It feels like being shoved into a room flooding with brilliant blinding lights. Never mind the fact that I was in pitch black darkness only a minute ago. I lie there motionless, too conscious about the life that’s rushing back into my bones, all the while listening to the woman on the other side of the wall who’s busy pounding away at my ears.
It’s awfully quiet out,wonder what time it is….I refrain from turning, refusing the urge to move or adjust my body on the bed seeing as it will only draw attention to this side.No I can’t risk that. Why won’t sleep take me? I can’t be awake when this is happening. But the thing about sleep is once you stir it doesn’t take you back. Once you’re jolted awake by things such as this, you can’t be accepted back into dreamland, it’s almost a wonder that I still can’t sleep through it. Not to mention my two decades experience in this. My blanket lies limp around my waist so I tentatively reach for it and draw it all the way up. Closing my eyes, I beckon for darkness to take me, for my memory to fly away but no, it can’t. Apparently I’m whole again, too tainted maybe. Before stirring, I was halfway through a dream, but I can’t remember it now for the life of me.
Her footsteps are suddenly muffled but I can hear her voice receding, drifting away into the living room so I take that as my cue. Lifting all of my weight to the side and onto my elbow, I grope for the suitcase underneath the bed. Having felt its rough cover, I feel my way inside its belly, tapping on the clothes until I feel the cold casing of my dear phone. It lights up gleefully upon my touch, its 4.50 a.m.
The wave is washing up the shore again! This time bringing things with it! Oh God, she’s throwing things out along the corridor! I hear the soft landing of things, clothes maybe, the hard terse landing of other things, probably shoes, others lash through the air like whips, must be thin long things.What thin long things??? I am panicking now. I’ve sat up in bed and my oh-so-generous imagination is supplying me with all the ways this could go if at all she makes for my very open door.
My bed starts to creak, I can’t afford to breathe and this thing called my phone starts to vibrate. You were supposed to be on silent!!! I can’t throw myself back in bed or pretend to be sleeping in this position so I brave for whatever is to come. It’s a grueling wait, it even feels long enough for me to crawl out of bed and under it. Or to just shrink into a cockroach and make it out of this room through that partition on the wall. My bladder is burning, begging to be released. I can’t hold this one in, it’s too full. So I slowly let it loose and sit in the sudden warmth. But it soon turns cold and unsettling, I start to squirm. Double whammy!!
It felt like I was ten again, yesterday. I thought I’d manage to just watch from afar and not give into the urge to be a part of it. But what is it they say about things that tug at the heart? Because only that can explain my indulgence in it, the way I went crouching down, arranging the marble fruits into piles of fours. Or how I was flying around, chasing down a bunch of people half my age, screaming like I was out of my mind, acting like I was of them, breast less with light limbs.
I forgot I was even supposed to be tending the fire and ensuring the food cooks well. I let the embers die down and the food, oh-well, let’s just say that the few who managed to have it ate gravel. This is the reason why I don’t cook greengages from scratch.
Now the game. It is more like makeshift bowling. I have not been to a bowling alley to know if its like this one for sure. And no, it’s not because I have no money to spare for that, okay? I am left-handed. There is a certain kind of clumsy and crookedness that comes with being left-handed. Its like we were wired anti-clockwise so much that every time we get down to doing something, we are hit by a nagging self-consciousness. Do we look awkward? Do they think we are doing it right? Like when we mount a bike or when we’re begging our boyfriends to take the wall so they can spoon us. I am not exaggerating. So it comes as a surprise when I find that I’m good at this.
Whoever named this game gave it a funny name, Magora. Magora in reference to the marble tree seeds. But the name on itself sounds like murdering someone, carving their faces into funny looking tokoloshes the way you would a pumpkin on Halloween but instead of prancing around with it, you stash it away and once it starts to smell, you dare other crazy people like you to follow the smell and identify where you hid it. All for a prize!
Once the piles are ready, we all line up nicely and I’m surprised when no one scrambles. No one even tries to beat me at taking first place by shoving their asses up against my hip. We queue nicely like civilized people in a bank even though no one is there to patronize us if we decide to elbow and topple each other to our deaths. And these nice little monsters I call my siblings let me take first place. Rookies and visitors always take first place. In a few throws I’ve managed to topple more than half of the little piles but eventually I miss and as per the game, whoever misses to scatter the last pile should be made to watch. After which when they do manage to disassemble it, I’m to run after them until I’ve shot down someone who’ll take my place of watching. Watching, feeling sad because you’re no longer playing and maybe threatening to leave the game seeing as it is useless to you now that you’re not playing.
It’s all shit and giggles until i have to run after them. And suddenly my legs can’t carry me. There’s a pain that’s eating away at my knees and ankle joints and making me move like a sack of potatoes on stilts. I plonk myself onto the soppy grass, it’s raining a light drizzle. I’m feeling sorry for myself seeing as this chose the perfect time to start showing. My arthritis has come knocking at an early age, God, I’m not even thirty. I am yet to spank someone’s child and haunt them in their sleep. But I have been drinking, testing the gods and this must be them telling me to slow down.
But in all honesty, this staying at home amidst the Corona pandemic is driving me crazy. I don’t know about you and your family but mine is driving me to my wits end. Kids won’t let food be, kids are running all-over the house and literally galloping over tables. Kids are watching cartoons all day we barely have time for our corny operas.
Families are running out of food stock and soon shall start to ration. Old folks cannot let us be in peace. And they are threatening to evict us if we don’t get up early. Apparently our phones are drinking electricity in the house and now the bill is over the roof. Seeming to forget that we these phones are supplying them with jokes that are making them forget about the seriousness of the situation.
But through it all, I hope you’re surviving. I hope you’re finding new ways to be, new ways to live, new ways to breathe. I hope you’re slowly rediscovering the parts of you that need a little more loving, the parts that need a little more sun, the parts that need a little more care. I hope that you’re teaching yourself how okay it is to be different,realizing that sometimes the darkness you may feel was never meant to frighten you, that it was meant to reunite you with yourself. With the folds of you that you’ve long forgotten about.
I hope that you’re appreciating yourself just as much as you did your former world. That you’re recreating yourself. That you’re winning it all back. And when all this over, I pray you remember this glitch in time. This sudden halt in our lives. This overcast phase that seems never ending. The little rays of sunshine that are seeping through in the form of little loving acts. But most importantly, I hope you remember the lessons.
written by Beverly Guliana.
beverlynasimiyu@gmail.com
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