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.

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.

HATRED

Truth is, there are people in my life I love by virtue of it is written: “Thou shall love thy neighbors as I have loved thee”. (by the way, the next time you’re getting me a bible for my birthday gift, make it a King James version. How I love the Shakespearean language! Thank you.)But this is because at times I tend to overlook God’s own extravagant love for me. What if Christ died for me just because God forced him to?  There would have been no compassion. I’d still be dredging up my past sins and mistakes and facing the consequences. I’d still be schlepping all my past filth. Yeah, that’s how I’d be without His forgiveness.

You know, Jesus was crucified on the cross so that we could stop crucifying ourselves. He was hung up for our hang-ups. How is that? There’s something Perks told me sometime back that when we give God all our mistakes and failures, he throws them into the deepest part of the sea then he puts up a sign that says “No Fishing”. He doesn’t want us to keep dredging up our sins. Neither does he want us to dwell on our past hurts. And all it takes is a forgiving heart.

We seriously can’t allow guys who have hurt us in the past to continue hurting us. The point is, each time we dwell on these past offences, we allow them to hurt us again. Okay, let’s be practical, how many times have you felt better after thinking about a past mistreatment? Hardly any! Many at times we end up feeling even worse.

It’s actually from these poignant reminders that lead us to harboring bitterness. Nine times out of ten the desire and feelings of vengeance are the result. The anger festers into bitterness. Bitterness leads to rage and rage is the spirit behind murder. And who said termination of human life pleases God?

God wants you to be the very best. So get down on your knees and repent for harboring ill feelings. Why should we let hatred stop us from becoming the very best that He wants us to be?  It’s so easy to harbor hatred in one’s heart, trust me. The problem is, it always resurfaces. It adds fuel to the fire. And hey, what’s the reason for your loads of unanswered prayers? And just if I may ask, why do we forfeit blessings and power God desires for us?

Friend, we might list down millions of reasons why we cannot forgive but it all gets back to us: we are hurt over and over! Promise me you’ll think over this. Thanks.