The Arena in my Body

 

 

 

 

That my station is at the kitchen,

That my niche is by the laundry basket,

That my place is by the maternity ward,

That I’m resigned to

 

That you can be so ungrateful

That when I go toil for you

That you sit by all day complaining

Adding to my frustrations

 

Toil? You that can’t even bring oil home,

You whose pockets are inaccessible like treasured lockets

Do you understand toil?

Toil is scrubbing the trousers you soil

After you spoil binging cheap liquor

 

Hush! You thankless being,

That does not recognize my sacrifices

You who continues to drain my strength and blood

You who has stripped the man in me

You deserve nothing but thrashing

 

You are just but a beast

With bloated ego like yeast

And ‘big’ brain the size of cyst

Go and fight like other men

And stop this omen

 

 

                                                        Duet By @GKaneyia  and @Varaq

 

 

 

My neighbor has moved

My neighbor has moved

Even the fury of El Nino couldn’t keep him grooved

He was seen literally fleeing to harm;

His thin mattress squeezed under his heavy arm

My neighbor was mean,

He swiftly changed lasses, the way I naughtily rushed my soap,

He couldn’t lend me even one for cuddles;

Even when they trooped in doubles,

My neighbor used to flaunt his Johnny Bravo box,

In just a towel, he used to step outside his door to stretch his muscles, like a cox surveying the docks,

The females in the plot could growl and stare with zest,

Yet with disdain and pity, greet my efforts to flaunt my bony chest

I heard the winds blew away his prized towel,

Leaving exposed his bottle-top-sized jewel

His surprise and shame, only serving to fuel the flame

Maybe I will sleep again tonight,

Absent his soprano wails and the pounding from his tormentors

Mzee Varaq

Me, Silence, You

Somebody recently asked me why I was pulling a Mourinho.

Startled I ask what he meant.

"Si unapost once a month venye Mourinho anawin once a month"

Okay nobody asked me that. I couldn’t just resist taking a swipe at the other one. (Ooops, sorry again)

So a story found itself in my email. No sender. No return address. Just a story. Waiting to be read. 

Ladies and gentleman,  Me, Silence, You..........

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The text message was very brief, but still long enough to expose subtle hints of what he wanted to communicate. Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined that I would receive such a text, not least from my Alejandro. 

I felt a little sick in the stomach and a thin sweat formed on my brow. Goose bumps followed suit. A painful lump that wouldn’t just leave developed in my throat. I couldn’t possibly be breaking down in the middle of a meeting. Was I getting punished for fondling my phone when I should have been contributing to this serious meeting? 

I tried to excuse myself so as not to make a fool of myself, but my feet were devoid of any life. I had to sit back down momentarily and recuperate. 

When I finally came to, I literally ran to the washrooms to seek refuge. 

If you have ever seen someone who is about to throw up or one who ate chakula mwitu and the stomach decides to act up, then surely you know what I am talking about.

I drew out my phone and reread the text a zillion times, buried my face into my hands and felt the taste of bile in my mouth. All the poignant memories came streaming in.

Still, the tears refused come.

                                 ######

How about I begin the story from the beginning?

My name is Maria Clara Mendoza and this is my love story.

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We have been in a long distance relationship; me and my Alejandro. 

The last time we met, I sensed he was a bit withdrawn and he echoed the sentiments too. The truth is, when bae has been away for eons and you finally meet, there is some slight air of discomfort.  

Ours was even more pronounced because of the Pandora’s Box from our last lengthy conversation. I was naive to believe that our issues would just disappear with the assurance of love we gave each other on that cloudless night. We were to meet the following weekend to smile and laugh and do YOLO things. 

Then this text thing happened. 

Not that we were the perfect couple. Far from it. We fought, as if we wanted to finish each other but made up as if we would never break up again. Only to break up as soon as we made up. We didn’t see our relationship as broken, we saw it as different. We thought (maybe it was just me) that we could be saved.  

Truth is I loved him. I still do love him. I think he loves me too. Even if he wouldn’t admit it now. I sound clingy right? Maybe I should just accept and move on.

It’s easier said and done.

I looked at the man and I saw great potential. A man who is going places when he is done detouring. I consoled myself that he met distractions along the way. He was a cheerful giver who was there for me and I feel really indebted to him. He was the one person I couldn’t get mad at for long because I had important silly stuff to say to him. He had an aura of importance over my life. It did significantly help that he had a great body too. Sinfully sexy! And his ginene………

*(Okay Maria Clara Mendoza, please don’t say more. We get it)

And then this! Three lines in a text!

I don’t like assumptions so I did what I normally do whenever I don’t comprehend what one means. I called to seek clarifications. 

Yes, he didn’t pick up, and yes I never stopped. I can be a bother sometime. Ask Alejandro, if he picks your calls.

I just wanted to know what he meant. Of course he wrote that I was perfect and that I deserved somebody better than him. Better? How better? There is no better. Who will argue with me the way we argued? What of matrimonial gikmachakalmago?

 

So I called my ‘that girl’ to help me decipher what exactly Alejandro meant. Not that I couldn’t read the short message. Bwana I am not illiterate. 

My ‘that Girl ‘was in a meeting and thus unavailable for comment. 

So I called Bobby the guy who never gets tired of my ranting. Turns out that he was already enroute to town. Maybe as a guy he could explain the three lines from a guy’s point of view.

We met in a five star hotel over gweno as El Nino caused havoc unperturbed in the streets below. He advised I don’t call, an advice I intended to follow but didn’t follow nevertheless. 

I preferred to look at it as fighting for my true love and not as a sign of desperation. Maybe there was an explanation. Maybe the three lines were a typing error. 

I thought guys preferred ladies who drew the best out of them, challenged them to be better and put them on toes? Apparently this clown was an exception.

I can’t just describe how I feel. Actually I don’t even know how I feel myself. 

Had he just had the cajones to summon me to a nice place and deliver his bad news, I would have accepted and moved on. But a text? A text surely? How could he just reduce our relationship to a shilling? It wasn’t even a shilling since the ninja was on unlimited text!

Even worse is this ominous silence between us. Is he too chicken to face me? Couldn’t he just come out and tell me that am not beautiful enough or that he no longer loves me? Or that famous speech of babe it’s not you, it’s me?

He just had to go silent. Silent! Are you a corpse or something? Even corpse nowadays do ginene. (You heard that Hero radio audio, right?)

So I will weep for you, but more I will weep for my folly, until I can’t weep no more. 

Maybe then I will move on. 

 

When I’m Gone

I don’t know why I am thinking about death. Actually I have been thinking about death a lot of late. Maybe I am just idle. Maybe quarter life crisis just descended or maybe I’m suddenly getting philosophical. You never know maybe I was sitting on my calling all along. Talking about condoms and pregnant women instead of being a deep thinker. Providing thought provoking solutions to questions like: Who came first, the chicken or the egg? 

Maybe it has something to do with the high number of people I know dying. Old people. Ailing people. Tragic road carnages. Young People. Holy People. Kisiis. All kinds of people including those that turn up to play hockey, take one for the road, sleep on/with/beside/by other people and never wake up. 

Truth is people die every day around us. This is not about statistics in some donor-funded report, these are real people; some we know, some we were best friends with, some who owed us money, some we owed money, some we used to sleep with, some who had smelly gums but we never got to tell them.

This got me thinking. 

When will it be my turn? How will it be? Will it be sudden or long and torturous? Will my sisters start some Pay Bill number to enable me travel to India for some surgery or will devolution have borne fruit and I will access palliative care from the local Ragwe Dispensary.

Will it be sudden? Will Njeri be beside me? Will my unexplained sudden death be attributed to the innocent woman whose only mistake was falling in love with a man from the wrong tribe?

Stop squirming in your seat. 

We all know we are going down there. Whether we want to believe it or not. The only uncertainty is how and when. Maybe today? Tomorrow? Next week? Next year?

God must really be having fun. Knowing what he knows, knowing we don’t know what he knows but knowing we know He knows. 

So I’m gone.

My lifeless body lying in some hole somewhere.

I imagine my mother and the women in my family sobbing uncontrollably while my father and the other Luo men trying to be men about it.

I don’t know if any women will show up with my kids and lay claim to my vast fortunes consisting of a simba, two phones (Samsung Galaxy Grand Neo Plus Duo and Nokia 1200), some five plates and some five sufurias?

I don’t think I would mind that. If people don’t claim you in death then perhaps your life didn’t mean anything at all.

What will guys say about me? What will be worth saying?

Will they just say he was a good man, as traditional African customs demand?

I have always had a problem with the word good. It’s not only amorphous, but very relative and greedy.

What exactly is good? Patient? humble? proud? chauvinistic? feminist?  radicals?

Who determines who is good? The church, community, the government?

Will you log on to your Facebook find the news there and  lazily type RIP on my wall and move on to more interesting things like liking that photo of the overfed girl in a tiny bikini? 

Or will you be hungry for traffic and post the picture of my lifeless and bloated body and caption it with those irritating and unending captions like #deathtings #sixfeetundertings #burialtings?

By the way what’s it with people and hashtags? Does there have to hashtag for everything? When did we become this #morguetings people?

Will guys struggle to remember unique and spectacular things about me and resort to the #youwerereal lines?

It won’t be their fault though.

What extraordinary feat have I achieved with my life apart from writing and talking about sex on newspapers and on radio?

Surely, my excuse can’t be that am young. 

Friends my age are doing great things.

Lord Rungu and Jehovah Sikhundi aren’t that older themselves and between them they have stained over 2000 concubines (next blog post).

At twenty two, Mzee Mcwho was already the founder/president/ director/proprietor/CEO of Inda Industries, a firm dedicated to campus printing solutions.  I have never understood though why people use so many tittles. Can’t you just be the founder or the CEO or the proprietor or the master? Have you seen Lord Rungu call himself God’s Gift to Women/ Owner of Concubines/ World Record Holder/ etc.? 

My congressman Juma was already the Founder of FAKU (Fathers Association of Kenyatta University) even before we realized that that thing isn’t just for passing piss. 

At twenty five, Mzee Byudeh has worked in over 12 banks in the city. 

Baroson and Pokot have demolished the great Gladiators, Pompo has drunk over fifty barrels of Keg Guinness on his own. Even Joe of the Creatives Lounge has been founder/admin/ leader/ convener of a WhatsApp group!

Mabangi went over twelve hours uninterrupted in a live episode of Keg binging gone naughty.

What have I done with my life?

Even Magunga has a stake at history, what with a broken tooth and a documented passion for ‘kusugua bastola’?

Even Sumu was once a CEO of Sumu Movies in KM. It doesn’t matter that the business did not survive a week after he gave out free CDS to all his girlfriends. By CDS I meant Compact Discs you perv*.

But this post isn’t about me. It’s about all of us. All of us dragging ourselves through another day, waiting for the sunset and for the weekend to start living. 

What will you tell God when he asks you to account for your life?

“Hi, Mackiche, I gave you bundles, I even talked to Safaricom to provide night bundles. What did you do with the bundles?”

Were you that guy who posted computed generated grotesque photos of babies with seriously malformed limbs and asked people to share if they really cared?

Were you that guy who sent those long texts to people and threatened them to share it with over thirty people in one hour or something terrible will happen to them?

This is not to scare you. 

This is to encourage you to do something today. To live your life to the fullest.

I know it’s not New Year yet to make those resolutions that we forget about after two weeks, but maybe the Ethiopian New Year will still do. After all a New Year is just a New Year. 

Just in case I die before you, I would really appreciate if you remembered me as proud yet humble, talkative yet great listener, imperfect yet struggling for perfection…….You get the drift?

Whatever you do, don’t wait for people to die to write stuff on their social media walls. Tell them now!

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Editor  @gety_nandwa