Lessons in Sentences

I have not been brought up in the culture of cakes on birthdays. However, I take moments and think about life the day before  my birthday – just like we do on New Year’s Eve. I have my best epiphanies in the bus-thinking about things I have learnt and the things I want to do.

When I wake up one Monday morning at 40, I do not want to find myself saying that I am a writer, and just that- no book to show for it. Or having random sex over the weekend with a random man. Or find myself still riding on teenage impulses that will drive me to write ‘please-wash-me’ at the back of dusty Lorries. I do not want to spend my Sunday afternoons alone when I am 40. I also do not want to wake up one Monday morning saying ‘I have been with this company on the same position for 20 years’. As I reflect on the things that I do not want to find myself doing when I am 40, I think of the lessons that I have collected from the people I have been lucky enough to know and interact with. These are people whose words shape me.

From my father, I learnt the art of love. He taught me that there is love, even in death. That it is ok to shed tears even when you are a man. Emotions are what make you human. He taught me that some matches are made in heaven, and there is always that one person that will always be irreplaceable in your life- and other people have to live with that. He also taught me that education is the greatest thing that you can gift your kids. And that when they are all grown and you see them walking into supermarkets, able to buy a kilo of rice with their own hard-earned money, it will make you happy. He taught me that giving will keep you a happy person. Selflessness. He taught me that my mother was an irreplaceable woman. And that a man can walk into a supermarket and ask for sanitary pads for his daughters.

My government taught me that the government is never your friend, but your biggest terrorist. And that it will walk around wearing your intestines around its neck like a necklace, shamelessly, without flinching.

Pablo Neruda taught me to love without wanting to know how, or when, or from where. To love straightforwardly without complexities or pride. To love because I do not know any other way.

My mother, in the 10 years I knew her, she taught me things. Her absence taught me how to be a mother even before I was. She taught me that a man in marriage has to respect you. That sometimes, a woman has to wear the pants, but other times, she has to put them off and let others take care of her. Sometimes she has to walk to the market and carry her drunken husband home, clean vomit off his body, and tuck him in bed. She taught me to love a man, and to teach children discipline. I once took a 20 bob from her wallet. Her slaps and pinches taught me to respect people’s property and to ask when I want. My mother taught me that the spirit of the dead lives within us.

Biko taught me that you might have all the talent in the world, but without humility, and kindness, and commitment, and diligence- all that will be nothing.

And my brother, he taught me things. That I am never alone. And that I am the most intelligent woman he knows. He taught me the business. Taught me that even when you find yourself digging trenches with other construction workers with your university degree, one day you will look back, laugh it off and say; wow! It’s been a journey. He taught me selflessness, like our father. Taught me to look out for the man that puts alcohol before anything else. Avoid him like a plague. He asked me to never touch alcohol. I touched it.

Doctor Ezekiel Alembi is missed. And so is F.K Kyeva. May they all rest in peace. They taught me English- introduced me to this literature thing. This writing thing. They taught me how to find solace in words.

Round tables with my girlfriends over drinks on Friday evenings taught me that there are bad men in this world, and there are good ones. These girls taught me that girls are their worst enemies, and each other’s biggest lovers. They taught me that a man is what you make him. If he treats you like a pair of stinky socks or lodge house sandals, and you still let him, he will do that over and over. These girls taught me that a man needs to be taken care of, to feel needed. And so does a woman. In these round tables over bags of chips, they taught me that I do not need to marry because I am of age, or because I need to take someone home over Christmas time- they taught me that we should all marry out of the necessity of love.

My ex-boyfriends taught me that the flair of the bad boy is not my place to hook and bait. They taught me that I loved myself a lot more. That I was not ready. I needed to learn to be alone first. They taught me that I needed my time to be wanted back as I wanted. They gave me good times. They kissed me good, and we had good Saturdays in bed. They taught me that there are constant lines in the vocabulary of manhood- like ‘she likes me’, ‘she kissed me first’, ‘we are just good friends’, ‘she knows about us’. They also taught me to leave a man’s facebook account alone, his phone. And if ever I feel a desire to peep into any, I am better off out already. From them, I discovered that the lover and the loved are different people, and that love is never returned in the same measure that you give it out, unless we can measure love in units. It can never be equalized. They taught me that my satisfaction- of the body and the soul was solely my own affair. And no. Not in a masturbatory kind of way. They taught me that sometimes solitude clears your mind. Makes you think! They also taught me that my wounds heal fast. Within the length of a sneeze. And that I can’t stand being a passing fancy.

The places I worked taught me that corporate is a bitch. And that I cannot afford to etch friendships that will cost me better opportunities. Work taught me that I need to feel useful in a company, and that is the only way I will get satisfied. I also learnt that you have to give your services for free sometimes, make them need you first, and then make your demands.

A boy I once liked taught me that two people that are compatible with each, understand each other, even complete each other’s sentences do not necessarily have to belong together. He taught me that these people you see on twitter, flaunting their big monies, they are on their 17th job, and you are on your 2nd,so it is an undoing to compare yourself with them. He taught me that money does not make you happy.

Sylvia Plath taught me that I am too pure, as pure as the dirt I allow inside my life. And that this is now. Because it is now. And I should live it. Cling it. And as I do that, I should learn to say it well in good sentences.

I hope that I keep saying it in good sentences.

In the Paintbrush of Alfonse

I am in one of those art gallery shows where people chatter with their mouths closed. Speaking sluggish paragraphs, then pausing, waiting for you to applause their kindness with pieces of intellect. They are sipping coffee fashionably from unimaginably small cups. And  I am standing alone, close to the painting  at the door, waiting for one of the waiters to walk in with a mishkaki.

I do not know how to stare at paintings, their details confuse me. They make me feel shallow-unable to connect with art. I am looking at the painting of a meeting of the woman’s inner thighs. For some reason, I am repulsed by it. It makes me feel unclothed, exposed. Objectified, commoditised.

This is an ugly painting. I say out aloud.

The woman’s body is the most longed-for but feared form of art. Says someone from behind me.

I take that you paint? I ask. He nods. Yes. I painted that.

The woman’s body is the only thing close to godliness. He explains. But we gawk at the sight of a naked woman, ashamed by it, as if it carries transgressions of the world. However, we smoulder with desire in our aloneness, burning in the mind, gasping at her naked soft skin.

Would you like to sit for me? I say no, with my lips closed. Cards are exchanged. I read his name from the card. He is Alfonse. Who paints and has Alfonse for a name?

We talk. He is a solitary soul, just like myself. He knows only talk about brushes, strokes of colour, crayons, fullness of paintings, and eroticism in renaissance art.

But when he talks, he gets lost in his conversation, and for most bits of it, I am just nodding, waiting for a waiter to walk in with a mishkaki.

So will you sit for me?

Saturday morning, I drive to his studio.

You can sit on my lap. He points at a chair in front of him. His tools are set. Brushes. Colours. Crayons. Ink

He stares at my flushing face. Then he compliments my earlobes. I find pleasure in painting the feminine, he says. I am wondering why I am there, sitting for a man whose name is Alfonse, a man whose forlorn verbosity and artistry scares me.

He sets a bare canvas in front of him. I am staring at the walls, carefully avoiding his glare. But I can feel the first touch of his crayon on canvas. It is like the first meeting of unfamiliar lips. He starts with my earlobes. I can feel him tracing the lines of my face.

You have a sad face. He murmurs. There has been many tears right here. His eyes are on my cheeks.

He outlines the edges of my shoulders, my mids, my thighs down to my feet.

Then he takes his paintbrushes and with mixed degrees of ink solution, he unfalteringly paddles across my body. He paints my heart white, plastering itches and aches that my previous heartbeats have caused me. On my shoulders, he smoothens the dark patches that my burdened bra has for years embedded on my shoulder.

His brush strands hit the domes of my breasts, colouring them a shade of bronze, with a touch of fire in it. He lingers a bit here, and I can feel a slack in his grasp, his brush sliding out of his arm in the glistening dew of his palms. He paints the buds erect.

On my nipples, the fossilised cracks from bites of angry lovers, he paints purple. He takes more time here, smoothening the cleavage, separating it well, putting each bud firm on its own. I can hear him breathe heavily, like a wheezing child. Words can’t explain the weak in my knees, even as I sit…the silent chatter in my teeth…and the desire that is drowning me

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I wonder if he can hear me breathe like a car engine too. I feel him touch me with every quick stare. Like he can see through my clothes, like the painting under which we met, at the art gallery.

With each smooth stroke through my body on his canvas, I feel like our bloods are instantly mingled. His fluids on the brushes get excited, they splatter measurably, softening body parts, radiating me in colour.

He follows all the crisscrosses of my body hungrily on his paper, with a loose lip, and a drool at the edges of his lips. And as he breathes louder and louder, I can see his swollen ample paunch underneath his pants. And I am squirming around, unwilling to let him go, leaving any of my parts cold. I am tossing and turning on my chair. He asks me to sit still, speaking after long silent minutes.

I can feel myself taking shape. He destroys me and he makes me.

He doesn’t seem to make a mistake, or stop to gauge his work. He paints with a surge. He doesn’t stare at me a lot. It is as if he has known me for a while. Like he is drawing me from an image he has had somewhere for a while.

He shapes me into more than I was. Taking each individual part of me and organising it well.  His detail is exotic and subtle, and as his brush strands brush close to my heart, all those stories in here,  of life slaveries are erased, turning the dumpster of vileness  into charm and warmth. Every drop of paint captures the effect of radiance of the sun, embedding it into my skin. I can feel the glow burning me.

There is an aura of nakedness. And I am finally feeling a difference between my nakedness and my reprehensible nudity. I don’t feel unclothed by his glares and his brushes, but I feel close to recognition, transformed into appreciating every summary of my body, its decorativeness and its flawy. Happily subdued.

Alfonse liberates my human form and my jailed soul.

You will forgive me if I am unable to control my ink when I am excited, he says.

I feel perfect. Balanced

Do you want to see now? He asks. Or will you wait for it to dry?

I am staring at her, a reflection of myself every time I step in front of the mirror, undressed, but with a bit of a glow.

You are a sleeping goddess, he says. I am tempted to ask how he saw through me. But under my flushing skin, I mutter something. The gods live in the strands of Alfonse’s paintbrush.

To the girl with whom I might have shared a man

Resting on my bed, in the insomniac midnight air of the second day of September, I come to you blemished. Bearing sins of six generations of an oblivious Sodom. To sit down with you and disentangle the mystery of a man that holds both our hearts in his arms.

I have thought about you, about the possibility of you being there. And the possibility that the mumble he swallows in the jangle of our lovemaking is an attempt to warn me that there is another like me. Or the stains on his shirt are maps I can trace with my fingers to get to you. Or the keylock on the phone is the wall I need to jump over and find you, squatting, waiting for him. Or the fast pounding of his heart when he is kissing me insanely is a silent sentence that speaks of you.

No, do not inflame in disgust. Do not stand me against a yardstick and calculate my worthlessness. Like you, I have disregarded any possible hint from my conscience that there might be another, except on moments like these. I have hungrily eaten his words with my ears. Thawed into discipleship by this man. I have lost my sanities in a fiery flare of the heart. I have spread my thighs in clean linen, quenching my thirst in his manliness.

The Lovers that Loved us

The madness of love is the greatest of heaven’s blessings — Plato .

In this cold day of August, we remember our lovers.

The lovers that loved us are the ones that raced our hearts. The ones we looked at over a simple coffee date and climaxed at the sound of their words, the sight of their lips. The ones we interlocked with so perfectly, rhymed with like the sides of a zipper. They are the kryptonites of our lives. The indexes upon which we have found other lovers inadequate.

They are the ones that have haunted our dreams. The ones that have kept us wondering whether they loved us as much as we did, whether we made them feel the way they made us feel. The ones that made us feel insufficient, a little short of what they wanted. The lovers we loved and didn’t love us back. The ones that led us into an overfeed of the motivational books, they sucked out our esteem, trampled us over. They are the lovers we later fought to forget, and eventually did. They are the lovers we still wonder why we were so stuck up on. The lovers that loved us never loved us.

#My5Links

The 5 links are so hard to pick, but I went all random and picked the first that came to mind. 

My most popular post

This has to be ‘The things we Don’t say‘.  I decided to out a skeleton…stripped naked and fed the gawking eyes. Coincidence of sharing a skeleton with a girlfriend gave me courage; I wrote it, then I hated that I had written it, contemplated pulling it down after pressing ‘publish’… hid from the internet, then I felt better. As if I had emptied my heavy sacks, right there on the screen. I felt good. The response was to this post was intense! I could not tweet for a day or two. I felt like everyone was watching. Up to today, I have never managed to reply to all those comments! What shocked me about the response is the numbers of ladies who dm-ed me, or commented, speaking of similar experiences. Sad!