Scraps of Grace (1)

I remember telling my late mother that I do not want kids, and when she asked who would take care of me when I got old, I told her that her idea was malicious to believe that a child is only as good as what it does for its parents. I remember her as if in real time, and how her face conjured terror. It gives me a fright, especially now that I am on my phone googling “adoption sites for pet dogs.” However, I continuously scroll through dog photos, earnestly searching to avoid her eerie image in my mind. Then a message notification pops up. I try my best to ignore it and push it down, but it soon stretches to cover the entire screen. I honestly do not want to take a look at it. I close my eyes to breathe it away. Why? Because this untouched piece of my past is best left alone. The truth is, she has a life without me. It is clear how far she has succeeded in pushing me away, and now the pain of this finality is painted in a long silence that has grown roots to become our shared existence. Currently, both our lives have been reduced to little to no visits, no calls, and no letters, but I guess such is the tendency of life; life switches up on one when they least expect it, so that one day you are left with a darkness of thoughts, wondering what in the voodo exactly happened.

As for me, I managed; I managed to live with the wake of the space she’d left. I managed to still rise, work, eat, and sleep. I was peaceful with this life. I even became an acquittal with the exhaustion of my own company, but once in a while thoughts would spin my mind like wildfire, and each time they did, I came to the realisation that this peace was not peace at all but a fold of sheer emptiness. Within me, there was a certain kind of void. A yearning of some sort. I had a longing to be called by name and a desire to talk to someone, but nothing came close to filling up this vacuum, and I mean this despite the unbearable crowdness of beings, the money I owned, my lavish lifestyle, and just maybe. Maybe this is what people mean when they say they are lonely. Maybe it’s not even about loneliness but lifelong decisions that catch up with one later on and barely in their prime years. In any case, these are my own thoughts, upon which I cannot give further details of their absoluteness.

Nevertheless, my hands keep shaking as I try to focus on the trembling screen. I read the text over and over to make sense of its meaning. My mind on the other side insists that I already know the sender, but even so, the caller ID displays despite, and now that I get to hear from her after so many years that seemingly took the size of immortality, I imagine my insides will experience warmness, but lo!, the bubble of joy I had long anticipated in the event she would try to reach out one time was completely gone. It burst the moment her words in the text greeted me like an old friend, as though nothing but misfortune and a busy lifestyle had kept us away when, in reality, she is the one who stopped trying. She is the one who kept away; she is the one who gave up soon, and I know. I know it irks me to think of her this way. I am at fault with myself for feeling like this, while maybe she just requires a moment of grace from me. Perhaps this is the impact of her newly chosen path. It certainly not similar to the one we shared before, for I am stuck in our past lives, while her new life is a different ballgame altogether.

Hers is the life of marriage, motherhood, and everything in between. It is a life I refused to choose; even as an admirer of motherhood, this path never crossed my mind, let alone come out of my mouth. Throughout my twenties, this question kept hanging constantly over me. The idea of my whole life changing because of the addition of new parties was unfathomable, for inside my head, this journey required a leap of faith, a commitment I could not swear to make. Maybe partly on having a husband, but having a child was a different kind of bravery. I was afraid of loving something too much. Feeling deeper for it, carving it from my thigh and watering it with blood and tears to an extent we both blur and become one with no distinctive points of where we all begin and end, and of course it’s got to be so, for this will be a chunk of my flesh, a piece of my heart and soul that I will be damned to love eternally—even more than the father, more than anything—and you know what? Loving something too much, like this, brings about an inevitable heartbreak that changes one forever.

Thus, this idea in particular freaked me out back then, but lately, as I inch closer to what I’d say is “Nearer my God to Thee years,” this puzzle has proved to not imbue terror. Come to think of it, I may have overly exaggerated the horror it permeated back then, because now I do not see why I was so hell-bent not to try it. And as it is, right in this period of my life, the sharpness of it that throttled me then has eased to soft edges, but now at the wrong time, for even the biological clock has stopped serving its function. It’s way too late, and I get to sigh hard because sometimes you have to live through your decision to understand if it was good or bad. Sadly, life has no rehearsals; you live it as you make it happen. Hence, it is now becoming clear to me that the complexities of her new life—the push and labyrinth of it—are what I affirm to have set us apart.

But even so, don’t you think our way of life is perfected in society? Don’t we need communities to rejoice and mourn with us to help us unburden and grip us to balance? Shish has been like a sister to me since childhood. We have lived this life together in almost all of its cadres and rites of passage. We have bonded the most in our late thirties. We remained stuck together through it all, from our sour relationships with Nairobi men until we both decided to let that life go and rejoice in the happiness of single, independent babes, but did that even give us joy? Perhaps not, for both of us had come to resign to fates decree and, if we are to go by societal standards, a curse has been laid on our heads by the community for we are women who have been passed from man to man to man. We are women who fuck up the do’s and don’t’s for good Kenyan girls because we are woke and beyond those categories our parents moulded us to become. We are these women who get stalked in town, who have been labelled mistresses, the same ones who carry the stigma of muddled affairs and unspeakable secrets. We are these women whom men will not take home to their mothers because our reputation is scathed. Yes, we are the same women who show too much skin. We dissolve our sorrows in vodka and mince our words with whisky, rolling out cigars into tight joints and smoking them up as Paparazzi takes pictures of us in clubs, posting those that unfold our nudity, a traffic for their sites but an evidence and a weapon that parents will use to warn their children of what failures and bad examples look like.

But be all that as it may, I had a hint of contentment in this life, but Shish may have become so desperate to try the other side of it. Because how do I make out the feelings I felt when, on one dreary day, she swooped out of nowhere with a wedding invitation without issuing alerts or having me psychologically prepared to deal with her absence? The thing is, I am not sad for Shish; in fact, I am all the more happy for her, just that I feel bloody miserable for myself. It is the thing that happens when you are two women in your late thirties or even forties, both single, and suddenly one of you finds a lover. It’s a real blow to the one who has been left. It’s a bad feeling, as though you have been cheated on, and now the blindfold you’ve been choosing to wear all your life is removed by reality, and the sense of you noticing everything around you becomes acute. Like the pace of your life against your age mates. Then it’s the comparison that causes you grief because three-quarters of your circle, if not all, are settled into their second, third, or fourth children and even marriages. Thus, it turns out that the mundane of life around you has formed a routine that morphs into waltzes of baby showers, weddings, and school runs.

Either way, I have come to discover that this is the not-so-fancy part of life; after all, no one can completely own another. Humans are separate beings with minds of their own, and if they decide to stay away, then so be it; they should linger on the far end; they should not try to bring those they ignored closer. And in this exact minuteness, this becomes the piece of my mind I wish to offer her. However, my hands linger on the call button; I can’t press call, nor can I text her because my network has suddenly become flimsy, and all my airtime has clocked to zero, leaving me with an awful feeling—a sentiment of getting deprived of a last word. Hence, as I continue to stare at the long text, my attention is piqued by the last line of it, which reads, “This is an emergency, so meet me at the Cafe Deli Restaurant in an hour.” These words are bold and held apart from the rest, as if she has been holding the keyboard to type these exact words for years. Nonetheless, as I read and reread it, something in me is disturbed. In my head, the words imbue a certain kind of brokenness that I cannot touch. The shape of it in my head, however, conjures the figure of a man, and altogether, they cause a worry in me that is so rich and heavy that I cannot breathe.

But who gave her the right to text me that entire message in such vivid details? What made her think that I could be her spiritual Buddha, qualified to even understand the intricacies of her story? I mean, certain parts of the text do not add up. Do I even understand what she is trying to say? But does it matter what I decipher anyway? I do not want to go, but this body does the opposite. I was already prepared to go out anyways, so with these news I just rushed to the lavatory to powder my nose. I blink away the many thoughts that seize my mind, and for a moment I focus on the image in the mirror. Feeling the coldness of my skin. Two months ago, I had a facelift. I underwent liposuction two weeks ago. I am on my third anti-ageing cream, but my skin sags and is still producing wrinkles. There is nothing more to do. Nature wins in the end; it has to take its course. I know this: I have become a lonely old woman. I will admit to being old now. I will admit that my body does not behave the way it used to; that my walk is not as fast; that my bones are brittle; that my breath is shorter; and that my energy is sputtering and sparking. I will admit that now I am no longer sweet sixteen or the girl or woman that I once was.

It hurts me, and there have been so many moments of this kind where I discovered that I am not young anymore. Yesterday, was my birthday, and now I am unable to tell how more than three decades have passed, and my life in itself has come to be divided into before and afters, with the fury of youth having subsided and nothing having changed except that the feelings of these moments are different and more grievous in comparison. Nonetheless, this is it. For there comes a certain phase in one’s life, a certain age, where one’s whole life reflects back at them, raw and alive as if in real time, and some of your life decisions begin to wrack your head with guilt that makes you shiver with horror when you think about them, and truly, I have had my fair share of regrets. I pity myself most of the time, especially now that I am living the long damnation of these choices and forced to dance to their tune because here, there is no reprieve. It’s a replica of hell on earth, and suffering this kind of agony daily makes me wish to give my soul’s salvation to anyone who would tell me a few lies about me and how I still have a whole life ahead of me. But both these people and I, are aware that life does not begin in the end, and at this point, with fifty years humping on my back and a life expectancy of seventy, maximum without the surety of the bonus years of the Lord, and a womb that has rusted to menopause, nothing really matters to me, not even myself.

Tears sting my eyes from these thoughts. I dab them with my hankie, but my hand shudders violently from the hooting car, which yanks me out of my trance. It’s my chauffeur reminding me that time is up and we need to go. So I leave the premises. I move in a sort of reluctant dither, clinging to the ridiculous hope that the host will withdraw the invitation, but no, she does not, and so my body slides in the car comfortably. We beat the snarl up of the southern bypass. I reach town and get to the restaurant twenty minutes earlier, where I sit motionless, turning over the Nairobian magazine. I flip it’s pages and find that there is nothing new, just the same old narratives: the ranting of single mothers, the clout-chasing of celebrities, and a plethora of information to define and shove toxic masculinity and feminism down people’s throats. It’s the high cost of living, which is also not new. Everyone thinks we fumbled, but were we not the voters? It’s definitely capitalism—a system in this country that makes the people feel bad, grumpy, and angry, and then, to add salt to injury, makes them feel bad about feeling bad. How malicious! I think I have imbibed enough snippets from what has been trending in the city. I become exhausted, so I put the newspaper down and order what will be my fourth cup of coffee. Then I see a lady coming my way; our eyes interlock, and it is in this moment that I realise I was feeling at ease and in freedom before her arrival, and it’s only a matter of time before this same feeling begins to shatter.

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