I have terrible visions nowadays. I think I am a sick man. When exams approach, I keep on dreaming that wham bam, I have an A. This worries my head off because, in all candidness, I don’t deserve an A. Since I came to the University, my preserve has been Ds. Sometimes I sit for supplementaries (which is welcome) and yes, you guessed it, I exactly strike D with notorious predictability. But this is not the issue.
The other day, a friend told me( he has doughnut size, birds of the same doughnut size flock together). My friend is a peer counselor and when he talks it’s as if he’s swallowed a tape. I told him many things, negative things why I couldn’t but he egged me on, repeating on and on as if it’s his chant line ‘As a man thinketh so is he’. But, again, this is not the issue.
The issue is my brain. My head compares to the size of two doughnuts stuck together. It has so many bumps and rough rides that whatever I hear has to be tossed here and there, ricocheting and rebounding in a clean state of confused noise. I can’t read for an hour. I once tried it for 50 minutes but my mind was sledgehammers, booms and all. My friend is right, I have the willpower but will-power is not brain. I need good brains.
I am your regular cant-miss-the-library student. I think I spend more time in the library than in the hostels. The Brinks Security guards know me by name and face because we are one- the only difference is that I am a student and they are security guards. I once fell ill last semester for 2 days and the chaps got worried. Of course they had a cause to be worried. The safest bet to find me any day at any time is in the library. And I don’t just appear there and doze off like other students do—I read as if somebody is holding a pistol and pressing it on the nape of my neck!
Let me confess that I am studying Law (But let this be our secret, I think I am ‘Most Wanted’ in the Law Department). In class, I sit on the first row such that if I stretch my arm I can comfortably give my lecturer a short and brief handshake. I miss no classes. Most of my fellow students sit like our Kenyan MPS in Parliament but as for me, my spinal cord, in ordinary lecture attendance, is like the Y-axis, I cork my ears an tilt my head to trap all the waves from my lecturer’s mouth( who said being a student is a passive affair?) By the time I finish every class, my ears are wet because of the moist breathe of my lecturers. This, to me, is a test of a lecture well spent.
So you understand the ‘exclusive’ disappointment I get hammered with when I have never risen from grade D. My closest friend Adala, a gigantic fellow with chubby cheeks, barely attends lectures, romps every nightclub every other weekend, can’t tell the difference between the Reserve Section and the General Section let alone the clan name of Chief Librarian Fr. Kisenyi. Imagine the dude shows me his transcript he has a B.(somebody give me a glass of water- I am chocking with emotions). The other lady in my class who sits at the back of the class catching up sleep during the weekend and recovering from the break-up from his boyfriend told me she also had a B, like Adala. There’s also Loitabela-he’s always in the Yellow Pages playing chess and laughing at the world. He mentions celebrities’ names as if they are members of his clan. He got C and expects a B this semester. He had this burning confidence in his eyes I instantly hated him.
But as I told you it is my brain. Adala has a big, round head. Miss Sleep Lady has pumpkin-shaped head also. As for Loitabela, his is square, not hexagon-shaped like mine.
In my visions, a voice speaks to me: “ Salem, my son, thou afflictions have I heard and thine head size worries reached me; thine head I increase and shape correct because I have seen the cry of thy heart and the toil of thou hands”. I see an encrypted letter on a wall. Adala, Miss Sleep Lady and Lotabela are not amused. I look again at the wall-the A has disappeared. I jerk from my sleep and feel my head—Doughnut size, bumps and rough-rides!
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