn’t help but compare mine to theirs. There was this voice that seemed to tell me I wasn’t significant any more. I would ignore it, but it was incessant. Trouble with our hearts is they listen more to what it wants to hear. Right there it wanted to hear that it was deeply in love with her and she was too.

She’d meet me at Eldoret. For the first time in the relationship she never bothered to ask where I had reached. I didn’t too. I only called her when I alighted. The first call went answered. Second the same. The third time she answered in a very sleepy voice, that didn’t feign annoyance. I had ruined a Sunday afternoon siesta. I told her I was in town, just a few metres from where she resided. She had never allowed me into her house and I figured out may be she didn’t want me to the subject of gossip from her neighbours or she had another guy who had unrestricted access to her house. I had gotten over that and wasn’t hoping that she’d change her mind soon.

She promised she’d be out in a few minutes. The minutes turned into many. I contemplated leaving without seeing her but something told me to wait a few more minutes. Thirty minutes later she called. She emerged from the buildings lethargically, bound by something invisible. She walked like someone being led to the gallows. We greeted each other like strangers, without even a faked smile. No hugs.

She’d normally insist I stay for a while but on that particular day she let me go. She seemed to have dished her last shred of care. I had failed her numerously. She had earmarked her exit route and she’d do so at the earliest opportunity. Communication became scanty and when it did happen it seemed forced, her hurling insults then half hearted apologies, which she’d withdraw soon after or ask herself why she was apologizing.

In all honesty, there is always a voice that tells you a relationship isn’t right. I don’t know if its science but there exists an element called ether that links minds. Often times we are thinking of so many things at the same time to focus on what another person is thinking. Ever tried calling your significant other and she tells you she was about to or was texting you? That’s the power of minds. It communicates with another mind, and in the case of discomfort, the other mind will tell that your minds are no longer incompatible.

Don’t ignore that voice. Listen to it. Make your way out of relationships that don’t work.

Chrome

Leila had just closed school. After a few exchange of pleasantries through text she asked when I’d be around so that I could buy her a drink. She said her favourite was Chrome. I wondered. Chrome!  Odd name for alcohol. I mean there’s Kenya Cane, Kenya King, Konyagi, Meakins [I can name almost all the brands of cheap liguor-I belong to this class]. Names weren’t yet exhausted to warrant someone naming a vodka Chrome. Like someone woke up one day with a stiff hung over from the other liquors and said, ‘I’m gonna make me a liquor and name it Chrome. I’m gonna make Chrome more than just a browser.’ Five years from now a deep voice will emanate from our speakers….when chrome was just a browser….

My interest was irked. Trouble is I hadn’t enough problems in my Problem Bank to make me visit the liquor store. Every time I felt the urge of communing with eagles I was always repulsed by the Problem Bank customer care. Sweetly she’d say, ‘You have insufficient problems, please find a woman and call back.’ That’s when I realized how it sucked to live without problems. The world would suck even more without problems. There’d be no politics and worst of all journalists would be jobless. Imagine a world like that! A world where people wake up, make love with only their wives, eat, pray and make love again [with their wives only-this is important]. The world would be so freaking boring.

Back to chrome.

So am heading home with my paps. The sound track to our silent conversations has always been Franco’s music. He has an album that he plays every single time I’ve been on that car with him. We drive reveling in our awkward silence. Franco belts his tunes. I used to hate such kind of music. Now I don’t, how else would I survive a six hour journey? We stop at Nakuru. He had some business to attend. He disappears and I spot a huge Chrome advert on a billboard. There was a dude dressed stylishly, with shoes that glowed around the edge of the sole. There were curvy colorful lines imposed on him but not enough to make him indistinguishable. The photo was taken while he was dancing to some hip hop music, I guess, because his hands were in the air and he stood on his toes. Below him was a fancy slogan I forgot to remember. The clear target of this drink was the young broke ass people. Just like me. RRP 180.

‘I’ll buy it one day’ I promised my liver.

We get home in the wee hours, the kind my high school principal used to call satanic hours. That was just one of the few punchlines he managed to pull. One day he claimed our parents were the poorest South of Sahara and north of Limpopo. If weren’t peaceful enough we’d have lynched his car [one of his]. Looking back our parents sure had to be. I mean if you can build a multi-million house immediately after purchasing a Toyota Rav 4, everybody had to be poor surely. I retrieve my bag from the car boot and prance about indulgently. There is something about the village; fresh air, no noise except dogs barking occasionally and cocks crowing-the air is generally serene.

Something about home. No matter how long you’ve been away everything will always seem normal. No matter how changes have taken place it will still be the same place you left a few years or months back. It will still be home.

I should meet Leila, I thought basking on a rock by the stream. I always check on this rock occasionally, but almost always, when I want to clear my mind. The gurgling stream offers the best beats as the birds sing recklessly up the trees. A few texts later we strike a deal. We’d meet the next day, a Sunday. As usual she says she doesn’t have fare. You get a cookie for guessing what I did. Bingo! You got it right.

Is it impatience or is it that girls drag themselves deliberately when they agree to meet you? Or it could be my own problem? She had promised to leave her place at 3.30, add another hour and she’d be there. At four I was there, spruced up. I called. She doesn’t pick. I call again. No answer. An hour later she calls. I rushed out from this dinghy movie place, where retards catch Dj Afro movies. I forced myself in, for time to move. I’d missed Dj Afro anyway, and that was enough an excuse. This is also the place we catch football. Here the roof is dust infested. Woe unto you if a belated Arsenal fan jumps in jubilation, worse still for a replay of goal. It’s not rare to find people celebrating a replay, especially when their team’s behind. I think they should ban replaying from different angles because many people here confuse for another goal.

Leila says she’d be leaving her place in an hour. That’s makes it two. Thinking of two grueling hours in a dinghy place, coupled with sweaty human beings, crammed in one place and the hotness of the place prompts me to ask what’s keeping her that long. I call her back immediately she hangs up. She picks up and barks.

‘I just told you I’ll be there in an hour….is it this money that you are desperate about. I can send them back…’ and she hangs up just like that. Without according me an opportunity of reply. Meager money. I couldn’t count the amount of money Sportpesa and African Spirits Limited have gobbled up-probably a thousand over.

Why would she be irked by a hundred shillings? Why would she even think I would be at a loss with a mere hundred shillings? Just because she wouldn’t be around wouldn’t mean I wouldn’t get where I was to go [apply your poetic knowledge or lack of it]

Just stay wherever you are, do whatever you are doing with whomever you are with, however you lie it. Got nothing to lose.  I text her and head to this pub. It doesn’t have a name now but three years ago it use to be called Metro Pub. It’s deserted. I count only two tables, with a huge space between them. Three high stools are around the counter, unoccupied. Kalenjin music pierces the air. I look around and notice a drunk light skinned girl cuddling or seemed an old rugged looking man. I don’t want guess his age, cheap liquor has a way of aging someone embarrassingly. May he’d just cleared his fourth form. The girl rises once the song changes. I didn’t even notice the change, but I know it was Chelele before as it is now. She dances around trying to move her rigid backside to this Chelele song.  Well, all Chelele songs are the same. And she has the guts to call herself Binti Osama! How would you allow to be killed by a non-entity? Oh, I guess your dad wasn’t there to protect you, blame it on Obama.

I

 order Chrome. This is where we make acquaintances with Chrome.  I hope you aren’t slow like the browser, thinks  I.

‘We only have this,’ a motherly waiter says plainly. Trouble with all the pubs around here is there aren’t any beautiful waiters. No even one. And the serve you in those coloured plastic cups. I see a green liquid inside.

‘Aren’t all supposed to be like this?’ I regretted saying this; probably I’d be thought as an amateur drunkard. Knowing I don’t know she’d be at liberty to charge me any amount. And that’s robbery considering the fact that I’ve emerged from Muthurwa’s unnamed pubs on my goddamn feet. Skilled drunkard!

‘Lemon flavoured, ‘ she says, devoid of any emotion. A rock would say the same words without altering anything.

Green, blue, yellow….whatever (Breaking Bad fans). I want to taste Chrome. I grab it and she demands cash. Like I just stumbled into the pub. I reach for my pocket and retrieve a two hundred shilling note. I hand it to her and she hands me a glass. For the first time I see a glass. Maybe first timers are served in glasses, like most homes do to visitors. Those reserved utensils, you know. I pour a little and gulp it down and waited. Nothing happened. I poured some more and gulped. Nothing happened. The music still sucked. The two lovebirds were still miserable. Me too. Leila is distant. Like she’s never existed. May this Chrome is as slow as the one am used to. I pour half the glass and gulped down.

Then, without notice everything turned beautiful. The music became the best sound one could ever hear. The ugly couple looks sexy. The motherly bartender looks sexy too. I want to rise and gyrate whatever I have. That would wait, I think.

Then she calls. Leila calls. I look at the phone and toss it aside. She calls again. Same procedure. She calls once more. Same procedure. She texts. I look at the text.

I’m sorry.

                  Doesn’t sound real.

I mean it.

                  You’d have texted immediately. Not three hours later

Just received the text now

                 I’ve haven’t seen yours too, will check them tomorrow. Good night.

More and more sorries come in. I’m sorry for her because I wasn’t even reading them. Minutes later, after clearing my drink, I summon a boda boda guy. Ten minutes I’m fumbling with the door lock, it isn’t actually a lock but a nail driven into the edge of the door and curled, just to keep the door in place but not for security.

Lights out.

Let Me Forget You

It’s rather a strange thing to do today. I’ve found courage and now am raring to go. I want to forget you not because you ever did anything bad to me but because I need to think of fresh things from now on. Truth is, I’ve found it hard to keep you out of my mind. I have raised the rent but you still afforded it, lowered the standards but you still found it fit to live in an abhorrent and deplorable world. I almost left my mind for you, but upon knowing I need it more than you do, I’d like us to strike a deal. Lets part ways in the most amicable manner such that we can greet each other on the streets, corridors and may be sometime we grab a drink without looking like strangers or seeking to patch old differences.

Ever since you walked into this anodyne life of mine I’ve been haunted by the illusion of keeping up to an impossibly high ideal. I’ve tried to act like the man you wanted. I’m haunted still by the thought of us never having amounted to anything. For these haunting thoughts I’ve had to act like an animal around you: talking trash, doing silly stuff and now you think I bear a grudge against you. Actually I do. I wanted revenge to what I considered a callous attitude on your part. But I would provide you what you sought and you had to seek it elsewhere.  I wanted you to desperately want me. I wanted you to find me irresistible without trying to look like it. I wanted you to think of me as much as I think about you (the culmination is this letter).

This letter is a pact on my part. I’m accepting everything as it is. I’ll let you be you without subjecting you to any judgments. I’m accepting you are you and there are things you seek in life that might not be favourable, at least to me, but are to you. I’m accepting everything as it is. I’ll treat everything I’ve heard of you like a rumour; like those peddling it are merely envious of you.

I didn’t see a reflection of me in your eyes. I didn’t want to. I treated you with suspicion and I don’t want to find out if I unjustly did that or not. I’m satisfied of what became of us and I will be more than contented with what you choose to do with your life. I’m letting my mind free of you. Let me think about you when I see you.

You’ve been a nice occupant. Good bye.

Never Google Your Symptoms

Its Sunday morning and you wake up to a stiff headache. Then the events of last night light up your morning in the same way the sun does, only that it derives its tenacity from the yester. The bladder is abnormally full and you involuntarily step with a cat’s stealth, out of your bed to the washrooms (a leafy term I bet). There you whip out your willy (the one you’ve pointlessly doubted its size) and alas there isn’t that pleasant feeling as the liquid excrements gravitate to a God knows where. Instead there’s a painful sensation and the colour of the liquid isn’t normal either. You hold back some of it and make a painstaking retreat to your cozy bed. Your mind has run multiple sprints when you reach your bed.

The templates of the previous outings begin to unfold haphazardly in your mind, with an uneasy sense of humour. It jeers silently. It castigates. It rebukes. The blinding light your cheap phone produces gives a strange sensation as the eyes adjust to a sudden exposure to a copious amount of light. A missed call and a message confront you. She just said goodnight after you failed to pick her call. It doesn’t matter to you because it doesn’t seem to matter to her. You recall the previous encounters with her, and you are convinced she’s the cause of all your impending tribulations. Too much sugar cause diabetes, you think, the comfort offered lasts barely a second before it throws you back to your hell.

For the first in your life you are thankful that opera mini is located ‘so far away’ on your Nokia phone. It’s worth the myriad procedures you navigate before you finally lay your eyes on the best invention on earth probably since gravity, had it been responsible for people falling in love-Google. How it has churned out lazy literates you included and how many brag of that degree that bears the hallmarks of Google. Your certificate could have a Google logo watermarked (KEBS should check on that). Now you are here, conjuring up terms that would give a definite answer. Pain when you (you check yourself) and type urinating. A million plus one results pop up and you quickly click the first one. The ailments you could be suffering from ranges from gonorrhea, syphilis and all those STIS one could think and associated with pain when urinating. Reality hits you where it hurts the most and you suddenly prefer a wound because it would heal in some way sometimes to come. This doesn’t heal, doesn’t abate. Nags so unpleasantly in your head. Then they say you must seek medical attention as quickly as possible and your partner too.

Hospital. The last place you want to be. The distinct smell takes over the room, the kind that draws lines of death all over, only they aren’t straight. Woe unto you if the first story you heard involving the hospital was when somebody died. Then you turn in your bed and begin visualizing you and the doctor, preferably female. Your name is called out loudly by the doc and the temptation to look around, hoping desperately that there’s somebody you share a name in the room. A louder call tells you otherwise and you drag you thought-filled self to the doc for diagnosis. She greets you and make a feeble attempt to respond.

“What’s wrong with you today?” she asks like you’ve always made a visit to the place. A tone of familiarity creeps out of her puffy lips, stern eyes deflating your inexistent ego. You summon courage from your inner self even with the knowledge that it isn’t there, only the fear of dying forcing your lips to part inaudibly.

“I experience pain when I urinate,” was it easy as that? You wonder with triumph, the kind synonymous with Arsene Wenger when his team scores an equalizing goal in the dying minutes of the game.

She asks the day it the problem began and also wants to know if there’s any discharge. You answer all quickly and she scribbles as you stare at the stethoscope dancing rhythmically to her heaving bosom. She doesn’t look at you. She doesn’t ask any more questions, those that you actually expected. Did you have unprotected sex?

You scan around the room and your eyes are obstructed buy hazy figures, dancing like shadows on an uneven ground. The water bottle at the corner, the curtains, and the stack of files on the doctors table….everything dances to one tuneless song, except the doc. All her features stand still against the odds steeped against it. She seems half human, not scared by ailments that ordinary mortals bring to her table every single day. You think experience has taught her how not to give a damn. Your mind takes you back to Google, how to not give a f@#k about ailments……

“Take this to the counter,” she looks at you sternly like she is about to say go home and get well nigga.

A few minutes later you prance out of the clinic. The only disadvantage is that you have been prescribed drugs that demand you to abstain from alcohol. And you are pretty sure from that very moment that impromptu alcohol bingeing sprees will thrown around by your friends as if to celebrate the incapacitation of your liquor appetite. Two steps from the clinic the phone rings and its one of those drinking mates…God let me get well now, you mutter words of prayer and its seems the only time you’ve genuinely prayed.

“Ng’ombe ii!!” A voice reverberates through the earpiece as you turn the corner. It’s a happy one, a sign of good tidings. It’s a voice that creates suspense and you’ve almost always had good moments.

“Sema gunia ii,” you respond gingerly.

“Sportpesa nayo. Lets meet in the evening we do justice to this windfall.”

Windfall?! Jonte is fond of exaggerating things. In a world where he greatest stories are those that a team(enter Arsenal) messed up a bet where one staked as low as 10 shillings and expected to reap 66799 shillings, Jonte is legally allowed to lie though it’s a trait of his. You will not be surprised if you find his phone number saved as Jonte Mwongo in the phones of people close to him.  It doesn’t matter to you. You have been given a temporary restraining order from entering liquor zones. You are like a twelve year old once again, trying to enter a bar.

You trace your steps back to the lecture room. Everything appears distant within your sight. All those sumptuous behinds do not hold the promise it often has, albeit awhile. You take the stairs and for the first time you wish the building had a lift. You recall having seen one and you rubbish it because had it been functional it would have been reserved for the vice-chancellor, even when his office isn’t in that building. The class is half empty, considering you left it full. A group of your friends are huddled in one corner arguing wildly about football. The pretty girls are taking selfies and others are about their own business, perhaps wondering why they came all the way from Githurai to idle.

No alcohol. The brown sachet says proudly. You toss it into your bag and wander off the places you’ve had the most beautiful drinking expeditions. You remember that day when you failed to climb the last stare to your room. You remember that day you woke up in the most unfamiliar place. And you resign with a sigh, telling yourself that today would have been another one of those beautiful moments…

Into This Life, My Life

The long time that lay ahead perpetuated emptiness, an impalpable loss and grief. I didn't know what to make of my day. The desire to do something  better with my time only increased the void I have always known to be part of me. It seemed it would take forever to fill; to attain a sense of fulfillment. The craving for everything better (clothes, shoes and phones) became a futility each passing second i failed to do something tangible with the time disposed at my feet at such unfathomable abundance

Dreams jeer at me every chance they get. And they get it all the time except when I'm under to influence of liquor. I choose to ignore it taunts but I fail miserably in each attempt. It seems to retreat behind my back to launch itself then ambush me in an overwhelming force that I cant resist. I get swept away in an abyss. It takes days to know where I am, weeks to plan how to retrieve myself from the mess, months to execute and years to be fully free from it.

My hope is to be free from every chain that seems to curtail my personal development, slowing down my progress to greater things and greater heights. Even though it seems I am my own enemy I refuse to confront it in the battlefield. it looks like it can beat me hands down. I seek easy ways of soothing my makeshift ego with flimsy alibis. I look around myself and wish something was like this or like that. Then  I seem to wait fro things to be like the wait I want instead of using the tools I have to better myself. (If I always thought like this I would be far)

For the meanwhile, I indulge in a world that borders on despair and hope, my feet firmly fixed on both worlds and the absent desire i so crave to seek the fortunes there's on this earth. The urge to leave the comfort zone that is my dreamland is clipped by a force that I can see but its whispers I can perceive around me. Then i lie on my bed and imagine all the luxurious things i would own...

This Word

Fast running way

This word I want to say

Strolling away, increasing its speed

This word, so callous when am in need

One minute you are here

Next you are leaping away like a deer

This word I want to grasp now

Need I bow?

This word help express this thought

She deserves all I got

I mean my love−the whole of it

You word, help achieve that feat