Debunk.media

The pavement was warm, too warm. Granted, it was the middle of a coastal Indian summer, but it was still too warm. Surprisingly, there was no burning, just warmth. A hot-water bottle of asphalt that felt like soft rubber. I had face-planted enough to know what it was meant to feel like. I should have known that the softness meant something was wrong.

The anglophone literary zeitgeist is generally dynamic. Such elasticity is expected for a major global language, let alone the hegemonic one. Despite this elasticity, some literary texts will always form part of its canon, at least in my view. The original “Big Three” of dystopian literature immediately come to mind.

“There is a war on grass,” I say to my homie Sheila for the third time this week. I have found myself saying this repeatedly over the last few years. Usually half-jokingly, usually to a friend who has heard the rant before. The phrase sounds absurd at first, hyperbolic even. Yet every week seems to bring fresh evidence that Nairobi’s public green spaces are becoming harder to access. Anyone who knows me knows I am constantly in a forest’s business, or a park’s, or a garden’s.

My inner thighs touch, and this has been a costly affair. As a girl, you get a good twelve years with your body, thirteen if you are lucky, before the changes begin. On an unmemorable Sunday, I graduate from Sunday School to the Teens’ Class. That very week, Mr Moses, our Science teacher, introduces us to Chapter 3: Adolescence.

My friend Tia loves to joke that due to the current state of the Kenyan economy,  you can no longer afford to live, love, and laugh. You can only pick two. Either live and love or live and laugh. The moment you try to go for all three is when you realize you might lose the most important of the three – your ability to live. Despite Tia being constantly proven right, my other friends and I still find ourselves perpetually striving to achieve the elusive live-love-laugh trinity.

For purposes of this story, we will say today is a Tuesday. It is 6.00 a.m., masaa za City Market. By professional florist standards, I am late. I am standing at the Nyayo Stadium bus stop, dressed in what has become my go-to flower-buying outfit: grey cargo pants, yellow Gap hoodie and white sneakers with yellow laces to match. Of course, my black headphones are bumping REASON’s New Beginnings album as I wait for a jav to tao. It is a relatively quiet morning. It always is at this hour.

There are three men in the room that morning. I only notice because Alice, a colleague, asks. We are standing around the coffee machine, dragging it out longer than we should. One of those slow mornings where the conversation drifts from the price of maize flour to politics to the general sense that life has gotten harder without anyone announcing it officially. Alice is stirring her coffee, when she looks at me and asks, almost without thinking, “Where are your agemates?” I do not get it at first.

Dishes. Laundry. Lunch. I know what to do. I have done it many times before. But I could care less today. My father’s lunch will have to be simple. Ugali and eggs with leftover greens. The dishes, I will clean better tomorrow and the unfolded laundry will have to wait on the couch because the morning is almost at 10 a.m. and I am already late. We are to meet in town, my three siblings and I. Sibling One will leave their home via Mombasa Road around noon.

History, they say, is written by victors. I am not a victor in this story. A few minutes before 8:00 p.m., I finally drag my broken body past the front door. Not broken-broken. Broken. The body and soul variety. “How was it?” my sister, who cannot help herself, asks. I do not answer. Can’t she tell, or see, or smell, or sense? I look like I have crawled out of a sewer, and need to be hosed down and thoroughly disinfected. But I feel dizzy. I can no longer stand.

The light on my Samsung Galaxy A6 is flashing. My friend Jackie is calling. She is on her way to pick you up, she says. She lives in Karen. I know I have at least 25 minutes before she gets to my house. It is 25th June 2024. Five days earlier, Rex Masai was shot dead during the anti-Finance Bill protests. Today, Parliament is voting on the Finance Bill.