PINKTOBER

There still is nothing cooler than seeing an idea come to fruition. To see something go from a whiteboard to actual production. October was one of my favorite months this year having seen me achieve all that I had longed and planned for. My ambitions and expectations did not wither in the bud, they flourished, blossomed, saw the light of day. 

If I was obscenely pushy last month, that is what drive is-wanting the impossible, wanting it all, never knuckling under to an obstacle, pushing till you get what you want. I wanted to battle cancer. If I ever become somebody who stops fighting, I will be finished. Let us not be sentimental about this. That is what reaching the top and staying there means, in all aspects of life. If one for a moment, is tempted to think, Poor Akoth, so insecure, so driven, so unhappy, do not bother. Be glad for me. Thank God I am driven. Being driven is my energy source. It is my fun. I have always liked a good fight-your adrenaline is going and you are in there sparring and punching, especially if you have right on your side and you are thinking, I am going to win this. I believe that where there is action, there is movement, and those ripples will eventually produce something positive. If my life ever  becomes steady and even, I will go crazy with boredom, become fat. Lets just say I am addicted to action.

UNTITLED

I rubbed at the tears with my thumb and a smile pulled at one corner of my mouth. I dumped the onion rings in the pan and turned on the tap. I held my hands under the running water, watching the water hit them and splay off into the sink. After a few moments I smelled them carefully and dried them on the dish cloth. Ileaned against the counter and stared into space, thoughtful.

"The onions are burning Lizzy."

I began to laugh through my tears. Another monkey's wedding. I scrabbled at the onions vigorously with a wooden spoon as I encouraged my thoughts on.

"Oh, hell. I am the champion messer of the world. I just wasn't cut out to be a good cook. I dont quite know what I was cut out to be either. I get carried away by my own emotions. I am purposeless."

"What does that mean?"

"I suppose I don't know what am at...and I mind. Lots of people don't know and they don't mind. I mind."

"You're going to get married."

I sighed.
"I suppose yes. That's not purpose though. It's sort of routine really. The birth, marriage, death routine."

"You really do not have to get married you know."
"It's hard to explain about love, even to yourself. And then...Ihate living on my own...you need someone," I lied.

I held the pan under the tap and let a stream of hot water run on to it. Steam enveloped me for a moment, then my little brother broke into a song. I wondered whether he knew his singing always had a way of breaking the clotted sadness in my head.

"Would you kill anyone? Any...you know...person?" he asked.

"I am not sure. How can you ever tell the answer to that? I wouldn't want to kill anyone. And I think if I ever did kill anyone, for whatever reason, it would probably be the wrong thing to do."

There was a long silence. Only the sound of the gas fire whispering through the room. I watched as tired dust settled on the kitchen windowpane. I looked past the window, out into the street. A building outside was still smouldering and some workmen were clearing away the rubble. There was a queue at the police checkpoint and women stood with shopping baskets, shuffling along a few metres at a time. Bags open. Shuffle. I watched a man light his cigarette as they waited. Hands patting up and down bodies. Bags open. No love lost. No time for humour. Guns always at the ready. Bags open. Never turn your back on anyone.

I could see feet shuffled and shopping bags shifted from one arm to another, to ease the weight. Grey piles of stones and guns strapped on waists. Their day was done.

A crane was w3orking on the road and I watched as it gently swang its load from one point to another. A couple of men stood near them and watched also. Curled ropes and lengths of chain and the high buildings stained with floor dust. The cars moved slowly over the cobblestones. Two men stood nearby talking, gesturing, their eyes warily on the movements of the crane. A dog sat near them, fluffing out its fur to keep the wind from penetrating.

"God give me patience!" My brother's shrill voice brought me back. "How many times do I have to call you?"

"Oh, am sorry."
"Yes you should be. M hungry. And I wouldn't kill anyone." He said fiercely. "I wouldn't. No matter what."

"Joram..sometimes we are not able to really help the things that happen to us. The things we do. We have no control...at times, that is. It's far much easier to think the right thoughts than do the right things."

"I wouldn't. I wouldn't." he repeated.

He started to sing again, there being no answer to that.

DATING THE IMPOSSIBLE

[This is an attempt by one  Faith Keener to produce a sequel to OF FIRST LOVE AND BROKEN HEARTS. She is a close friend and quite some good writer so this just as close as anyone could get to the facts. There you go.]

"He is gay. He is going to waste you," The truth behind his friend's statement came hitting hard as I held Mitch's hand in mine. A statement I wished I had heed a year and a half earlier. I became involved because of the determination that churns like an engine inside me, this credo of mine that will-power and intensity can do anything, can break through any obstacle. I felt so much masculinity in Mitch, felt so physically attracted to him, that I refused to believe he could never function with a woman he loved. After all, he had fathered a brilliant kid (yes he has a five year old son called Terrence). I guess I really thought for a long time that the love of a good woman could convert Mitch, really thought I could save him.

I remember how I used to bask in his affection and aura. I was the person that Mitch, the arbiter of intelligence and cleverness, had chosen to adore, which gave me an identity, something to be. I loved being with him, this man who was utterly romantic, utterly aware. There would be flowers delivered to me on occasions, a poem in the mail, a gift in elegant taste for no reason. He was my knight who saw into the subtleties and absurdities of everything. Our minds were like two little kids playing the telephone, schmoozing and giggling into Dixie cups connected by a string of brains and affection-I am also bright, you know. My first phone call every morning was to him.

I remember how he would put his arms around me and hold me and kiss me warmly. He would say, "I love you. There's no one like you," and be masculine and passionate, and I would tell him,"You are sending me the right vibrations," all the while shutting out the image of his doing the same with some man elsewhere.
    He would say, "I'm not."


As in my whole relationship with him, I was living my dream vicariously, luxuriating in the glamour of being behind the art scenes. I had always wanted to develop a voice through lyrics and I was already open to him, already moving instinctively in his direction by improvising and taping and developing my own voice. Also, the act of creation fascinates me. You can only sit with a blank page and wait. You cannot press a button,cannot program it. Everything comes out of smoke and mist and nothingness, a mystical happening, something to be worshiped. Writing meant an inspiration.

He was a charismatic man who people turned and looked at. As a poet, he was a potential William Blake, writing pieces that were beautiful, touching, original, with great internal rhymes. He had an irreverent, caustic, very dry wit, a brilliant, precise mind, and an insatiable appetite for gossip(you can almost guess my own appetite tripled his). This rich description is from the days when I was notoriously poor in perceiving his faults-I was blindly head over heels in love.

Despite his being gay, we so adored each other that what we had(whatever it was) became a sort of reality-as though by desperately wishing, we could make it real. He was frustrated as I was-one of the few gay men I have ever known who really hated being gay and hated himself. The only thing he took pride in was his mind and his work. Ours was a very sad love affair.

I was in love with a man who was my dream-a man who looked right, who was right for me and my family(yes, I consider them), adored me, lived for the arts, a man who had a happy place for me in his life-perfect except for one little flaw. H e was a homosexual. What a waste of such a good man! I was hot with shame. I, who prided myself on being honest with myself, I had let delusion take over, let wishful thinking convince me that this relationship could work-and now I had been told to get lost because my loved one was going to be a homosexual for a while. I felt slapped hard across the face.

"What am I doing? What am I doing?" I felt entirely defeated, entirely inadequate. I who always believed there MUST be a away. But there was no way I could compete, no way I could change and get him. A homosexual is a homosexual is a homosexual. Torn by mixture of anger  and grief, I walked through the night, knowing this precious relationship was over, but still absolutely crazy about him. Besotted.

Mitch and I continue seeing each other, but the relationship faded back to what it should have been-an extremely warm friendship-and I wondered to myself why I constantly chose impossible men.

BIG CUT!

If you are of my origin,the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear of the "big cut" is probably some circumcision,which wouldn't be such a bad thing were i a man!But my own wasn't as far off from that because well, i cut my long glossy,black,beautiful,african hair..(you'll have to give me some intense adjectival order culturing after this)

Yes you heard right I cut off my hair on 21st November 2012!why? Because I can! Seriously I've had a big hair for years,ok, make it two years and i just wanted to try out something different. I refuse to mention the fact that i have cancer and is going to emerge out of the tunnel a victor. So well, i was never going to stand my hair fall off so i decided to take initiative of chopping it off. Yes, I love being in control of circumstances.


But before it all goes, I've cut it to about an inch!My routine for the first month is going to be wash and go and my activator gel..I am rocking it!

OF FIRST LOVE AND BROKEN HEARTS

I was ready for earthly love. At least that's what  i thought. It came to me in the person of Mitch who I met as he ate his lunch, at Almond Resort in Garissa. I had known Mitch virtually through a late best friend and had a crash on him since girlhood. I thought him breathtakingly cute, but to him I was only a girl hanging on the fringes and nothing passed between us except "just checking on you" emails.

But when we met that day, at lunch, he was going through a proposal for a project he was working on then, and the chemistry was instantaneous. This was the first time he had ever noticed me and to me it was like being in love with Mike Macharia and suddenly one day he turns around and goes, "Well, hi". I could not believe that he was asking me out. I could not believe it when he said he loved me. I could not believe that he said to my brother, "Your sister's my girl." It was very, very heady.


Grown up, Mitch was light with deep brown eyes(like mine), symmetrical, flexible features and muscular. He was very kind to the eye. He was strikingly masculine and bright and wild and exciting. Exuding self-confidence, certain that the world would be his. He had the air of a Kenyan Luo man which was so irresistible to me because it was so exotic to me, so forbidden. His sense of fashion was heavy and spitting in the eyes of society.

Everything we did together was an adventure, things that appeared glamorous to me because I had never been allowed to do them-like kissing, going out clubbing on a crazy night. But we spent most of our time together operating from my house, along Ngong Road, walking the streets, going to Choices(Baricho Road) on Thursdays to join the zoo of humanity that gathered to hear the quality live band music. We sat for hours holding hands in beatnik coffee houses and strolled the line of paintings during Art fairs. We both appreciated history, culture and art, making The Kenya Archives and the Nairobi gallery favorite hang-outs.

But mostly we talked. Mitch was a mechanical engineer and a would-be writer and pursuing a degree in history-and the first boy who ever assumed I had read books and understood them and could talk about them knowledgeably. We discussed how profoundly misunderstood we were and talked with fervor about our futures, about the possibility of getting married, about my legal and IT careers and his own life. Being a writer, he was burning with intensity, suffering deeply from his sensitivity to every nuance of life. Such free-floating angst was quite appealing to me because I could be the comforter-consoling a major Kenyan engineer-writer.

With him came unshakable security, warmth, comfort, culture and complete understanding of living with the arts-everything i ached to be part of and what he seemed very much part of.

. He saw me through my bed rests, supported through my chemo sessions. With him came a ‘forever’.

It was after the doctor’s prognosis that all started going wrong. Yes, apparently I didn’t have long to live, which has turned out wrong. We fought constantly, which for a while added to the excitement of the romance. He was volatile; I was volatile. He was dramatic; I was way dramatic. He didn’t know when to shut up; neither did I. There were incredible highs, and incredible lows. After our second huge fight, he came to me and said, "i wrote an elegy" and I was way impressed. He wrote another after our third big fight and then our fourth. Eventually, he had a two volume set. He made Lord Byron look like a slacker.

He was my first sexual experience and I was not ready for it emotionally, could not handle the excruciating intensity laced with guilt. I needed a confidante I could ask, 'Am I doing wrong?Am I doing too much?' I needed a mother, but it was unthinkable to my mother that a good girl would sleep with a boy before marriage, or even speak of sex. In my mother's lexicon bed meant a place to sleep and throw books on after a long study. I turned totally to Mitch-and there was nobody there, either. He was full of his own insecurities, consumed by his own problems, so i was left to fend for myself, lonely, confused and racked by feelings I could not control or understand-crazed with emotion.

"Honey, I need to move on," he said on the evening after my third chemo session. In his eyes i read pity and resolve.
"Oh yes you got to. But why baby, why?" I was crazy, shaking with rage, fear and rejection because he was the love of my life and I wanted him to stick it out for me even to death. He had promised! But anyway, how could I have been the love of anybody's life at that point! My life was in pieces. I had given myself to him totally and now I had to take back myself totally. This was the end forever and ever. I would never see him again. I had to build a new life and only some day-perhaps-would another man be possible.

But ultimately, I was smart enough to tell myself, "I've got to get out of this too". I had learnt how all-encompassing, how exciting the first love is-and there is nothing else like it. But I had also learned the flip-side-how painful it is, how devastating, how exhausting emotionally. If you love the wrong person, there is a point where you must walk away, no matter what it does to you.

I knew that I had to be strong and stable to survive both the cancer and the break-up, knew that we could not continue on that emotional binge, and if we were to get off it, I would have to capitulate and give up everything. I knew that eventually there would be other women and I would end up frustrated and used and discarded. But I also knew that the physical attraction between us was so intense, so overwhelming, I could not resist him.

"Take it easy," he said, his voice maddeningly calm. "You don't understand Lizzy. You will heal with time." If there was something my mother taught me so well, it was learning to let go.

So I sit down next to him. It was a pinnacle of romance, knowing that was the last of him I was seeing. I took his hand in both of mine and said, "You're not leaving me. We are locked together."
"I loved you Lizzy," he said, not withdrawing his hand. All the while am thinking, this is Roheo and Juliet. And he is probably writing a love article to me in his head. This is big time.......

MURDER OR FAIL

“They eat hare!” cried Wanjiru, a girlfriend, with some sort of tone I would only use if I found out that they eat each other. For a moment I was baffled. They eat them whole and raw? They eat them alive? No. They kill them, skin them and put them in a pot with some onions, just like we do. And yet this lady, bright enough to be given a job as a researcher, was astonished. Yes, my girlfriend and I were watching a documentary when that came up.

I am becoming increasingly depressed by how hard we are trying to insulate ourselves from the reality of the food chain and the wonders of the natural world. Not long ago, I was watching my favorite episode of the American show survivor. The starving contestants were given some chickens but couldn’t bring themselves to kill and pluck them. They were chickens for God’s sake. And chickens are basically vegetables. I am talking here about a bird that is so daft that it would operate normally with no head. Anyway, while they were deliberating about what should be done, the birds were eaten by a couple of monitor lizards.

Then I remembered the kind of nonsense I watched in the series of I’m a celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! The contestants, with their man-made lifestyles-and in some cases their manmade breasts-are absolutely lame when it comes to dealing with jungle wildlife. Do they really believe the producers would let them put their heads in a tank full of properly dangerous spiders? Of course not. So if they aren’t worried about being eaten or dyeing in screaming agony, what’s the problem?

When an animal dies, or a human for that matter, the stomach fills with methane gas sometimes the pressure becomes so great that the carcasses go off like a bomb. I’d like to think this can somehow be harnessed. Forgive my getting lavatorial, but the cows in Rift Valley produce over a million tones of methane yearly. Little facts I keep specifically for emergencies like this. It’s nice to think we can get meat from their legs, milk from their udders and most importantly, electricity from their bottoms. But one thing is for certain, in this day and era, people would be reluctant to switch on their lights at home if they thought the power was coming from Nyakoguya’s(my grandma’s favorite cow) farts.

I sincerely don’t understand this. Out there in the real world, away from the twenty-first-century supermarket/freezer/microwave chain of catering, there are insects which eat their partners after sex, there are turkey vultures that will vomit on you when threatened, there are cats that kill for fun and there are leopard seals that play aquatic tennis, using penguins as the ball.

So, in the scheme of things, slaughtering a hen isn’t one of those huge sins. If you don’t want to be party to the killing, that’s fine sweetheart. Be a vegetarian. But if you’re not going to eat meat, quit standing on tiptoe and shrieking when you find out how the chicken became a meal. Yes, if you are not ready to murder, stay hungry. If you are not ready to succeed, keep your cool. Don’t take risks. Yes, fear failure and fear.

DAKTARI'S OUT TO GET ME

"Chew on gum and eat salty crackers. Apparently it helps with that steely taste in your mouth and the loss of appetite after chemotherapy." that was Monthe Sila,MD. My whole life rotates around doctors and hospitals and I love it. It's the closest i could get to my dream of becoming a doctor. All is not lost though. I could still do my years of legal studies and computer science after which I embark on my ten years of med school and die a happy woman. "She died in the line of purpose" my eulogy shall read.


So Saturday afternoon was spent pretty much naked, in a darkened room, while a ruggedly handsome young man applied lashings of warm lubricating jelly on my soft underbelly. Fantasy aside, he is old, physically harsh to the eye but fit for the job. But am allowed to create my own pictures if it makes me happy. Sounds like fun. Unfortunately, this was an ultrasound test, part of my fifth medical so far this year.


I have been bent double, pumped up, sucked dry and asked a range of questions so impertinent that even John Sibi-Okumu would blanch. I have been hit, probed, tickled, smeared and X-rayed, and I've forgotten what it's like to pee in a lavatory. These days, i only ever relieve myself into small plastic vials.


When Mitch first went to high school, the doctor held his testicles and asked him to cough. He could have established his reflexes were fine by tapping his knees gently with a small rounders bat, but hey, he went to a public school, so into his pants the doctor plunged. Mine was milder, the school nurse used to wring and squeeze my belly in the name of life detection. That was enough to abort whichever human life was there anyway.

Today, you get into a hospital and the first question is, "Do you have AIDS?". Well, unless you can catch it by slobbing infront of your laptop or reading volumes of legal books, I very much doubt it.


The second question is whether you are partial to a bit of same-sex heroin. Can we just get one thing clear. I know there are no Restore and Build Kenya (RBK) voters in the media, but there are several heterosexuals and am one of them. And no, i have never enjoyed the luxury of Koinange Street men, and the only hypodermic needle I've seen all week is the one you are about to plunge into my arm to confirm I'm not lying.

The fact that you smoke 45 cigars a day and hot box on weed the entire night never seem to bother doctors. Not until you get to page 331 of the form.

When they are convinced I am not the Campus Diva who has taken prostitution to a whole new level, they move on to check my blood pressure. Mine is 100/60, same as it was last month, when Pledge 25 asked the same damn thing.

Then you pee in another jug, and then you relax as the nurse hunts around for the tiny bit of blood you have left after Pledge 25 had their fill the previous month. After all the blood tests this month, I couldn't be a donor even to an injured cockroach in my house. small wonder the pressure is so low.

After the fluid tests, the doctor usually sticks his whole head into my vagina. Well that’s what it always feels like. “Aaaaaaargh.” I normally say until he comes out again only to explain that it was only his finger.

Soon, you will be led to daktari’s scales which, in doctor’s surgeries,  are always set to over-read. I am 53kgs, minus the few decimated kilos of all the blood and urine that has been extracted. But in Daktari's surgery, i weigh the same as Manuel Uribe. This, to my grandmother, is a good thing. Fat people are ipso facto unatrractive, which means they are less likely to be having much in the way of woman-on-man action.

At the end of the session, by which time everyone in the waiting room has died from whatever it was that brought them there in the first place, you will be asked to give your family medical history dating back to the Medieval Age.

Why? Even after the doc has hit you in the elbow with his hammer and asked you to read his wall, he will still not know if there are tumours the size of conkers dangling from your brain, but the form will be completed anyway.

I haven't finished yet because at some point the GP will uncover something that warrants further investigation. This will mean a trip to KNH where I will get lost.

I did, and that's how I came to be lying in a darkened room, with my dream guy smearing me with KY jelly. He then ran his ultrasound detector all over my belly, befor turning on the light and giving me the good news. I'm not pregnant.

LIFE AFTER CANCER

Doesn't the world owe me some kind of parade or fireworks show? that in itself would be enough first down payment towards compensating for my troubles. That was my last day of breast cancer treatment. It left me feeling disoriented like someone who had just fallen off a flight of stairs. I seriously did not know which way was up or what road i was to take next. Instead of my healing gratitude leaving me happy and content, I was miserable and depressed. So I walk out of the radio room past the hallway into the oncology waiting room and out into the parking lot, all the while wondering how i was to deal with life after cancer.

I had never worked for something so hard, let alone something so anti-climactic! World, I would appreciate unicorns or some talking horses..just something!
"hey lovely.." came a tentative voice behind. I turned around to a beautiful young woman with flawless skin.quite some sight to behold. Yes dear, I am quite straight-at least to the best of my emotional knowledge. All the while am thinking ..you better be selling unicorns! "....you look like you just had a chemo.."

All i did was nod affirmatively, checking whether with her were some bottles of ionized water or mineral juice for sale. I am slowly starting to believe in miracles you know.

"Should it feel this bad...I mean, should chemotherapy hurt this bad?" She continued, looking at me like she needed some reassurance. My eyes were a reflection of her own- they read depression and desperation.

"Sweetheart, it feels like I have been beat everywhere. Yeah, I have just been run over by a truck.it's difficult to breath. But that is pretty much all there is to the feeling." In her eyes I saw a desperation that mirrored my own -- not for relief from pain, but for the comfort of reassurance. She could deal with the pain if only she knew it was the right kind of pain. So I told her. Her face immediately relaxed. As she turned to go back into the oncology waiting room, she thanked me for confirming the one thing she needed to know at that moment-that she was normal!I climbed into the car, smiled at Mitch, and waited for the joy that was certain to follow -- after so many disappointments, the day had finally arrived. I'd be able to walk unaided; I'd be able to breathe. Strangers would stop addressing me as "madam".

Instead of joy, I spent the next 47 minutes crying effortlessly on Mitch's shoulder.That was when I knew: I'd lost it. What person with even a shred of understanding would act this way? Who responds to the conclusion of an active fight against death with increasing levels of depression, anxiety and grief? Well... I did.

Looking back now, I wish someone had been there to answer that question for me in the coming days and months. Is this normal? Am I losing my mind? How can I be grateful and yet still be so miserable? I didn't know what a panic attack was, how to deal with my own angry outbursts or the inability to remember my boyfriend's name. I didn't know how hard it would be to get out of bed every day, or that I'd count the minutes until my next fake bathroom trip so my classmates and coworkers wouldn't see me cry. The resentment I felt every time someone introduced me as "a miracle." How to wade through the guilt of my own survival as friend after friend passed away. Above all, the sheer exhaustion of alienation, of no longer belonging in my own skin, of building a new self while mourning the loss of the life I had loved and wanted.

A friend came over to my room yesterday. Yes i live in some hostel. No one at her new job knows about the three surgeries and chemo that concluded two weeks ago. Her coworkers complain about the lackadaisical attitude of the IT staff; she weeps in her car during lunch break. They don't know she's bald; she doesn't know how she's going to make it through the next hour. She feels like a horrible person for thinking people don't know how easy they have it.

"My family and friends talk about what an inspiration I am. They claim some kind of responsibility for getting me through this because they said a prayer and sent a mass email. But I cry myself to sleep every night. I can't stop crying. It's over, but it isn't over."

So before she could ask, I told her. I don't know if it's supposed to hurt this bad, but sometimes it does. If anyone tells you otherwise, just go ahead and assume the universe has bribed them with unicorns, fireworks, and a brand new brain.

Breast cancer somehow prepared me for ovarian cancer. Am glad. Yes, you heard me, I am.