KIM +10

“And in my mind I’m a blind man doing time, look to my future coz my past is all behind me.”
Tupac Shakur, Only God Can Judge Me


What is love now? Love is a green clipboard of my missed Sociology Paper 101 lecture notes copied out in your handwriting on my Nkrumah Hall bed 9:00am Monday morning. Love is pork at The Deep Saturday night 11:30pm in Wandegeya, my wallet forgotten in my blue jeans, you thrusting a crumpled 5000 shilling note in my palm, excusing yourself to the bathroom, before the waiter returns with our bill, me looking after you, wondering. Love is Nabinoonya beach, volleyball in the afternoon. Love is that night. Yes, love is that night.

Never is it clearer in my mind than tonight, standing in front of another girl on the brink of falling in love again. Standing tonight on Kampala road in front of Kim, watching a laughing girl so unlike you, leaving you behind. Leaning against this yellow MTN booth, for the whole world drunk, a Bata store guard watching me cautiously, I know now. You loved me.

Everyone could see that, from campus friends amazed at how quietly you used to respectfully hang back when you used to find me, an ass, pontificating to them leaning against the rusty railing of the Sociology department, before another mid morning lecture, more spellbound than anyone else. After that night, no one sitting in the seat next to you in those smooth wooden arm chairs in the lectures we shared because everyone somehow knowing that seat, like your heart, was already permanently taken. Five to nine, when I was in, no one knocking on my white suited Biggie Smalls postered Nkrumah hall door because they knew. Everybody knew. Everybody but me. I did not know. Until tonight, after that night, was that I did not know. Tonight, as Kim covers that distance between us to hold me up in time, slumping to my knees next to that booth opposite the Post Office on Kampala road, the insight comes. I know.

The night I won you is the night I began to lose you, a girl checking in with me on a Saturday March night after 12am with exaggerated dark shades, unaware that the cheeky, smiling receptionist was a back seating fellow undergraduate who already knew her, that night. A night surrendered to after mornings, afternoons and nights of sulking arguments for this night, a night granted in an excess of love from meeting two of your best friends, after five months of dating, and making them laugh until they were begging me to stop. That Saturday night in Wandegeya, after driving all the way from Jinja, Mary Stuart hall already locked, that was like any Saturday for the red eyed patrons we met at I Feel Like Chicken Tonight, students and fucked-up graduates in their third working year, horrified, realizing life in Kampala would always be like this; for me, a payoff Saturday for patient hours of listening to your dreams for us in weekday walks to Mary Stuart after 9pm, before those endless stairs of silence and pleading checking into that heavily curtained room. Until we entered that room and entered that fresh linen bed. In Wandegeya three years ago, you a girl, me a clueless fool despite all my experience. Until tonight, a clown for a posse of four girls, after The Rocks, being driven home to my house on the hill in Ntinda or somewhere else maybe, I finally know what you always knew even after years of reading all those SMSes on all my Samsungs that in varying forms codedly informed me, “iwanted to apologise 4havg wanted 2much 2meet you, ithought we were friends!? Am sorry 4havg intruded, nice time, still care," you pretended you read them only on the surface, as SMSes from friends who only happened to be girls.

I never told you before tonight but in my fumbling, mumbling mind in a dark corridor stumbling towards a bright light that could be love; Kim calling, I went in that room a hunchback with an invisible hunch on my spine, in my own way a boy still, because of you, coming out a man.

I could not figure you out, in that straight backed chair with black leather seat in that room, calmly and slowly eating the over chillied chips, chicken, kebabs with cabbage, even making me call reception for a proper plate and fork, disdaining the white disposable paper one, until we got into bed. You, irritatingly, insisting I lock myself in that tiny tiled bathroom with a glinting overhead shower before you get in bed.

I had come out of that bathroom undressed, in my blue boxers only, my teeth brushed. And I could not understand why you would not look at me, stiffly lying in bed like you were in your coffin, the thick green blanket pulled up your chin, fidgety in your fingers. Your voice gone, a child’s scared whisper there.

It’s been a long, long time now but I can still remember very clearly how suddenly happy I was to be there with you, like I used to be when I was a child allowed out by my grandmother to run and play in the rain with Yakobo, the ticklish drops beating on my upturned joyful screaming face like a glass window pane with my shut eyes pretending we were swimming. Incredulously wanting to jump onto that bed and hug you! Tickle and play like we were children! Tell you the story of my childhood there and then. Tell you about my grandmother, tell you about Yakobo, tell you about the mother and father I only saw again after I was ten, tell you about that village I grew up in and the school on a hill where I used to stand at break-time, a sweet potato as my break in my tiny fist, a child of seven on that hill looking down home at my grandmother waving back at me, every single day when I had to leave her side and go to school. I wanted to tell you all that. I wanted to tell you everything.

I wanted to tell you how beautiful you looked in that bed, your braided hair let loose. So still you could have been sleeping. Before I joined you, kissing your temple, then the tip of your nose, lightly, before you gave your lips. Kissing in a meeting of lips that seemed a merging of universes that would never part, leaving us trembling.

I remember, now with a wry smile, you doing that thing girls do, before we could kiss again. The edges of your finger tips on my forearm, you asking me softly, after that first kiss,

“Do you love me?”

Like a National Theater Comedy night actor who had temporarily forgotten his lines, I had paused, frowned quizzically and then like Philip Luswata’s boda boda rider character remembering his NIC Insurance backup plan like a streaking flash coming to his mind, replied,

“Yes, Fiona, I love you very, very much.”

I had been ready for that. How many girls have I replied without batting an eyelid, and replied looking like I mean it, “I love you. You’re the girl I have been waiting for?” I stopped counting after my seventh, lucky number who turned out to be the worst girl I ever rolled in the sheets with. I was flip entering that bed.

A friend, friendly, knowing me after my wild years recently said to me, jokingly of course, “If you bring me TK's hymen and place it on this table, you’ll be my hero.” Before you, I used to go in for bets like this, going through horrendous expenditures causing more hearts upheavals to prove I was not like “Biggie worrying about his pride in bed.” Crazy like that.

That night even before we made love, I could already hear in my head the words I would be using at our favourite Kireka bar ‘Oba Tufa Tufe. Here Since 1979’ explaining to Rodney, Christ and Timothy how I had finally ‘touched’ the Virgin Mary of their course they had said was imperious to normal feelings. Before getting into that bed. I did not know getting into that bed that you actually were a virgin. I did not know. Never suspected you could choose me to be your first and this night would be that night. With you.

All in my life, before you, coming second. The less loved second last born before the coveted girl last born, the hand-me-down clothes wearer, going to Uni only because I won government sponsorship, finding you there in my first year, and with you coming first in that room in Wandegeya on a night when I had no right to.

It was never sex we had that night, it was never just sex that night, after midnight, the curtains and windows closed so that the hum of cars and lonely calls of taxi conductors below was like a music all of its own, the locked door double checked, in the soft dark of that room your eyes never leaving my face, watching my every move, like a debutant auditioning. It was never just sex.

Making love to you suddenly I knew, I was sure you were the girl I was going to marry. Somewhere past the frozen Antarctica’s and dry Sahara’s of my mind and heart, I’m married to you forever, the mother of my heirs, whose pedant with your baby photo I wear around my neck instead of a ring.

Coming out of you, I had swung out of my bed, my feet connecting with the floor, shocked at how cold the floor was, to see by the dim light of the window, to be sure I had not imagined. I remember sitting on the edge of that bed, before I peeled off that condom, looking down between my legs, at blood, virginal blood, your blood. You had been a virgin and given yourself to me! Me of all the men in the world. You had chosen me. Unworthy, slutty, planning to fuck Shamim on Sunday in this very room me. Me. I think it was in that moment the frivolous misogynic playboy in me got up, seeping into his clothes, slipped out of that room closing the door behind him. Life no longer a badly scripted game to be toyed with. I knew. And turning back to you, I did not say ‘I love you’ but kissed you so deeply and so hard and so hard and so long until you said, “I can’t breathe! I need to breathe.”

My arm under your head, I kissed you again. Slow, lingering kisses, playing with your hair, whispering words I have said only to you, you laughing and giggling, wanting to look at me.

One ear on the door waiting for the pre-arranged room service knock on the door, one ear listening to you but all my eyes on you, seeing you see a man for the first time, trying to disguise your embarrassment and curiosity.

How hard I had worked to control myself! Rocked with an inner mirth, when after, you knew you should clean my penis but after drawing away the blanket, you ended up gazing at it, your face a Technicolor changing screen of many emotions; wonder, shock, amazement, disbelief, terror barely suppressed questions until you couldn’t hold them back anymore,

“He’s still big! Isn’t he supposed to be small when he’s flaccid?”

It would take me time to get used to your clinical directness when it came to intimate matters but that night I was too amused to be taken aback replying, “That’s how he is.”

It was not formality or breeding when you looked me in the eye and said with just a hint of relieved laughter in your voice, “I liked it! I really liked it so much! Will it always be like this?”

You were so earnest. Those luscious eyebrows raised, your trusting brilliantly brown pupiled eyes intent, your dark lips an open O of inquiry, with a 1st time lover’s intensity that I knew I’d never be able to tell you all my depraved years of experience that made me reply cautiously but honestly,

“When we both want it, yes.”

Your eyes were on him again asking, “Is he mine? Is he mine alone?” shyly but proudly.

I was so full of love, my throat choking, wordlessly I had gazed at you until more timidly you asked again, and with a deep swallow I had replied, “Always, yes, it is.”

I’m sorry I hurt you when I burst out laughing after and you thought, for a dreadful moment, I was gloating I had added you as another notch in my belt. Before you, I had forgotten how to cry. I did not know how to cry. I was laughing because I could not cry.

Sitting on the edge of that bed, after coming from the bathroom, with you frightened still in bed, full of knowledge about what you were supposed to do but the instinct yet to kick in.

But you remembered this was your first time and you were supposed to bleed. All shyness again. Insisting there was a ‘thing’ you wanted to do in the bathroom. I remember your wordless gratitude, face turned my way briefly, when you found Jik in the bathroom, I basking in it behind you, amazed at my own intuitions I never did tell you that that Jik bottle was in that bathroom not because I knew before hand that you were a virgin but because I had told Sula before, “Man, she’s a cleanliness freak. This is a chick who doesn’t like to leave any trace of herself behind: when we’re at a place not exclusively mine. It’s not like she’s ashamed of me. It’s more like she’s been brought up to believe that she was invisible, strictly behind the man. Sula had thought a moment and then said, “Maybe she’s a virgin?” We had looked at each other, like for five seconds in silence as if seriously contemplating that and then I shattered the mood by incredulously asking, “A campus girl?!”

I have been wrong about a lot of things with you and I have been very, very sorry but never was I so glad to be wrong about you as I was that night.

I remember standing by the window, looking down on Wandegeya at 2pm, the sluicing of your washing the only sound in the room, in my beating heart a joy more immense than I had ever thought capable of feeling. All my life before you floating past me like a movie in a projector remembering every detail. I remember what that night meant to me. Standing by that window, you washing and me by that window knowing we were going to make love again, falling in love with you in that room in College Inn in Wandegeya that night.

Making love again.

In the morning, different. Walking with you and walking you to your room in Mary Stuart hall that morning, through the rusted small University Hall gate, the ever grinning tie wearing éclairs vendor by the gate not yet at his stand, through the silent campus, up from Wandegeya, in the brilliant morning sunshine of that Sunday, furtively fingering my belt loop, trying to read in the smiles of the church going people we passed if they sensed what we had been doing the night before. To look at you, for the leap of love in my heart, was almost unbearable. Changing. In love with you and never knowing it. Unlike tonight with Kim, falling aware.

From the moment pressing the cute looking red button of Linda’s Rav 4 taking us all home after The Rocks and the door whooshing open to their screams and the tyres screeching the car to a halt, determined to make that girl of Patricia’s friends who had ignored me, look my way, crazy that the night was ending and I was failing again.

I would like to say I jumped out immediately. It was immediate, my exit. But it was more of a stagger out of the car. When my feet with a disorganized thump hit the tarmac, I remember a whole world tipping nearly over in my stomach before I quickly righted myself spitting two or three times sorghummy bits of phlegm, nauseous.

Kim was quick, next out of the car vehemently declaring, “You’re mad! Mad!” but laughing.

The Bata Store guard watching us, me, shrouded in his night jacket and the dark warily because I was staggering, zigzagging perilously close to his turf. I saw him, knew the implications and then something took my attention completely.

Steadying myself against the yellow MTN booth, I saw Kim. I saw Kim. Knowing this is a moment I’ll remember the whole of my life. Kim on Kampala road, at a quarter to five on Saturday morning, glowing red moon dipping beyond Jinja road behind her, clapping in delighted glee, laughing, at my prank. Me by that MTN booth, in disbelief, turning to the Bata Store guard for confirmation and seeing him seeing it too. Knowing in an instant but not yet understanding the price I would pay for Kim to be my girl, because leaning for support against that booth, the urge to throw up gone, knowing the search was over. The girl I had been looking for here infront of me, home again at last, with Kim on Kampala road, 5am on Saturday morning. Beginning over.