He was living his life blissfully before she entangled him in her charms.  With her long flowing hair she cast her net far and wide and when it caught, the embrace was so tight as to cause the poor suggestible lass near suffocation. He experienced fear and arousal in equal measure and could no longer be expected to make a balanced decision on the issue. The dance caused him sleepless nights.

She was finally in her element, a new project so to speak. She had something to throw her attention predatory energy.  She approached the acquaintance that fast evolved to a new romance, like one would with a business engagement. Charts, tables, pros and cons. Nothing left to chance. She was now six and twenty and feeling every bit the old maid she could become. All she needed was a fair chance.

He was utterly smitten and no longer in control of his faculties, the lass craved her companionship simply the sight of her; such a delight. He was only too aware of his station in life and often entertained the thought that she was ignorant of the situation with his purse having being cut off from his family inheritance. He often wondered whether it was in his place to inform her, just to clarify but most times he was just glad that his lot in life seemed to be receiving some reprieve.

She was walking on air with pride, glowing with happiness; simply gay. Life could never be kinder. Then matters took a turn for the worse. She got too indulgent and the unthinkable happened. Actually when one thinks more about it, it was rather expected given how she carried on.

A woman her age had few trinkets in her arsenal. She figured she had to be more welcoming and he offered such adventures unheard off she could not resist. He was a gentleman after all she thought. Such harm as was occasioned upon her was unforeseeable according to her.

A whisper from a lady in waiting was all it took. As soon as he heard of her morning ailments, he decided to skip town. Better to do it while he could than wait for the ensuing madness. He had nothing to offer after all.   

And so the poem goes that she left her mother a tear stained note and jumped off the cliff that was too willingly availed, to escape her shame.

It beats wildly when I see you,

Wishes to break free,

Longs for a life of its own,

I cannot keep up.

I crawl when I should run,

I know not what to do with the sight of you.

I will yank it out,

Offer it as sacrifice to the gods.

 I will hold it in both palms and watch life ebb away.

It cannot live without me,

It needs me,

But perhaps I need it more?

I fear frost will bite at the hole left,

The sun is gentle no more,

I will stuff it with jelly to replace you.

I will board it up,

And sign graffiti all over

( ♥ was here)

Five minutes passed as she listened to her heart beat and watched the shadows dance on the window sheers. Nearby someone was playing a ballad, she wondered what time it was for others to be up playing music so loud. Maybe they too couldn’t sleep, or they were having a party. No she ruled out a party; there was no chatter or usual party noise. She listened harder to confirm that it wasn’t a party.

Her mind moved from one thought to another, one sound to another, any slight movements real and imaginary. Anything but what she knew she ought to be thinking about. It was getting cold now she straightened her knees and pulled the duvet around her to her chin. Laying back her heart much calm she let her mind idle dabbling over mundane this or the other before she finally allowed the sneaking thoughts daring to engulf her take over her mind. The same dream had waked her for the umpteenth time since she came back to the city. There had to be a connection between the project and what had happened that night that she barely remembers. She had been to a therapist a few months ago but the dreams would not go away and her memory was not back. 

The same chapped bony hand clamped around her throat, the turquoise eyes gazing right through her soul, the menacing smile with no teeth, hot breath hitting her cheeks and some into her open mouth. She was mouthing a soundless scream frantic for dear life. The only thing missing was that acrid smell of ammonia. Alexia was going back to her dream she knew the details by heart now.

 The night noises, shadows and movements faded away.

 She is saying something or the other but I cannot seem to concentrate.  I am conscious of her brown velvety neck.  So close but I cannot touch. I can see it rise and fall, a small vein throbbing across, blood coursing though. I imagine what her scent would be and find myself struggling to smell her. Valley of lily, faint and intimate.

I conclude that there is subdued recklessness about her. When she smiles the top and bottom of her set of teeth show and a pale pink gum reveals so unflatteringly. This is how her inner organs would look like pale and gleaming with wetness. I wonder what she would think of me if I were to pronounce this apercu.

 I can feel her thigh or the layers of cloth over it.

Did she move closer?

I think she is flirtting with me unknowingly. I cross my legs.

I will take a hard look at my soul once am done crying, I will wipe the tears off and I will reconcile with the person that lives there in. she has been summoning and I have been ignoring. 

It has come to this, tears and alcohol. Just what the witchdoctor prescribed. I have been to a soothsayer too and she did not stop the flow either.

I am a master at keeping appearances but the mastery of it weighs heavily on me. In privacy as I recount the days acts it haunts and mocks me incessantly.

I do not know when my dreams faded, perhaps I cannot see clearly through the tears. But there are no traces of them left- nothing to hold on to.

This is how I can be defined now; cool suffering, a yearning larking at the surface begging for release.

The mirror reflects a different being too, the warm glaze seen in daylight gone by night before re-appearing the following day. It takes sheer will to reproduce more for the world to see, to keep me all patched up and together. But I am running threadbare. I can feel it.

Am almost out of my tears ration, it is unjust to be denied even that. These tears have been my release, my outlet.

What will I do when I finally run out?

 Is this how it feels to die slowly? Another distraction; actually I have never smoked but on many days, I imagine dieing of tobacco poisoning.   

I get back to my day dream and shift on the day bed trying to find a comfortable spot for my neck. I will definitely get a neck ache after I get the strength to get off this chair. He walks in just as I contemplate the leg showing from the parting of the bath robe I do not attempt to cover up. It is midday already and I have not showered yet, just lying around in my bath robe. 

The scene before him registers (I know it must have) even without really looking- nothing new. He places the heap of books he is carrying from the study to the previous heap. That is his mission for today.

This is where we are now, my better half (I prefer ball and chain it reflects us perfectly) and I at this moment in time this is who we have become.

He barely looks at me; I don’t know whether he knows am still here whether am still breathing and sane or otherwise. I on the other hand stare at him-I can look at him roaming about in his world for long minutes wondering who he is or why he looks like something the cat dragged in.

It is needless to say that we don’t talk, we don’t acknowledge each other though I will open the door for him when the urge to lag around the furniture from one room to another, from indoors out strikes. He can do that all day, huffing and puffing. I move the carpet so he doesn’t trip or open the door, just the least I can do for I man I don’t know what he is doing in my flat. The little comforts for old times sake.  

The day before was his birthday; I don’t know whether he knows but we did nothing. Sometimes am amused he remembers to eat and wash. A part of his life still functions perfectly as though he is who he used to be.

I used to love him, perhaps I still do.

There was no kiss and that is not why it “was turned away”, these words depict the almost there but not really moment, the disappointment of it, how we can extrapolate mundane events to life shattering proportions.

 It reminds me of this episode of Artscene about performance art. Let me paint you a picture.

The room is spacious the audience is standing around along all walls. All surfaces -walls and floor are painted white. There is no furniture and the walls are bare. A mound of red soil here, a few stones there some twigs with pieces of cloth tied on perhaps meant to be flags (no one knows). They are arranged in some pattern a kind of jigsaw puzzle. If you squint you can see it. The centre piece is a small bodied woman she can’t be beyond her mid twenties but her body is that of a teenager. She is clad in a fitting hooded costume with a patchwork pattern of white and reddish brown, the color of the soil. The stage is set.

 She is now on all fours slowly crawling lithely from one mound of rubble to the next. Excruciatingly slow-it is part of the act. It is a mime act, a fill in the blanks get-what-you-will act. In the audience some look on with feigned interest holding their breaths as they follow the act pretending to understand but all the while wondering whether it would be unreasonable to ask for a refund. Others have already given up trying and struck conversations under their breaths seemingly discussing the act before them. It’s about the post election violence but you can’t tell.

 

Back to that kiss. This is a fictitious account of my day, if it seems real it’s because it happened.

 I am not entirely sure I was conscious of the moment as it happened or whether it was brought on by having ordered a grossly expensive meal. I walked into the restaurant at the spur of the moment like turning a corner, as if all along I knew that this is where I was going to dine. I had never been here. As I sat and looked around to acclimatize I suddenly realized it was way beyond my purse. There were only two other females dining. There is a something to be said of such a scene in a country where the female population is higher.

I drink it all in and brace myself pushing thoughts of alternative places I could be right now as the waiter approaches. The menu is brought and I order at the top of the range, again besides my better judgment as if someone did it for me. I mentally count the contents of my purse. I was only dealing with consequences here.

 As the meal is brought I am suddenly not hungry, but I dig in and strike a conversation in my head. I shuffle between several people I would like seated with me and settle on conversing with myself. She forces me to think things over, my life and such. Outside the window I watch people rushing around minding their own business and I envy them. I am back to her she wants me to think of the state we are in. The fact that I am broke again.

“We have to stop living like thiiiis,” she moans.

 It finally dawns on me that my BSC is worth crap.

I am now back to college that point in time when I knew this seemingly new fact to be true. When I had a choice to walk away before it was too late, but I had just started a new romance. I could not admit it then but it made me stay, not him but it. This new unknown thing and the prospects of its future made me stay the four years needless to say it lasted two.

Should I have dropped out then and grabbed my life by the balls? Start afresh now that I had no encumbrance? I went with the flow i was a coward and here we are…

 Afterwards, very stuffed I find myself at an ATM at a corner of another street looking at the slip. It’s a three digit number. I instinctively reach into my bag as I walk away and retrieve the cell. My pride dips and I call all those not-so-good freelance offers I had left hanging hoping they would still want me.

To say that am complicated is an understatement, a realisation several have come to including mother dearest. I do not have or perhaps i don’t brook the luxury of “taking-it-easy”. Even when I do the utterly mundane I can’t help but do them seriously.

Being at the onset of that lonely latent kind of panic which accompanies the realisation that you can no longer afford not to know where your life is heading does not help either.

Perhaps in the haze of this panic I have come to thinking that maybe I seriously screwed things up earlier while I was being serious doing what I was doing.

My career for one, well ( sigh) lets say it’s limping along towards something good. I read those selfhelp books and voraciously so. They say to keep positive. That’s the medicine am supposed to be on right now.

Can I say I don’t know how that is going or is that negative already?

2nd Sigh!

So school has increasingly been seeming attractive, an escape-a solve all. Not just the crazy parties and the slow days spent doing absolutely nothing but the reading part too. But i can’t decide what to study let alone where.

There is the allure of exotic foreign cities where I have to learn new languages, but I also know that I don’t have the patience required to learn a language.

Then there is love…(wince)

Even my diary doesn’t know much on this one,well largely  because I abandon her while the vagaries of the love business take over. Then there is the off chance that a sibling may come across it. I hear people use codeword but mine is designed to be blonde so I stick to the simple.

Love loves me but only as much as i love  it back, there-in lies my woes. Some…

3rd sigh!

Now that my head still throbs I will lie down

tafakari hayo!

Looks like either he was tipped off by Sarkozy going by the snigger or Sarkozy just knows this is trouble…

Don’t you wonder who she is?  faggedaboutit in this world of men i have found it does not matter they will stare at all and sundry. They confess to it too.

 Is it a hobby then?  Whatever it is, it is also their downfall case in point Clinton, Berlusconi, John Edwards,govenor Eliot Spitzer….. the list is long. Interestingly no Africans on my list..why? it doesn’t matter here. In fact such issues either serve to offer the guy more much-welcome-and-needed-media spotlight or it just embarasses the wife (whatever woman standing by him).

Spot the difference

 Monkey A is 27 years while monkey B is 29 years, spot the difference. Yeah i see it too .lol..

Research shows that a 30% caloric restriction in primates reduces ageing, so what is the connection between the miserable “brother” on the left and us?  Us here refers to humans. (Clarity is important)  More on this ..

  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/16/opinion/16iht-edcohen.html?_r=1&em

Web find

Nairobi based company, offers phone tracking and Data protection services(makes one think of “Trackit”-no connection i hope). It’s simple too, just sms the words ‘XMS ‘to 5553 for free trial.

http://www.wps-global.net/    

Books & Playlist

• reading ’The tourists’ by Jeff Hobbs.   
• listening to Robin Thicke- Can you believe. ♥

 for more on the tough love from our brother; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8146508.stm

Obama’s visit to Africa is more controversial in Kenya than stimulating. Am not sure what the fuss is about, should he visit Kenya? Why should he? Why him? Why us?

 I wonder though why they picked Ghana. It is said that Ghana is an example of working democracy in Africa, just because of the successful elections in 2008? True they are a peace loving people and generally genteel-but how about their history?

A cursory look at their past reveals a series of military coups; 1966, bloodless one 1972, a military coup of a military coup in 1978, violent one 1979, enter Rawlings through another coup1981.

“Ever since Nkrumah’s regime, successive Ghanaian governments have devised policies to contain or to destroy political opposition. Observers, both domestic and international, point to the Preventive Detention Act of 1958 as the first major official act of human rights infringement. Subsequently, international human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Africa Watch have reported many cases of abuse.”

I would rather he visited Tanzania or Rwanda.

On a light touch

Forwarded to me on facebook. -Thanx @Bridgit

I don’t mind No.3 that much….. the Gangsta look

♥  Sweet tweet revenge- Palin Vs Mc Cain.

MCCAIN: @AKGovSarahPalin — Hey, Daffy. I’m running for reelection next yr. Some of us know u have 2 b in govt to “effect change” in govt.

PALIN: @SenJohnMcCain — That’s the old-fashnd thinking that got ur butt kicked. I did all I could 2 get u crowds & drag u across the finish line.

for more funny would-be twitter conersavtion between Palin and Mc Cain;

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/opinion/12dowd.html

Web find

A nice website operated from Nairobi. Though for now services are restricted to certain parts of the city (affluent ones)

http://www.dialupshopping.com/  –thanx @karis2000