A Little Late Night Musing

I’m laying low. Life is leering lecherously at me. I quake in the corner. She (life, the bitch,) has lately landed some of her choice uppercuts on my jaw with jarring juddering impact.

But no, it’s not all bad. Today, a half-crush from the semi-forgotten past texted me. This lifted my spirits. (It shouldn’t have.) Perhaps she was just playing with her phone and my head. She could also have been just poking - don’t you just hate that poke thing on Facebook? You don’t? Sorry.

So, the half crush.

Uncertainty about her had flooded my mind in the distant past. On the face of it, she was a girl and I was a guy, thus it was all figured out and hence meant to be. (Primary school doesn’t encourage too much critical thinking, hence multiple choice national exams.) But my naïve mind was rescued at the unhappy moment when reality shone a harsh light on my dangerous naivety: I was only “infatuated”, and on top of that, highly reproductively capable, at least if you asked those guys who came round every now and then to threaten pupils with gruesome death from AIDs and guilt, leaving destitute illegitimate children roaming the streets as one burnt in hell for ever and ever. These hired doomsayers were in close collaboration with a cane-loving headmaster who constantly did violent “purges” of “boy-girl relationships”. Therefore I hardly even tried to nurture the half-crush into a crush.

This is not to mean there weren’t episodes. At a chance meeting, after we had both suffered the benefits of a few years of maturity, she told me (volunteering - without being asked) that it could never work between us. I was unsuitable, according to her, because she gravitated helplessly towards bad boy types. I took it in stride and nonchalantly and mightily-breezily patted down my carefully ironed suit. (Otherwise, inside, my alter ego screamt “Bloody f*cking sh*t!!!”) The conversation then crawled onward into more mundane things. But still…

Henceforth, after that event, I embarked on an initiative to ensure that in gender relations, I would be highly “suitable”, if you hear me correctly. Now the psychology-types among you will start yammering about how I was scarred for life but I beg to differ. Some experiences refuse to be rubbed off the head, no matter what moves are made to overcome their memory. DISCLAIMER: the experiences in themselves are pretty pedestrian and unremarkable, but as we all know, embarrassment gives a misstep the quality of immortality.

Moving on to other things… I recently did a small survey of the special ladies in my life. The list was alarming. (“Special” is not “hanky-panky”.) Not one of them is intimate in any relevant way, yet the variety is baffling. A look at the categories should make this apparent. Maybe I’m crazy to categorize, but I have in my list such illustrious ladies as a favorite ex best friend, favorite ex deskmate, a favorite ex groupmate, a favorite ex sit-across-table-in-library-and-exchange-suggestive-glances mate, a favorite ex neighbor, among others, and I haven’t even mentioned the favorite current lot, such as a favorite blog author I know a bit, and a favorite blog author I don’t know much of but wish I did. So I’ve finally figured out why I’m single and doomed to remain thus: One more favorite and I’ll have a nervous breakdown.

Otherwise, I quit the dating scene; it’s like a maze, complete with a bloodthirsty Minotaur (read The Ex) to panic your strategies for getting out. Having weaved my way out, I’m hoping the Minotaur didn’t catch my scent and follow me out into my austere retirement.

I’m off to text the ex-half-crush back. Hopefully it’ll remain distant, lukewarm and platonic. Fat chance.

Plagiarizing Facebook

The title means that from now henceforth the posts that appear on this blog will have been copied word for word from my Facebook page or else I'll drag them straight out my head. Some of my memories make for dull stories but have to find an outlet. Praise the Blog.

On to other matters.

I'd come to Nairobi from home sweet home, Kisumu, where I'd been trying to act like an ex towards my ex. Otherwise put, I avidly avoided her and pretended to be having a good time when I couldn't avoid her. This included being rather too loud and chummy with my lady ex best friend on phone. Anyway, developments were such that by the time the holiday ended (actually I fled to Nairobi long before time), we had bared our fangs and had a fight to end all fights - nothing physical. Her verbal lashing was ably met by my logical reasoned arguments about rubbing friends forever and ever. She blamed me for a variey of things, including Atheism and Anarchism, and I in turn thought her bum looked fat in that. Thus did we part amicably: just like I wanted it.

Why we left one another? The single life is so uncluttered but you can't tell from seeing my room. Relationships are for later. AND Yes we left one another; she didn't leave me, and I insist to death.

I thought I was in charge, having come out with minor ego burns. Trust The Ex to have feminine wiles for correcting the anomaly. She came right at me, weeks later, in my school-time bedsitter-type room (Blue and White, a home away from home), knocking the door at a time when I was dozing a dull afternoon away in the ambience of an Al Jazeera presenter's voice. My shock on seeing her outside my door was well hidden... at least I hope so.

"Wrong house, lady," I told her, pulling off the most malevolent glare my grogginess could afford. Trust The Ex to simply walk in. I wanted to go Hey I'm talking to you but decided against it. It just wouldn't work.

She had on this smile. Now this smile... She seemed to be seeing through me and smiling at my weak fight. You know better than that, she seemed to be saying, Admit it, boy, you missed me. The smile charmed my insides. But when she lavished the same smile on the furniture, the messy desk, the pile of clean laundry on my bed and even the air, all in the process of giving my place an appraising glance, I decided it was a mocking smile so I shouldn't excite myself.

"What do you want?" I demanded, feeling less outraged and more apprehensive than I was sounding. I also knew full well that she had travelled a massive distance - all the way from Kisumu to Nairobi, in order to... to...

to do what?

She had not spoken a word. As I stared at that smile, I felt real fear in the pit of my stomach.