I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately. The memories have refused to stay on the shelf labelled ‘to forget’ and have become avalanches dropping unnoticed, sending me into a punitive free fall. I have decided to withdraw some of them, put them on paper so you and I can find peace or whatever it is we will find.
Recently I went back to that day at Kenya National Theatre. And I saw you in that line, waiting for your turn to audition for a role in what the casting directors touted to be the soap opera that would cause seismic waves in the local entertainment industry. You were in your third year in University, so anything that bore the potential to make you some income was welcome and being seismic would be a welcome addition. You just didn’t want a role that would give you the opportunity to become someone else, you had written dozens of scripts and you hoped getting your foot in the industry would give your work the wings. It was time to grow, you believed.
I watched you uncomfortably say hi to people who had coalesced into small crowds. After a quick scan of the groups you decided that you didn’t fit in any of them, you made your way to a bench that was a safe distance from them, saying anxious hellos and laboriously making small talk with some people who offered to have mundane a conversation about – is this your first audition? What do you do?... Your feet were already slightly sweaty from nervousness. Your movements and engineered facial expressions told the story of a fish that had found itself on dry land. But what caught my attention was the competing deductions of the words, actions and noises of the people around you that became a storm that turned violently in your mind. I decided to get closer. You were the puppet and I, the puppeteer. It was I who triggered the war. As your eyes darted from crowd to crowd, I attacked you with a rash of fear and spun a tale that ‘everyone looked sharper than you did and stood a better chance to clinch a role at the audition’. You tried fighting the ‘you’re not good enough’ flaming darts I threw at you, but we both knew you had lost before the war begun. With every step you took towards the audition room, your mouth became drier. Like a pipe to an empty tank, I filled you with self-doubt. When it was finally your turn, you walked into the audition room wearing a thin layer of a smile that according to you would veneer the fear and anxiety that had coiled around you. “You look like you’re in borrowed skin”, I teased. And with that, the crumbs of confidence left in you fell and broke further into irredeemable pieces.
Your task was simple, to play a lastborn who was upset by her older siblings patronization. You tried to free you from you, to summon this character that was needed, there and then. You went quiet for a few seconds as you assembled words that seemed to be scattered on the floor of your mind. You came out blank and couldn’t manage anything more than 10 words and awkward movements. Turns out that as your confidence was in a free fall, so were your words and they lay in debris that could not be salvaged, at least at the time. But the casting directors were nice, they threw you a second chance. This time you were to play a young fly secretary who was in hots for his married boss. You were worse than the first time! They seemed to search for words that would precisely describe the thing that had just happened in the room where they hoped to get the people to help them shake up the film industry, a simple – ‘we will be in touch’ was all they found. As you walked to catch a bus back home, a stench of failure wafted around you. If there was a prospect of getting into the film industry as a script writer, it most certainly would not be through that or any other audition!
I watched as you steamed in the aftermath of my actions and your failure. You questioned everything about yourself, you cussed yourself for shooting your shot, you lumped together the scripts you had written and labelled them bland and stupid. “How come you were unable to channel the greatness you believed lay inside of you?, how did you forget to express yourself at the most important hour?” I watched as you stoned yourself with bricks of words. And when reprieve set in, you found other words that became a band-aid to the spots I had hurt, then you packed that experience in a bag where you put other failures. But that wasn’t going to be the last time I would viciously attack you.
*
It was your first time leading a meeting. A brainstorming session to chat the strategy to advertise a client’s product, you were determined to do it right, get it right, so you spent hours the previous night preparing. You conducted a reconnaissance of the field, went through terrains of possible scenarios. Like a general you put together the tools and weapons you would need. You read and re-read the brief. You scribbled possible ideas to ensure that as the leader you were a few steps ahead. It was going to be the most important task of the day. Your dreams that night were an amalgamation of unrelated scenes that ended with you in a boardroom. In the seven hours of sleep you managed, you were restless and kept jolting awake. Your mind obeyed what I had taught it to do in stressful situations!
And the day came. You were the general, so you arrived early, ensured the whiteboards were clean and the pens were in great working condition. Underneath the layer of symmetrical order, the brave smile on top of a brave face, there was something you were working hard to push out of the room. A heaviness in your chest that you sighed heavily hoping to push down with a chunk of air. The nervousness, the fear, you felt it tighten around your throat and squeeze sweat from your underarms and feet. I watched you multi-task, on one hand, working to keep your train of thought on track and on the other dispelling the uneasiness. Then the hour came, when every eye was set on you, every mind was trained on you. You started off as planned- confidently, but there was an unprecedented bump on the road, it’s what life is about. Bends you didn’t anticipate and didn’t plan for. As you unpacked the brief, someone said they didn’t get what you were saying and another quickly volunteered to grab the steering wheel off your hands. Your house of cards started to shake but you were ready to weather the storm and gain control of the meeting. But just when you lifted your right leg ready to jump, I grabbed your right arm and yanked you back. Like an archaeologist I began digging up your fears and insecurities, I reminded you that you were not a spontaneous person and jumping over unexpected situations wasn’t something you did and that wasn’t the moment you would start. We had a history, you and I, so I knew all too well my hypothesis would be your fact. It wasn’t the unexpected hurdles only you had to face, there was a hill of fear that blocked your vision. You couldn’t see ahead or think clearly. Your mind was drawing blanks. You lost the ability to express yourself.
The wheel wasn’t going to be given back! I sat next to you, wearing the silence of the accuser I was. You were so anxious that you became numb and as the seconds rushed forward, you didn’t fight the waters that had swallowed you and kept pushing you downward.
“You got that promotion you wanted, I repeatedly told you to step back, I reminded you of the possible pitfalls & you didn’t listen. See the mess?” I teased. As my voice vibrated through every muscle, you collected the broken pieces that were scattered in the room and dragged your throbbing body out. Fighting back tears, you limped down the staircase. You walked under the naked sun and as it stroked you with its rays you prayed it would siphon off the heaviness that lay in your chest. Once again, I became a dumb spectator in a scene I had conjured to being.
Ours was a relationship between an addict and her drug.
*
You had been single for 2 years. He was the guy every girl and boy defined as intelligent and handsome (in that order!). The intelligent part you had seen and experienced. His kind of handsome was the one popped up in his kindness and gentle actions. You happened to spend a substantial amount of time in each other’s radius. You said hi to each other and once in a while, you savoured long deep conversations about your job, his job, your writing and his reading. Then one evening he called. He liked you very much and wanted to explore a relationship beyond friendship, In this new chapter he proposed that both of you would open with a cup of coffee. His words opened a door of emotions so great, they filled your heart with warmth. In that moment it felt like you had been in love with him for years. You wanted to have that cup of coffee, you wanted this story to last many chapters. Then I stirred something in you, it bordered fear and uncertainty, and instead of saying Yes! Yes! to the cup and its coffee, you replied that you would think about it.
The reel to this love story kept running. Like any other relationship at it’s very foundation, you exchanged messages and called to inform each other of minor milestones in the day; a story you had completed or a program he had successfully implemented at work. The calls, the messages, the laughs, the gasps, they shook the ground below your feet and you fell in love. Your heart was all in, your mind looked forward to the day he’d propose that cup of coffee again. But somewhere in between the silent screams started.
Your face like many other times before was going through a season and was riddled with acne. That was the first tool I used to poke holes at your self-esteem. Every time you were around him, I convinced you that he was wondering what the hell was going on with your face. You were older but you had not devised a formula to silence me, so you acted like you had lost something and couldn’t wait to rush out of his sight to continue looking for it. I questioned how interesting your self was and because you were used to listening to me you nodded in agreement and began to doubt yourself. You didn’t realize, but I was slowly building a stone wall between you and him. I was sucking the oxygen so fast that it was difficult for the tender love to breath. Like an investigator in a crime scene, I persistently gathered evidence from your past and reminded you that you were neither great at starting conversations nor steering them. The fulfilling, natural and seamless conversations you shared eventually became a thing you actively avoided.
The butterflies in the pit of your stomach would still stir with excitement when you read his texts talked to him or merely thought of him. They inspired you to act to save the love that was quickly dying before it had left its birthbed. On my advice, you jumped off the cliff. To stay afloat you had to put up profile pictures to veneer your ‘not so fascinating self’. You had to work hard to dig personalities that you deemed interesting enough, it was a tag of war that you lost most of the time and ended up feeling so insecure that you were unsure how to act around him.
Even though your body ached to rest on his. Even though your heart yearned to be read by his, you said hi and struggled to find words to make actual conversation. Moments that should have been filled with love turned oblique. You believed it was your time to love but I had trapped you in a cell of insecurities and you became a spectator to a bonfire of your hope.
Further away he moved, the steady stream of flirty messages that your heart looked forward to and clung to began to dry up. It was only when he was out of sight that I let you go. You ran in the direction you had last seen him go. Of course you didn’t find him. You were stuck in the first few paragraphs of a story you believed would be epic, written by both of you. A chill of loneliness attacked, you lay still listening to the squeak of the door he had walked through. Your heart beat in pain and your ears rung in protest. Before you could heal, your eyes became a witness to his blossoming love story with another woman! You took a deep breath and promised to forgive yourself for the way you acted, only it wasn’t so much of your fault, it was mine.
*
I’m not writing to stir the dust or poke at old wounds. I have seen your exhaustion from cooking spells to exorcise me, you’ve grown tired of me and quite frankly I’m tired of myself too. So here’s my promise to you.
I promise to listen to you. You will lead and I will follow, because all I’ve done is break us.
I promise not to hold your past against you. Your setbacks, regrets and mistakes, you’ve done well drawing lessons from them so I will let them stay where they belong ‘in the past’.
I will speak more kindly to you.
I will beat on the same wavelength as you.
I will not work hard to shame you.
I will watch with reverence parts of you that are tattooed with pain. No longer will I drive us crazy down memory lanes and we shall open only the safes you pick.
I will neither stone you with criticism nor trade self-esteem for what is popular in the social market. Most importantly I will not nail your self-worth to failures or successes, after all, it’s called self for a reason!
I will listen to the beat of your heart, reach out with my hand and feel it. You won’t need to sleep with one eye open for I have thrown away the daggers. When you lie at night, unable to fall asleep, your heart throbbing at the aftermath of setbacks, you mind a combustive blend of fear and uncertainty, I will be the one to remind you of self-compassion. I will calm you with a song. And as it grows quiet inside, the beautiful orchestra of the crickets, the frogs and the rain will lull you to sleep.
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