Life kills.
even your lifeskills.
If I could write fiction, it would read like Chekov’s. I’ll be checking out of this world and into my imagination. Sometimes I try to write, but it doesn’t come out right. The words I have don’t build worlds. They are forensic instruments searching through a dead mind, like it’s CSI and I’m Horatio. Excavating and pulling my tired body out from the quicksands of my mind. The glass between us is super thin. You look inside and can’t reconcile with what you’re seeing. I’m open like a cold cadaver. Deader than dry thistles. In the heat of the moment, of being seen, visible. I burn into a wildfire, but the flames keep puffing out. You get scared to be burnt, and then give me distance, like I’m a plague on earth. We pass each other like known strangers with a past between us. We gave each other everything, then took it all. I called your number, but it was busy. I guess I should have minded my business. I don’t reach out anymore. My heart is closed, it thawed too late, and now ice abounds. I get wet feet, dry lips, and a palpitating heart like I went to Kandahar and came back home with battle scars. You knew my value, but with time, it turned into cowrie shells with the money you’ve been stacking. It’s been making me dream of the better days you keep having. My classmate made the news, won an award overseas, flipped his luck and now wastes on the couch. You had me in a chokehold, I could always fold. Nothing makes sense anymore, as the walls grow mould. I slept on a park bench, talking to God. Then woke up with no shoes, which escaped my stagnant soles at the hands of a soleless soul. I made a mistake and took a walk to the stage close to home with Crocs on, only to find an old friend who got a job. She talked differently, and her perfume smelled like office spaces. Handbag across her shoulder, she looked like enjoying board meetings and sending emails. I looked out of place, but told her that she got her dream made, kept my ego and paid no mind. I looked at my AMG crocs and made a perp walk out of there. The rest of the evening, I meditated, medicated, and took myself to a different plane. It has been eight years since we last met, talked, and sat together in all kinds of stories. I didn’t take her number. I couldn’t dial it in even if I tried. We live in different plotlines, with forkpaths up ahead, let’s keep out of each other’s lanes. I’ll wait another eight years. There’s nothing new in me from the old.
I’ve seen so many old faces randomly on the streets that make me feel aged. Another classmate made it big, works at KPMG, but you’d never know because he stopped being online with the work pressure breathing down his neck. He couldn’t hold his space, and we parted out of each other’s lives like driftwood. I didn’t hold mine either, and that now seems even. I also don’t take group pictures, I’m worse than Olise. I kept sharing my backstory until I got tired of dreaming of being on the front pages. I live painfully, and the pain tastes like cherries. Everyone I knew is gone, and it gets scary to only meet new faces. Part-time strangers feel like sugar rushes, only hitting for a second until the time is done. Familiar faces keep me stuck in my phases. I need changes, like words on empty pages. I am not good at editing, regretting, or reminiscing. I’m worse off than a memory addict glued to the past, or an old man bathing in the sun on the front porch, thinking of how it should have been. I am grateful that I’m still here, while finding it funny that I’ll one day be in a coffin. I laugh it off, guiltily knowing how scared of it I am; you don’t want to go there with a fist full of dreams. My own death doesn’t scare me. It’s the tears of others over my rigid corpse that does. Will you stop crying? I can’t hear your sobs over all this dirt. Humour washes away the pain, and life is a joke that I should take lightly. I am the act of the show, and my life is selling out on all the jokes. I write so maniacally that the AI keeps worrying. I’m okay, fool, you wouldn’t understand it. It’s crazy how they made it possible to sell our intelligence back to us. Stop using AI, they’ll use it to write your eulogy, prompt a caricature of you and put it on your obituary—hurts more than Njenga from Githurai. Question: If they stacked the days of your life, could you still scale it? Question, if they fell like Jenga, could you still take it?