It’s starting again: the short and loud thunder growls, the scared birds chirping and flying away to some tree, the cars’ roars slowly fading in and out of sight from the nearby highway, and the silence momentarily created when all these things go dead silent before returning with a bang! It’s like waves of emotions, something I’m all too familiar with.
I take it all in, standing on the far end of my balcony, which is on the 2nd floor of that building. Not too low to feel some form of shame, but also not too high to warrant that as my daily cardio exercise. Butterflies resurrect from the left and travel to their nest someplace I don’t quite get to see. A woman opens the gate, and I hear running footsteps quickly fading away. However, before I finish listening to her now completely silent aura, the drops begin to fall.
I was so caught up in that poetic moment, that I had completely forgotten to remove some of my clothes from the hanging lines. I quickly put my journal away and sacrifice this moment so that tomorrow I can have clean and dry clothes to put on. The sky is giving very pale grey vibes. It’s a raging storm, it seems. I take the last of my sock and peg, then lock the door behind me. “Bora tu stima isipotee aki, ghai!” I think to myself. I put the clothes on my bed, where all the not-so-clean and the not-so-dirty ones meet to socialize. One really heavy, woollen, sweatpant is still wet, so I hang it on my bedroom door.
A thought crosses my mind of how this moment is perfect for a Netflix and chill session with a doll I bought off Jumia’s super confidential and quite embarrassing supply chain. Rain, Internet, and a whole house to myself. If it were another day and another time, I’d probably have flirted with that thought long enough to cheat on the promises I made to myself. Otherwise, I might as well have given in to the recent masculine urges to just go hunt and gather in some forest. So I ignore it. Instead, I go back to the sitting room where I realize the rains are subsiding again.
“Sa izi ni gani?” I wonder. I listen for a moment with that attentive face you put when you know you are poor and trying to overhear a conversation you shouldn’t in a matatu. “Ahh!” I sigh, realizing I’m going to disobey the commandments passed on to me by my mother. “Ukuwe unamake sure zinakauka kwa jua, sawa!” she said one day while forcing me to wash my own underwear on the basis that I was now becoming a “man”, and grown men wash their own underwear. In retrospect, that would explain why most guys are just big-bodied boys floating around, trying to find those underwear they never washed and were never dried under the sun.
I rationalize my disobedience with sound logic drawn from an experience just an hour old. “Hi inakaa tu itanyesha!” I mentally sigh again. At times like these, when it’s cold and lonely, I think back to a moment in time when the girl I loved was still here. She’d probably have taken those clothes out again, either herself or she’d have made me do it, similar to how the devil does it — with finesse! She had that effect on me, of being a little bit bolder.
I suppose that’s the difference between me and her. She was the kind of person who believed it would be sunny again. Like MILCK, someday she too will walk in the rays of a beautiful sun. She believed in forever, in a good God, in us.
And I just… did not!