(Short Story Submitted to Storymoja Blog on Romance and Dating)
Dear Steve,
I am sitting in this dark room with the aid of a flickering candle writing to you what will be my last letter to you. Inside this small cubicle I will spend the last minutes of my life, a solitary lone figure with no compassion to the pretences this cruel world offered me. Much later when the door to my cubicle will remain closed and the stench of my rotting body will hit the nostrils of my neighbours, the sad news of my death will filter. May be much much later you will get to hear of my shameful death. But I will be DEAD.
Consider this a suicide note written in prose, not the hurriedly sketchy message that passes for the ordinary suicide note. I am writing this in the silence of the night. Crazy thought: Isn’t it figurative to die in darkness and in silence away from the glare of man?
I am trying to picture how you are going to react upon receiving news of my death. Will you phlegmatically look at the bearer of the message and stand aloof? Will you scratch your head and mumble inaudible words of desolation? Will you lock yourself in your room and cry in the secrecy of your bedroom? Will the news of my death be another insignificant statistic of a relationship gone sour? Will you come to my funeral? What will you say to mourners? When it will be dust to dust and ashes to ashes will tears finally sting your eyes and let you release two balls of tears just for me? Will you miss me? Will you mark my anniversary?
Well, those questions don’t matter to me a jot. If they mattered to me I would have taken a rope and ran crazily in broad daylight to a mugumo tree to hang myself and of course get intercepted mid-flight. If they mattered to me I would have bought sachets of rat poison and summon all in the neighbourhood to witness firsthand how one voluntarily swallows poison and succumbs to death in the name of love. But these don’t matter to me for all their glare and bravado. Till now, no one knows what I will do next to end my life. I never believed in bubble popularity in my life and I expect the same in my death.
I was walking today in the streets. In the privacy of my thought, I imagined the power that lay in knowing when I am dying. As I trudged on busy pavements, I took in the beauty of sunset, the fading glory and its ultimate death. The sun also dies! How I loved that thought. Shops were getting closed, the busy streets getting forlon and forgotten, darkness enveloping alleys. Town life also dies! I also loved that thought. I felt like to sing Till We Meet but on second thoughts I restrained myself because I was in no mood of divulging my secrets to the cocky-eyed townpeople.
Steve, if my death was a novel, you are the prologue. For you introduced me to this thing called love five years ago when we were at campus. I was never much of a love convert for I had been taught to believe that it was sin and that I had to wait till I get married. But I hid my heart in the company of bad girls and smoked to conceal my true identity. Most of the times it worked out. I pretended to be carefree and outgoing but if you scratched me deeper I was the most careful girl I could ever be—against love-struck boys.
Then you came in. You turned all my love rules on its head. In the Campus Cafeteria, you could come with a pack of cigarettes and crack the latest jokes and spill the juiciest gossips in camposphere. I kept the distance but you still kept your cool. You did what all campuserian men never did: break the first barrier of defence, the girlfriends. Soon, if my girlfriends never saw you even for a day they would call you to confirm if you were alright. And boy, did you have a way with your words? I bet that first poem you wrote me was the second barrier of defence you broke and it was just a matter of time before I exposed my heart to your whims and fancy. You did your homework and always talked about what we wore, what was in the Pulse Fashion Cop and which celebrity was chipsfungwad. If other boys talked about the Abu Dhabi and English Premier League, you talked about the Wedding Show and the latest episodes of Soap Operas. Where some egotistical braggart talked about the legal implications of the Ocampo Six, you talked about how trendy it is to have Mohawks nowadays( May be I could be wrong). Of course we could disagree, but soon you became the centre of our lives, Steve.
Soon, we hopped from one nightspot to another. In your state of inebriation, you could recite me silly love poems that drew me even closer to you. We could go to Open Mic Sessions together, Slam Poetry and every other event your poetry taste buds wanted to savour. Soon, I was also addicted. At the end of one such event, you took me to the Nairobi Animal Orphanage. As the two of us stood on the wooden bridge, as the wind blew I saw in your face a Prince Charming. When you opened your mouth, Steve, to speak, my heart was in ashes, incinerated. You sang to my heart. Your voice was not loud and not so low, barely a whisper but it strummed the strings of my heart and yet it was so loud that it shook the walls of my being. You spoke as honestly as a Chaplain did. You revealed the vagaries of love, of empty promises and its lies. As you held my hand and recited the first stanza of your favourite love poem, for once I felt love for you and I remember saying to myself that if you ran away with me to the sun I will not mind the heat.
My chains you unlocked, my loathe for love you thus reversed. And instead of offering me a pack of cigarettes, you offered me company. You never lectured me on the effects of my smoking but talked to me as a friend would. When I harangued about my back-pains and how the tap ran dry in the morning before I fully showered you just listened as if you were a crime detective extracting crucial evidence that could unravel a mysterious murder. You gave me attention and pandered to every girlish tidbits even when they were nonsensical. And Steve, when I was assured of your love my heart I gave you on a silver platter. I had fallen for your love—hook, line and sinker.
You still kept thrilling my girlfriends. You still made them laugh—even more. What more could a campus girl dream for after watching movie together with you at Sarit Centre? What more could I ask for when you bought me a teddy bear and fancy dresses? What more could I expect after a crazy goat-eating party somewhere in Kiserian? How much more could I expect to feel when we swam together in a swimming pool a whole afternoon?
Steve, when I think about all these my resolve for death is piqued. The sweet memories fill my heart with happiness and sadness, joy and bitterness. The movies we watched for all the joy they brought me don’t outmatch the horror that play in my mind in gory images of blood, skulls and screams. Your gifts look like rugged toys of a beggar’s child, dusty, worn out and an eyesore. The goat we ate, the mere thought of it constricts my throat in pain and bad memory. Inside the pool we swam in, all I can envision is dirty water, broken rails, a smelly bilge of useless water and useless idiots.
That night will forever be etched in my memory (Do dead people have memories anyway?). A Friday night. It had barely started as a normal date and I was enjoying myself in your sweet company in your hostel room. I had insisted that I bring my girlfriends along but you countered that you never minded that but we still needed our lone moments. As the night wore on, I had politely urged you that I had to leave. I meant it, seriously I meant it, Steve. You had to respect my decision.
But you didn’t. You came closer to me and I edged further and soon it was a small little game of move-and-I-move-further. I had stopped and told you matter-of-fact that we will not have sex. I meant it. But what did you do? You held my hand and forcibly kissed me. I had to push you but you came back with more vigour and stubborn determination. I had pleaded with you. I had beseeched you, Steve, not to hurt me. As I moved towards the door, you had bolted to the door and locked it and pounced on me as a tiger would a prey. Your hands grabbed me and as you ravished me, I kicked around and screamt. I never felt such pain in my life.
You took my innocence away, Steve. You crushed my being to smithereens and replaced it with a shadow of a haunted ghost. You lured me to your dark pit and buried my soul. You took away my dignity, my self-worth. There is nothing as debasing and monstrous an atrocity than what you did to me Steve. You sucked the thrills I had of life and left behind a bitter lemon of bitter past and hatred for men. That night Steve, I died. My mind and body died. What I will do tonight is simply a completion of what you started five years ago.
All I request of you is to stay away from my funeral. Don’t shed me crocodile tears. It is past midnight and I have to end here. I wish you well Steve.
Troubled Heart,
Prudence
C) Lorot Salem 2011
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