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.