Where I Have Been

This will make little or no sense to you but it does to me. I used to be the writer of sad stories, I used to be the poet of longing. Sad eyes were my specialty. I knew all the windows in the neighbourhoods I used to walk in at night that would have bulbs of electricity lighting my stumbling strolls. I was the singer of frustrated desire, mystic channel of two lovers in two towns cut off for eternity.

All that is gone now.

You wonder at my silence?

I have not lost a part of me. I have been on journeys to find he who I lost when staring in the hall of mirrors, I walked with the muse of exquisite longing. She said if you it is something you must do then do it, I will only be whole when you’re whole, to whole go on your journey. So I went. To find he who I lost entranced by the muse of exquisite longing, he walked away, I went back for him.

Two people I have wished for happiness more than any others are happy. I was waiting for this without knowing, brooding Sphinx silent, uncertain if tears or laughter would rack me next. I have found him! Write happy tales now, walking around in your world, the world is young! Let me celebrate you.

I used to think loss was sadness, before you. Foolish me! There are some evenings I have had thinking about the things we talked about that still make me smile, I was not just holding your hand, we were holding each other up. You kept me walking when I thought through the rubble of these torn deserted towns; we could never reach safety again. I was more afraid than I told you. We have come through!

I’m sitting in this car facing a river deep in the night, not alone. She is here. I’m here. I’m about to tell you a happy story…

I Have Something To Declare

I have sat on dusty grounds looking puzzling out the brow of new worlds in afternoons that passed in silence. I have left behind wrinkles on stern faces that loved me and I knew to come here hoping for newness. I’m coming through the darkness, eyes squinting at the dash of light at the cave opening. I’m coming through again, dear reader!

KIM +14

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Not Quite Gone

In your testing my love, you have made me harder. I was the one on the floor, too drunk to walk to the toilet but not drunk enough to pass out into blackness, dialing all the numbers I knew you had when you did not answer my calls because I had missed one of your calls, you were punishing me, on the floor able to savour my humiliation, without the will to get up and stagger somehow, bruising lips on door frames, morning inspecting bumps on my forehead that I could not remember getting. You could do this to me once. You had that power over me once. I look back now to the lover I was, amazed.

I take longer to miss your calls now. When you get angry with me, refuse to take my calls, I forget for hours to try your number again. I’m reminded when I see others around me calling the people they love, I try to fool myself I’m dialing then to call you because I missed you but I have never been able to fool myself. I’m calling you then because I want to be able to come home in the evening and not until I sleep exist under a glare that is trying to burn holes through the back of my head, your hatred warming the back of my neck.

I still make you laugh but I wonder if sometimes, alone, on Saturday nights waiting for me to return from watching my favourite team, in the silences of our house without children, you ever remember how you used to make laugh too. I miss that, I’m staying away longer in memory of the laughs you used to scatter like rice confetti all over me in the little world we were building.

I swore once, you thought the Grant’s was making me talk too much, John Legend’s Ordinary People was surely one of the saddest songs (not for the reason you thought I was going to argue!), I never wanted to settle like the weary man in that song was. I meant it! Love should not be ordinary! I still believe that. I have lost many beliefs, my faith is a flag held up sometimes by a trembling hand aged from battering, but I still believe that. Loving you used to make me extraordinary, sad confession. It does not anymore. I want to steal back from time for you who you were.

Back Door Man

I’m the one with tears in my eyes. They will ask what happened here, and there will be no witnesses. No whisper in the wind to relay of how a dream died here. My dream is dead and all I can do to hold on from bursting into tears is to remember that I tried so hard, did all I could, this is keeping me, for now. Still, I’m the one with tears in my eyes. I was the fool who dreamed.

Preview

"The day Fiona called is the day I left my house on the hill in Ntinda. The day Fiona called is the day I never went home again. The day Fiona called is the day I stopped using my first Mango line. The day Fiona called was the first evening I did not walk Kampala road, my workday done, my friends all gone, but I did not want to be alone in a room thinking. The day Fiona called is the day I finally realized how much I had needed her to call me but had never admitted to myself just how much. And the day Fiona called me, a phone call I did not want to answer, was like the first day of life after death. My heart in my fingertips in the seconds paused over the faded YES button of my ringing Samsung phone. In the ticking seconds, hearing before I had picked up, what I had for months waited to hear breathed out, “Yes, today, if it’s okay, we can meet. City Square, yes, then we can decide.”

Thursday, busiest day of my week, in the afternoon after a snack of warm glassed orange juice and two big oily doughnuts, working through lunch, she calling. Beethoven’s Ode to Joy startling the napping room in my direction. Angry glances urging me to pick up. I lived and died and came back to life in the seconds my eyes staring at Fiona’s caller photo flashing on my screen, ascertaining that the glare from my computer was not making me see a number I had willed myself to stop hoping was flashing on my screen whenever my phone vibrated before the crash of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy forced me to pick up. A willing that had taken me months to achieve and then when it was done, she called.

My stomach was gone, a cliff fall yawning emptiness there. I could not feel my legs; my knee caps all that were left. I was sure I did not have any voice left, a dry croak surely all I could summon from my parched throat if I tried answering. But beyond all this, I was certain that getting up from behind my old black Dell desktop computer facing the gray wooden door into the partitioned office meant never coming back here, on that Thursday afternoon when she called. The waiting on disaster over. After ten months, Fiona wanting to see me again."

Kim +14 will be coming soon.

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