Everyone from your mother to your cat asks why you don’t blog anymore. Are you out of the country? Did you quit blogging? For how long should I keep refreshing your blog? Where am I supposed to read single girl stories? Are you testing us? Lol. Hii inaitwa kuzoeana bana!
Pull up! Rewind come back again, selecta. Take it back from the top!
Long weekend. Yayyy! Right? You had it all drawn up, how you’d spend it. First, there was that cousins’ meetup. You are all grown-up and so are most of your cousins. You have finally decided to form a group that meets up and helps each other out, like your parents have done for years before you. That is a good distraction, a really good one before other issues crop up in the remaining three days. You sit in the dark, smoky but yet cosy kitchen with your closest cousin and talk men while cutting up veggies to go with the meat. You nod at her story. She has a story. You don’t. He lied. The end. Men. Cucu asks your brother whether he has found “a person”, directly translated. You all laugh, you, bro, cuz and cucu together. He says the “person” is coming. You wonder why cucu didn’t ask you. Why she never asks you. How young does cucu think I am? You ask yourself. She definitely knows exactly how old I am. Should I be worried that she is not asking me? You don’t find an answer and move on real fast.
You know exactly what you want. But so as to make things sound complicated, to not hurt people, you tell them you don’t know what you want. People here being men. You know you want a man who knows what he wants, not just by word but by action. You want someone who, right from the start, made his intentions known. Someone who is decisive. Someone who does not practise certain rituals that you do not approve of. Think about something like drinking. Not milk. Alcohol. This, especially, is becoming increasingly hard to have as a “don’t” on your dos and don’ts list. It makes you wonder whether your list is too prefect. Like seriously. You know exactly what you want, you just haven’t found it yet.
This is a story about a girl. A girl who was in love. A girl who was in love but didn’t know it. A girl named Clara.
You know what, let’s not beat about the bush. I know Clara. She told me this story herself. I didn’t know what to think or to advise her, but I’ll let you be the judge.
You sigh a lot nowadays, whether in text or physically. You rarely feel anything anymore. You have lived long enough to know some things are not worth wasting your emotions over. Even when you do feel something, you’re human after all, you move on very fast.
You have a crush in the office building. He looks like a sweet chap. But every moment you get, you ignore him, pretend not to see him, unless your eyes lock and you have no choice of pretending not to have seen him. Hi there. He probably has a girlfriend or wife, in all likelihood.
Sigh. It’s mid Jan. How did that happen? You struggle to get out of bed today, as always. You remember sleeping without answering all the texts on your phone. One was about an engagement on Facebook. Facebook will never leave you alone, will it? Despite you not logging in for two months. The other was a good night from another friend. You wanted to reply but couldn’t. Not that you had something else to do except read that book that has you glued to its pages and lying in bed in all sorts of awkward positions.
Ever felt so at peace with yourself and with the world that you wonder what’s changed? You begin to gain weight, weight that has been elusive ever since you were aware of yourself. You still have your acne but it doesn’t bother you much. You begin to portray more girly traits, complete with a changing wardrobe since the jeans you are used to and growing too tight anyway. You begin to catch up with your girls and slowly get rid of pointless talk in your life. You tweet less, scroll down your Facebook news feed twice a week, only have Telegram and Hangouts as messaging apps and chat a total of five people in these two and watch the news in passing, because you have probably seen an alert online about the same pieces throughout the day. Every once in a while, someone will ask when you are getting married, but that’s once in a blue moon.
He will text or call you just to tell you the most trivial of things, just to ensure he kept you up to date or made you laugh. He will keep calling even when you don’t pick at first because you’re stuck in a meeting. If you are stuck somewhere, say, filling NHIF forms and don’t know those weird numbers, he’ll read them out off head – both his ID number and my mum’s, and any other random number you might want.
She will ask about my day, even when I don’t want to tell her about it, which is almost always all the time. She will linger, even when I snap at her. She will be so sweet that I will eventually tell her. And when I actually have a bad day and willingly tell her, she will ensure I am okay. She will call the next day when I get to work to follow up, even if I was with her a few minutes ago in the house.
I’m in bed. I have tried to sleep. I have really tried. It’s 00:54. I am tired. My legs feel worn out. I was trying to ice-skate. My cousin’s idea. I got into bed at 9 sth. Took on Taken 3. Liked it. Cried a little. Embarked on using a bit of my night bundle then decided to sleep. Wapi?
The cock is croaking now. No, we don’t call it croaking. Somehow I thought they go together. It’s crowing. I might be going crazy. Or maybe it’s all the thinking I should be processing that I’ve decided to forget about that is haunting me. I honestly don’t know what’s up. M-Pesa is apparently undergoing maintenance, so I can’t top up and text. I can’t watch something else. What am I? A couch potato? No. So I’ll do the only thing remaining. I’ll tell us all a story. It goes like this:
So I’ve been writing short posts, shorter than you were used to before we began the new year. A lot has changed between now and then. For one, I stopped talking about men all the time. This is a good thing, right? But apparently not for this joint. Secondly, everything about my days changed and I had to adapt with shorter blog posts. I did not realize I was doing this until a mini-coup was initiated with my last post.
Guest post by Anonymous
There are many mistakes that you could make as a woman regarding love and relationships. We may choose to blame it on ‘broken hearts, YOLO, or on the a-a-a-alcohol’, but a mistake is a mistake. The good thing with making them, if you are smart, you will learn and avoid them like the plague. However, if you refuse to learn, it will become an unpleasant cycle that will taunt you and you will turn into a miserable old lady no one really likes.
Here is my story:
You know how people tell you they don’t want something but they do? Like how men think that a no from a lady means yes? Well, I was not going to do this. Mostly because he explicitly said I should not write about him. But I know deep inside, he expects I will write about it sooner or later.
Guys lie,
Guys lie all the time.
Maybe I am wrong, maybe I am right.
Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s false.
Right and true, wrong and false,
Totally different.
I could be either, or.
It’s been seven months since my heart was broken into a thousand little pieces. Seven months since I added too much salt to the food because my mind was somewhere else replaying conversations, trying to figure out what I did wrong. My dad did not even think about it as he went on his jokes about how he should have cooked the food himself. He always cracks this joke about me having, perhaps, gone and cooked the food in Lake Magadi.