Things That Barely Register

on learning to look.

The trees sway gently, rustling their leaves in the air. It’s a slow day, so I exercise and test my mind. Observation is important. I notice the unseen things. Objects mundane and ordinary that barely register — how someone walks, cars parked along the road next to apartment gates. Some empty, others with people inside, windows half opened, smoking and chewing on Khat. It’s a transportative experience, even if they’ve barely moved since 5pm.

A pawpaw tree with a bent slender trunk stands next to an electricity transformer post. It’s still unmatured, the seeds are yet to bear fruit. Its leaves face the sun in obeisance as they surrender to the sunlight for their sustenance. The wood, the wires and metal of the transformer have soaked in oil and turned black. The red skeleton sign for danger, stained with oil streaks, casts its gaze onto the road menacingly. A trail of ants makes its way around it. The transformer nuzzing with electrical currents obscures a section of the wall behind it where vines creep across the surface. The pawpaw and other surrounding vegetables such as sprouting kale and spinach are enclosed by a kayaba garden fence covering the length of the wall.

A black and white patched stray cat defecates within the garden and begins to hide its waste, its nose gently smelling the soil, its whiskers barely touching it. A blue gate leads into the compound. Two vehicles sit idly in the front yard. An old Indian woman, her silver hair fluttering small strands against a gentle breeze, is seated on the balcony of a ground-floor unit in a house three stories high. She wears a blue and golden sari that reveals coiled sleeves of loose skin on her elbows. Though her hands look frail and wrinkled, she holds a jug of water sturdily as she stands to water a line of succulent plants in differently styled small clay pots decorated in different patterns. The chair is placed against one of the two columns that lead into the open balcony.

I began to observe my surroundings seriously after sitting at my desk, thinking about what to write, and coming to the realization that my imaginations didn’t fully run on images. The kind that stick. Already formed, already ready to be written down. I write on a blank canvas, like a hand on a biblical wall. I was tired of conjuring things from the blankness of my own mind. Tired of not noticing, of letting things pass my gaze without record.

I had not known that the cat I watched relieve itself was not alone. Two kittens followed close behind, playing in the overgrown grass and marigold weeds. She was a mother. She cared for her kittens the way my mother once cared for me which is to say completely, and without apparent effort. She cleaned her paws and called out to them, and they came.

I stayed and took notes.

My eyes opened to the world in the way eyes do when you finally let them. I noticed the shapes of clouds, high and slow, gathered in vast bodies against the sky. The sun hung low, its light spent, turned from a piercing white into a burnt orange that seeped through windows and plastered itself onto walls and blinded me when I walked directly into it. The sun sets differently in April. Quietly. Eager, it seems, to rise again — or so I tell myself. I think about this sometimes. What would happen if one day the sun did not bring light from the east? Would I go on sleeping, the clock reading 9am, the room dark? Would I stay in bed even knowing there was panic outside? will my being my own sun still feel the same without it? I turn onto a busier road. It connects different estates together. Cars pass me quietly. At least here there is order. There is no loud hooting, and the impatience that exists just further along Langata Road is replaced by a slowness of life surrounded by residential buildings, children in sports uniforms walking back home after training, bouncing their footballs, turning back and talking and laughing with a kind of laughter that I cannot make.

I think of the gentleness of still being a child with your life and the whole world in front of you, and with a young self that still hasn’t grown to contradict you — and the things you know, have become, and tell the world that you are. They pause their chatter as I walk past them. These kids — they’ve marked it. I’m no longer of their tribe. And then they resume their stories as if my age oppressed the excitement of their day.

I’m getting the unc treatment nowadays while looking at the mirror in denial. I check my face in the morning for new wrinkles. I confirm I am just as I was yesterday, but that last glimpse of the mirror stays — it lingers, as though it were a second slower. In that moment, I stop fooling myself that time isn’t passing. That’s usually how I begin my day, with a defiance to prove the day that, just like it at 6am, I too am young, and an unageing Dorian Gray.