KIM +4

"It's like my soul's on ice, everything's on pause. It's the sense of buried life screaming like the condemnded damned that has one at 4 still awake."

I have been poor. I have been down. I have known what it feels like to not want to wake up again in the morning.

I have lived long enough to reach a point where I was grateful at the end of each day that the day was over and I was going back home to my house, a house without a furnace unfurnished, a pantry empty and cobwebbed, six jugs of water in the corner the only thing to eat and the sh. 200 mandazi in my hand, still grateful. Indescribably joyful to be at home in my own house where I can close the door behind, shut out everything, and in those two bare rooms create my won world of Arabian nights dreams. I have lived long enough to experience that and know it is one of the greatest gifts a human being can have when his knees seem to have been knocked off from under him.

I have lived long enough to know that and something else more this poor bastard who was looking at me as if his brain had ceased functioning and he was dead and did not know it. I have lived long enough not to just know but to accept, without bitterness or anger or hate, that in this world we are each alone. You cannot trust another human being, they'll break your heart, they'll break your spirit, they'll kill you.

Like a sinner's mind is his sanctum, your house is your heart, don't give it away.

Don't give it away especially if it is the only thing you have. Don't give it away especially if you love it that much. Don't give it away if you have to walk from town, from Namuwongo, all night, taking four hours, to come to it, the only hope at the end of this daily nightly odysseys full of peril and uncertainties. Don't give it away.

I looked at him, a heap on the floor, wailing, without pity. Tears don't move a woman when the woman's cheating on you. I wanted to kick him, bark at him to get up and be a man, punch me, be angry, kick me out of your house! You have found me fucking your wife! But he was a heap on the floor, wailing. Punched in the stomach and knocked out by the abused power of his own love for her betrayed.

She was a distressed, shivering mirage behind me, trembling teary voice beseeching me not to leave her alone with him.

He was a stupid, half-man on the floor negotiating, that he could go away and come back later, but please don't take her away from me. I was a raging inferno, disgusted at this submissiveness, a venom that had not been put out licking itself afresh into a frenzy. I was going to teach these two stupid idiots a lesson.

oh drat! it looks like its again...to be continued!