Her Thought Piece

"Aki Sue call me in 2 minutes. It's mayday!" I am hysterical and sweating bullets. It's 6:45 p.m during this pandemic. I am too far but I must go home. I hate it here. I loathe this man.  My girlfriend knows the drill and calls back sounding very fierce. My call volume is intentionally high so the man can overhear how impatient my "cousin waiting by my door" is. He now drives a little fast and my heart races even faster, it's winning I can tell. My veins are almost popping out of my skin in dire attempt to guise my disgust. I would cry but Fergie says big girls don't do that.  I know, I know, I should get an Uber but it's actually late. I am a scaredy cat and he's my safest bet home I swear, which hella sucks at this point. He's an authorized medic so I guess we won't be landing into any trouble with the hungry and blood thirsty night crawlers. My bad, I meant to say cops.  There's some serious traffic but in an hour we pull up at

...Phil calls and an involuntary smile fills up my face. I can’t get used to his croaky voice. It makes me nervous and I like it. “So what’s up?” I ask. He says he wants to see me, he’s off work. I too am home. “Can I come?”, he asks, “I have some wine and I miss seeing you laugh so sheepishly”. Yes, wine gets me drunk. I have been a teetotaler all my life until Phil happened, a month ago. He comes and soon we are seated on the floor chatting and teasing. He draws me in for a kiss. I am complaisant this time. I respond in kind and we get lost in a shameless hearty moment until he feels his phone ring in his pocket. Damn! It’s been a 5-year hiatus from physical intimacy and I feel heat surging through my body. I could scream but as for Phil…  I 100% recommend. I let him answer and on getting his phone out, oh whoop! The balloons slip out too. I cock my eyebrows, in a quizzical stare and he gives me the smug smile back. It’s her I could tell and he was not hiding it.

It's a Friday night in an eighth full matatu(team positivity) and I'm going wherever the party's at. I'm a little frustrated from frantic calls I'm getting from another fella and I won't pick them anyway. A raggedy brother hops in, looks around and he settles for where I am. I'm mad, what are all these empty se ats for? I know I'm not looking pretty as my hair is held back with no much thought put into neatness. I'm in a trenchcoat and some random pants I jumped into hurriedly. Or it's that thing they say about you being who you att ract? I'm actually mad because he has a boiled maize on his left that he's gnawing at unapologetically and a fat avocado on his right. Wait, no, that's no crime. It's his chewing that's getting to my nerves. "You can have a bite," he offers with his mouth full and pointing the maize at me. I'll pass lawfully. My reason being chewing maize is exhausting for me, so I'm

Momma, it's been one month. No calls. Nothing. Well I know you're old fashioned like that and I accepted that texting will never be your thing, unless of course under special circumstances. (Where you communicate in letters, whew, I guess if you mastered Morse code then dots would have been the story of my life.) The last time we talked you were working on something, I mean, money for school fees and upkeep. So one month, what have I been eating? Or what is going on back there? Momma, folks here expect me to call back, that's what a good daughter should do. I unlikely pass the bar on relationships but mum I can't call you. I think of you everyday that goes and I know better than to call so fast. Because everything I want to tell you starts with I need money and ends with I need even more money than before. You know long before, you'd call me at least twice a week, from butt-dials, to goodnights, to checking up on me and talking to all my friends; you know

“You look lovely,” he says. I can hear his tenor voicing these words close to my ears. They dance around my ear lobes for a while and somehow they feel like an itch nearing my eardrums. But close is as far as they get, and I turn my head to look at him. I glare like I heard nothing. I guess that teeny weensy rush of wind I went against in the process swept those words away. In all sincerity, I felt nothing. My walls went up, on hearing those words. My fatal and first instinct is to bat away these words people use as gate-passes into our fragile hearts. Most of the time they want something right? So during my vincible days my head goes sprawling, “oh! What does he want? Definitely not me. With all this height I still look so naive? At only the first glance? Or what’s his dysfunction anyway. Would you save those words for that other girl? she looks like her life depends on it. I’m furious within this poker face and beneath the neatly plaited lines on my head. He is probably

I look at generational gap in so many ways, and my parents just make it clear how lost they feel living amongst us. Well, my dad made it even crisper, ha-ha. I had my series in CDs and would leave them at the TV area. So someday, my dad got ahold of walking dead which he chose to watch at night, mistake number one. All we could hear was him gasping, “My goodness!” every other two seconds in some kind of tone. Worse, he was alone in the living room. My old man is brave, those zombies are driving him crazy but he keeps on, until when he realizes that this thing won’t end. Well, he wasn’t raised watching series. So he relinquished the trauma! I too, got really cold chills watching XYZ but my amusement couldn’t let me back down till I got used to them, even horror movies don’t do nothing to me anymore, except Hannibal. It’s a thriller that apprehends me, and I need the lights on to get through it. All this time I zoom into the film industry asking myself why? I mean what are these

On this day I feel like Cinderella, running in her glass slippers back home, shunning the midnight hour when tick-tock hits then she turns out to be who not the prince thought. I am alarmed, truly that this year has been my princess-like charade, and once the fireworks start to go off and people start screaming in the neighborhood that it is new year, everything will change. So 3 campus years, what do I make of it? Maybe I should have pictures to show and stories to tell round a bonfire all night. But snap your fingers and for those who cannot put their thumb and middle finger together; swing them sideways to make a sound, I hope you can blink once. And yes, that’s all I can say about my years for now. It was, then it wasn’t, and believe me it’s still messing my mind up.  Can I go on being Cinderella anymore? Will friends I had in school always there for me because they were there, like the next door to mine? Will there still be like a titanic-sized room for mistakes, a