Comings and Goings

Time stood still. Last year, for a period of nine months or so, time stood still for me. It also moved. At times, I can vaguely recall a few instances during the said period. But mostly, it is a blank. It is as if I was in one long comma from which I woke up after 9 months, or someone took a chunk of my memories, and I can’t recover them.

Normally, when I write, the kaheadline is the last thing that goes on the article.  I drag my typing through the pages till the story makes some semblance of sense. Then, based on what inspired it, and the general direction of the story, I cook up a topic, just when I am about to publish. Not for this one. This time, the kaheadline came first. I had been toying about writing about last year; something, anything, when it all glared at me from the screen of my computer. I was watching Californication, and there, in one of the titles of the episodes was a summation of my last year, or life; Comings and Goings.

I read somewhere, probably in Dust, an “orgasmically” poetic novel by Yvonne Owuor, that every No, every silence is a story. So is inertia.

Severally, I find myself wondering what happened to 32 weeks of my 2014. It is mine because I was lucky enough to be alive, and healthy, at least in the physical sense. I was entitled to it. I needed to recognize it. I need to, even now. But sometimes I cannot. However, at times, I can recall a few things. Like the time I spent in some company trying to whip a dead horse.  Which is not that helpful.

2014 was the year life as we knew it changed. When I say we, I am referring to my family. Suddenly, everything caved in, and I always felt suffocated. My heart went numb, and my mind took a life of its own. I could think of things outside my immediate surroundings, of things far away and of different import. It (my mind) took a route of its own. It walked, barefoot, on the shards of my broken heart and gazed at a staircase of rearranged lives.

Nothing changes a family like a sick family member, especially so if the sickness is not considered a “normal sickness”. Early last year, depression got a better part of my father. And in flash, the man I knew was no more. In its place was a totally different man whom, I not only had to know afresh but to also learn to live with. It is not easy remastering your own father after almost a quarter a century. I don’t even know it is possible. However, such things teach you new things. Things you could not otherwise learn.

You learn that it is easy for people to offer you prayers. I am not saying prayers are bad, only that they are the easiest thing to give. I don’t think one needs easy things at such times. And, at some point, you can only have so much.  You also learn that people break when it is least expected, or break earlier before it shows. One day, after my old man’s condition had taken its toll us, I stood next to my brother by our water tank. He had this far away look. By this time, silences in my family had become unbearable for me. So I made a general statement, I think about football. And he broke down, just like that. For a moment, a few seconds or so, he cried. Later on, I would tell myself I imagined it, but it was real. I still remember him wiping his eyes, and the sound of his cracked voice when he posed a rhetorical question.

Of course, we never talked about it. But now we understand each other’s burden, and pain. I also understand that I may never cry before my siblings. That chance went during that moment by the water tank.

You learn that it is possible to pass a night without sleeping, and it will not have an effect on you the following. One night, my brother called me with very uncomfortable news. He likes calling me at night, my brother. He says that is the time people talk. I like it. I like quirks in people. It makes me smile. But I wasn’t smiling that day. My old man had left home that morning, ostensibly to go to the bank, and hadn’t come back. Now, under normal circumstances, that is no biggie where my old man was concerned. But with his condition, that is the worst kind of news you can imagine.  Luckily, he turned up in the morning.

You also learn life. Such moments give you a look at life in a way that you had ever imagined existed. I guess it has to do with the state at which you operate. Everything gets stripped down to the bare essentials. Walls crumble. Only the things that are important to you remain. I will liken it to a state of undress before a lover you have pursued for a while.  And their naked self stands before you. That is what you have been pursuing, without the clothes, without the makeup. Only the essentials. The morning after look, after the nips and tucks came off during the tumble in the night. You learn to appreciate it, however ugly it may be. Fortunately, for the night in the tumble, you don’t have to stay if you do not like what you see in the morning.

Interestingly, in the midst of this, my sister gave birth to a lovely baby boy making me two times an uncle. FYI, as I write this, I am now three times an uncle. (But do I say, Omera). She had waited for that baby, and it chose to come in the midst of darkness, showing it is not always bleak.  Life is everywhere.

I learnt that you can never take everything for granted. That even the sun may not rise tomorrow (sounds dark?).  That sometimes, in fact most of the time, you may forget that, and it may be okay, or not okay, depending on how you take it.

In between these lines, you also gather that you are not the only one facing tough times. Several people are. And they are managing, so will you. A friend told me of an uncle who had cancer of the liver when I explained my predicament. From the story, I gathered that he was basically waiting for the call to pull a matrix move and transform into another state. He still guffawed and bellowed with laughter, in the midst of his pain. He still laughed till he couldn’t any more. So there was no need for me to bury myself in worry.

I also learnt that you share the heaviest of your worries with strangers during cocktail conversations snatched between sips of wine. Such moments are unburdened with the weight of history and knowledge. Especially if you talk about fathers facing different lives from the ones they knew and of families grappling to reconcile themselves with the new turn of events.

Another lesson; you can make people melancholic, sentimental or uncomfortable. Difficult stories make people reflective, or sentimental. Just like the way you are feeling now. I hope this last part worked. I, as well, hope my 2015 will have more comings than goings.