The year is several years after i arrive in this dimension crying and screaming wild much to the agony of my tiny minute lungs, yet the adults breathe and laugh and smile. I have been purged from my comfort zone to a sea of cruelty and uncertainty. These are the thoughts crossing my mind as i float on the narrow tarmacked paths that threaten to push their way into the walls of beautiful flower beds surrounding them and escape to freedom. This will be my new home for a good part of four years. I am still reeling from the culture shock and thinking i need a new heart, the old one has been battered by the new life that i have experienced in the past week.
I get to my class still in my spontaneous daze, i stand outside and pretend to be busy on my symbian phone reading old messages from my subscriber. At some point in the future, i will pick this phone and pretend to be having a loving conversation with some anonymous person, i note that that is five minutes from now when people start strolling into the classroom each with the ‘swag’ of their home in Nairobi, so i wait.
Ten minutes from now, i will spot a guy, he will be short, nice hair, light skin, a very confident and interesting gait. In fifteen minutes class with have begun. We will all introduce ourselves. I will hear his name and learn he is of a different tongue from a foreign land that i fell in love with long ago. I don’t know it at this moment but i will spend my four years deeply in crush with him, after four futile years i will love him for eternity, not the way lovers do, but i will care about him enough to worry about his whereabouts ten years from now. Unfortunately, he will have changed his number so i will begrudgingly delegate the worrying to the almighty.
Two years from now i will embarrass him , it won’t be intentional, it will be the result of shock and disbelief that he is actually going to lunch with me, of course that will be the end of us. He will spend four years dating girls, that are nothing like me . I will be in my kitenge and long flowing skirts, the fashion of my village; they will be in carrots and tank tops and crop tops and pencil skirts and trousers and i will be no match for them and every time my heart will sink. By the time i’m in my third year, my heart will be on its way out of the pyloric sphincter.
Right now, i know not of all these. All i see is him in all his glory and his laptop. Its the first time i am seeing a laptop up close and i am impressed from my village to Alabama. I also notice his shirt, a cream colored shirt and a black trouser that he did not bother to press. He will later reveal that that was once his uniform. This image will buy shares in my head and engrave itself there.
He will encourage me when my two left feet betray me in dance class and he will do so without getting too close. Damn! In my second year, some spirit will attack me and i will hate him or so i will pretend. But his kindness will melt my heart every day. I will notice even the smallest of gestures. I will forever remember the gift he gave an old woman somewhere in the west, a woman he did not know had never met, i will remember clutching my heart to stop it from melting all the way; the impact of his gesture.
In my fourth year, we will have lunch and i will stop lying to myself that i hate him. I, however, will not reveal it. I will pack my bags and fly to my mother land and there i will spend my life hoping he is okay. I will stalk him on social media, i will call once before his number goes mteja and my hopes are kaput. The short man from a foreign land with a light skin, the kind that lights my heart, the man i love not the way lovers do.
Waturi Diaries 