( Memoir)
February is winding up. It is the last day of the month. The next day had to be Monday. And oh, how I dread Mondays, or maybe not so much the day as the place I get to work. And with this stifling anxiety, I keep wanting to look the other way. I know that sort of makes me a coward, but that’s just it. I want to run away to another universe. I want to avoid myself. I read, and there I am on the paper, so I put my book down. I turn on the TV, but I am lost in my thoughts—a deep labyrinth I’ve created so as not to face that beating thing in the centre of me. I am cooking but only get to realize it when the burnt smell starts hitting my nostrils. Where am I? Not here. I am mad at the world. Everything seems against me. Everything is seemingly abusive, and I wonder if this is really a reflection of me.
3 o’clock strikes, and the 4 and a half hours ring its double chime, but I do not stir. I have not managed to sleep because my mind is pondering endlessly over insignificant chores like how I will wake up the next day, shower, and maintain a straight face at work. And since I am getting restless, I decide to take a few sleeping pills, hoping that their effect would spread over me like a blanket, inducing the slumber that my body so much craves, but then I guess I jinxed myself because, suddenly, I started to experience prolonged moments of fitful tossing and turning. And as the hours passed over slowly, I was awakened by the sun rays of the 8 p.m. light through my window. Then suddenly, it dawned on me that for all the nights in the last two months, I’ve been forcing myself to sleep using tablets. I have always woken up each morning to find out that such rest is not the antidote to the problem clutching at my heart, and indeed, today is no less different. Today I am unable to wake up. Today, the misery has been manifested physically. Today, I am wheezing. I am sick, and when I slip my phone from under my pillow to call in sick, I am met with all kinds of life-threatening notifications from everyone in the company. One is texting to know where I am. One says the CEO is mad at you; she is having Mps, and nobody is in the Corporate Affairs Department. Another says my supervisor badmouthed me to my boss, and it is in this exact minuteness that I think things are burdensome, my phone and mind almost blowing up instatenously.
So I squeeze my eyes shut, and tears fall down my cheeks like some faucet, especially each time it replays the text about my supervisor. Why? because I’ve always been in his bad books. Because he likes picking on me. Because he literally hates me. Every day he affirms to me that humans are the custodians of hell, disputing the idea of hell being some underground, imaginable place, and now I cannot help but wonder what new bunch of hackneyed lies he has fed the boss about me. And being the person who feels every little detail intensely, I begin to notice the hair on my back rising. Anxiety tips in, and I am fine thinking myself to blame because somehow operations aren’t functioning well with me in absentia. But then again, this mind conjures a different theory, a string of what-ifs. What if this workplace is my whole problem? What if this workplace has created a dysfunction so deeply ingrained in me that it’s hard for me to think things through objectively? Just what if, but be all that as it may, with my mind’s inferences, as sick as I feel, my heart pushes me to go to work. The push has me feeling all fidgety. It’s the fear of desperately wanting to resolve everything that happened yesterday.
Thus, on Thursday, I arrive in the office. Here, everybody has something to say about my absence. Everybody has appointed themselves my legal advisor. You are bound to be called by the CEO, they say. Call your supervisor and apologize. He said bad things about you, and for a moment, they made me feel responsible for their emotions. But this is how it has always been: for the one year I’ve spent in this place, all I ever did was wipe away my tears alone in my room, make sure everyone else feels okay, clean up their messes, take on their responsibilities, and put them on my back, and this once I failed to show up, they crown me the villain. That I have become negligent, and to even imagine that their opinions are not dramatised for effect, makes me see no reason to defend myself against them because somehow this place has normalised toxicity. Somehow, this place has become a haven of brokenness and sadness. Somehow this place has become a home of survivors, always making do, resigning to a world of bullying, saying that insults are okay, and telling each other that this is what it has always been. My supervisor is normally like that, and I should tolerate him because that’s just who he is.
However, what they do not realize is that I am human too. I get to feel things. I get exhausted too from shovelling pain down my eye sockets into my stomach, silencing myself, and pretending it does not sting. But then there is just too much that a man can take; and as it is, something resolves within me that results in tears. It hurts so much. This learning to stand up for myself. It hurts so much, this thing about setting boundaries and learning that honouring myself would ultimately feel like a knife in my gut when I am this close to actually doing it for the first time. It hurts so much that all this time I have attributed worth to how much I could sacrifice for someone, for an organization and just how much of the pain they inflict on me I could bear, and as I stand in the lavatory, my emotions fail to have ground, and I am unable to control myself. Jay catches me off guard. The expression on my face would have been stern and even cruel had it not at the same time expressed suffering, which touched her. So she just wraps me in her arm and asks me what’s wrong, and for a moment I am unable to bring words to my mouth.
I cannot dare confess it to myself, much less venture to tell it to her and increase my vexation. And when she insists on the question of when all this love and hate began, most especially between my supervisor and me, I want to squirm immediately because there are moments in the life of man when one’s extinction seems far more palatable than the circumstances they find themselves in. And with the shudder of my shoulder, she endeavours to hold a grip on me, hugging me up closer and absolutely rubbing my back, making me sob twice harder because one day the world will come tumbling down on your feet and you’ll turn to see no one right with you on a stormy night. However, in my case, there is someone outstretching their arms, making everything feel less daunting during the hours that feel so lonely, and somehow I am almost prompted to tell her all things stuffed up in my chest, but I figure I am the only one who understands my anguish. Nobody else will, and I just cannot explain it because they do not know how this job has been stifling my life, stifling my brilliance, stifling my self-esteem, nibbling my voice, and demeaning my worth. Nobody will understand how my supervisor insulted me, shouting at me and treating me with unfairness as he remained pleased with himself. I tried to tolerate him even when it was no longer possible, and so I am left just sobbing it all out of my system.
Despite this, Jay continues to hold me closer, and I heave my whole breast the way children weep. She holds me in this position until I feel the weight of darkness begin to leave my body. Until I begin to feel the rhythmic and steady beats of my heart, until my teary vision begins to find clarity
Later, after she has instantly managed to calm the storm within me, I sit down to file for my leave, never to return. At some point, it’s almost denied, but eventually it gets approved, making me experience nothing except the out-of-breath feeling, which spells release. My heart is peaceful, and my excitement is similar to when one has had a long, aching tooth pulled out so that suddenly what had poisoned their life is swallowed up, never to exist anymore.
But be all as it may, in my mind, I cannot tell what will happen to me next. In my mind, I am standing at a turning point in my life that might have terrible consequences, but I tell myself that I have always survived. In my mind, I repeat the words in Nyque’s voice: I am positive; it’s going to work out. I repeat this until it’s ingrained in my soul, but in the meantime, I want to let my brain rest a little. I want to wake up at 2 am and eat breakfast, read, and walk barefoot in the house while I do nothing but think, write and watch movies, and sleep and repeat.
And as soon as I reach for the door, I feel a certain air of healing calling to me. I want to head to the elevator, but instead I stand at the doorway of the building, sobbing and wiping my tears. A feeling that I am saying goodbye to this place for good overshadows me. My heart agonizes to depart from my loved ones. I am experiencing intense grief in this moment of freedom because somehow, in all honesty, this place was home for a year or so. It may have had its perks, but it was not all that inherently bad. It just stands to reason out that I inherited certain heavy feelings from it that needed mending, and it’s only when you will be reading this, through my writing as a confession, that I will have achieved absolution and a slice of healing.
Nevertheless, far away, I hear the PROC guy calling. He approaches me for a chitchat, then he digresses to tell me that he has been with the other colleagues and they were just talking about me. He tells me everything they said about me. How they said I got grit. That I am a fighter. That my performance is stellar, and it almost makes me want to cry, though I do not let him see me cry. Instead, I swallow up my tears, gulp the water I have, and bid him goodbye, leaving him standing and watching me. And no, I do not look back at his stare, because I get the instincts I’ll find it hard to leave.
So I just enter the elevator affirming that every experience in life has a climax be it happiness or sorrow. And as it is, I am surely leaving for good. A part of my life is ending; another part will begin. Perhaps I will never see any of its people again, but even so, I just have to look ahead. And while in the matatu heading home, I stare at my phone. There are so many messages, but I only find a small moment of meaning in one text that reads:
I celebrate you today ❤️
You are one amazing woman.
You always find me when I get lost in the dark.
And oh, it feels like a kiss on my lips, an arm around me,a hand caressing my face. Even in strained moments of difficulties or inadequate communication thereof between us, even when we are both dead tired of life, our hearts have always gravitated towards each other. This softness, this gentleness, is sometimes all a person needs to remind them that they still matter.
There, I send him a love emoji and immediately put my phone on DND hoping that peace will call me by name. Hoping that there is still a whole load of goodness in store for me. Then my heart recites:
“What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.”
The End.
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Memoir of Me 
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