The music was ethereal in my ears. I looped Olivia’s ‘honeybee’ a few too many times to try and feel something. And I did. Head inclined against the glass in a most cliché fashion that makes me gag in hindsight, I could feel the allure of a lonely silent demise crawling in my skull.

The past is a library of journals full of torment. Some pages are drained with ink but most are just dry tears. There is no nostalgia there. It’s a dimly lit prison that I’m sad I got out of alive. My eyes had adjusted a little too well to the poor lighting, and my feet to the cold concrete. Now, light and warmth feel like unearned comforts. And I try and yearn for something in the future. But I’m too terrified of how hopeless that is. How miserable does someone’s present have to be for him to seek refuge in a time that only exists in mathematical lies.

Nineteen-year-old me would be baffled I could stay up this late. He breathed different, that version of me. Every step he took was a math equation to some predetermined destination. Success had a face, the future was branded with it. He’d fill up journal pages with words that didn’t try too hard to mean anything. Every note was a declaration. Nothing was blurry. Everything was within reach. Life was a canvas of intentional blankness, and he knew exactly where every brush stroke went.

I have friends. But I’m hardly a friend to anyone. I’m almost always a curiosity. Something odd to keep around as a souvenir from a time when inexperience informed all the questionable decisions one made. They hardly call, I don’t blame them, I’m the least callable person. What with my vagueness and desperate silence in between sentences.

I yearn to be a memory in their busy lives. A face that only comes up in old photos and random conversations. I have one of those faces, fragile features that would fit perfectly in a suicide prevention brochure.

For a few minutes. Last night was the best night of my life. I was certain I’d get home and blow myself up. And this was it, this was the last time the thought of dying would just be a comfort creature. Something to temporarily alleviate the dread of living. And long after I’d been gone. When my mother’s face had known wear, and my sister’s had blossomed under the radiance of youth. They would ask them what I looked like. And they wouldn’t know who I am.

***

How Much of Me will You Consume?-Sande

I never quite believed in the existence of people who consume others, not until I met one, or was it a few. I can’t tell anymore, I’m too worn out to feel the difference.

They never showed any signs of hunger, but they just kept taking bites. It starts with nibbles of my time, then my patience, then another nibble on my understanding. And I gave it, willingly, because I loved them.

They took bites of my evenings, then my weekends, then before I knew it, my sleep was on the menu. My boundaries eventually were the dessert, because why hinder their feeding?

Till one day, I couldn’t feel anything anymore. They had eaten my heart too.

Cannibalism-Azan Trini

Intellectually speaking, we are so firmly rooted in our beliefs that we will do anything in our power to win arguments just to preserve our safety and standing. If we are this vain in simple ideological disputes, how far are we willing to go when not ending the lives of others spells our demise? Our doom?

Let’s take a reflective walk through history.

War, in the last 100 years, rapidly changed from being a pursuit of Liberation, Protection or Expansion, into a money minting machine for a chosen few who saw an unexplored domain. Now, wherever there is a war, there is profit to be made by those shrewd enough to seize. When we think of war, we think of sides. Side A is fighting Side B. Simple. Easy. That’s what war might have been up until the early 1900s. By the time The Great War, World War 1, started in 1914, the stakes had shifted significantly. This was the first war that was being backed by loans offered to the governments at play. Previously, warring factions would congregate, pool their resources. Men. Weapons. Strategy. They then went into battle. If they conquered, they shared the spoils. It was simple. Effective. Purposeful. Objective.

Now, wars have become endless looping, convoluted tools to sow chaos, disdain, division and extraction. Look at the current wars that we have. All concentrated in high mineral content areas. Oil. Cobalt. Lithium. Where are these priceless commodities located on the map? How many of these regions happen to have a convenient war happening around?

And the genius of it is with modern day warfare, you only need an Entity X funding Side A and B to be consistently at war. Vita vya Panzi, Furaha ya Kunguru. A and B are even trained by X. They get their ammunition from X. They generate all the instability required so that X can get the main resources that it needs from a region. This is because if the region was stable, the ruling class might make it very difficult to acquire the resources cheaply. There will be taxes, tarriffs, policies, treaties. Why not skip all the bureaucracy? A bonus for political instability is that it also allows for sinister practices such as human trafficking, ritualistic killings, manufacturer testing and distribution of manmade viruses, testing of population control technology, testing of weapons of mass destruction using human subjects. It’s brilliant.

Cannibalism in lore involved… Well, there’s no point in doing that. We all know what Cannibalism entails. The modern day reflection of this principle is the way in which a few people can play large scale monopoly with full sized human beings as the pawns. You don’t have to consume humans. You don’t have to slaughter them in order to dehumanize them into items for your consumption. You simply have to sit in an office and create policy that drains the souls out of them. Remote work? All you have to do is drain them of options, enclose them in circumstances and provide only one way out. The promise of a way out if they do their bidding. The promise does not even need to exist, be defined or explicitly stated. The human mind loves looking solutions. ‘If I do this, the chances of me getting that and leaving this circumstance are higher. So what if I have to betray my people? They would do the same if they were in my shoes’. Very rational. Very scary.

There was an experiment where some primates were placed in a room with a heated floor whose temperature kept rising. They had their offspring with them. As the temp went up, the mothers lifted their offspring off of the ground and took the brunt of the heat. As the Celsius were cranked, something beyond immediate comprehension rose. Every instinct is to protect the young ones, you would think. Yet, the mothers placed the offspring underneath their feet and saved themselves from getting scalded.

We think ourselves as rational beings. We think ourselves as kind. But deep within lies that Cannibalistic instinct. Deep within, when it calls for it, we will eat the weakest amongst us because we perceive ourselves to be the greater good. Self preservation will lead us to paths that we never knew we had the capacity to tread.

What does the phrase man eat man society mean to you?

36-Amrita

You have a beautiful heart. I trace its intricate scarlet rivulets and they tell me the stories that have coursed through your blood for three decades and a little more. They tell me who you thought you were, they tell me who you could never be.

I hear its pulsations falling out of a rhythm that was never quite its own by the second. I hear all your borrowed anthems and lost lullabies in the slowly widening pauses between them.

I watch it march, I watch it rebel, I watch it plead.

Prey-Viktor

I can smell the heme as it viscously traces its path down my nose bridge. The warmth on it is arousing. It pulls down every primal lever of fear and restlessness. There’s a wounded whimpering in my soul. The nail merely missed my eyeball by degrees. He found the middle of my face perfectly.

There’s anger sculpted all around his brow, but mostly resentment. His teeth are barred like a wolf ready to pounce on his prey. And his fingers are shaking with indignation. He’s out for blood, I have a pool of guilt full of it to offer, and piss. He reaches for my head, I dodge instinctively. He scrapes his knuckle against the undisturbed concrete, it’s him or me.

His mouth is frothing with hunger. There’s a ravenousness to his motion. His claws find my neck, it’s a very findable neck. He digs in for a good grip, and shoves me wherever his strength allows. The piss covered pills are still on the table. The blood on my face camouflages the trembling of my lips. The blood on his knuckles evangelises his hunger.

The liar in me confessed he swallowed the pills. That was ill advised. The way he pulled them out suggested his verdict was final. The liar in me had to be feasted upon. But the pills were horrendous, they left my mouth feeling assaulted. And, furthermore, the ailment they were meant to cure didn’t exist, it was just a ploy to escape school, that cage of ambitions.

He charts my movement pattern masterfully, and lands the blow on my ribcage effortlessly. It sends me wheezing for air, a rebellious act towards the fate he has decided for me. I let the uncarpeted floor have my corpse, a fitting dining area for this animal. And he doesn’t waste any time, he fills his belly up with bloody chunks of my vulnerability. I’m wreathing in the cold like a stag with a bullet lodged within its spleen, he takes that as an invitation for more.

I am my father’s son. That’s all he needs to justify his cruelty. Did you know that male lions eat the cubs of a rival male after they finally take over his pride. It is his tuft now, I am everything that’s wrong with it. I can tell he is disappointed when I finally regain the strength to get up. I always get up.

There’s Pieces Still Stuck in Your Teeth-Wanjiru

The human body will begin metabolizing itself if it doesn’t get food after seven days. It starts with skeletal muscle. Ourselves eating ourselves. The original sin. The first act of cannibalism.

I hate it when I bite my tongue, but not the pain really. I hate the taste of blood… but I love how it trickles down. A stream contained in an unwilling bag. On and on.

We are repulsed by cannibalism because we are a species that has evolved to majorly have one off-spring at a time. We cannot afford termination in place of nutrients. It must be so hard-wired that the moment you saw the word ‘cannibalism’, your brain triggered repulsion, then fleeing. That metallic taste in your mouth is adrenaline. Flee these words, this person.

I was raised catholic so I have consumed Christ many many times. I wonder how and where he settles in my body. ‘Do this in memory of me’ he says? But my acids burn my tongue, how can it not liquify that memory? I have drunk his blood too…first at 12, you see. A curious age to be initiated as a blood drinker. The son of Man who is also God must taste like divinity and reverence. I would not know.

Did you know that starving slaves would feed on each other during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade? Yeah, sister on sister, a macabre amateur porn title. They would start with the hands, I think. The hands they’d used to hold on to each other with, hug each other with, soothe each other with. Hunger defies dignity...and love.

The lovely Hozier sings on that consumption that systems love. Cannibalism for Capitalism.
On an island, as you read this, a baby is being cooked and eaten by a billionare who could feed a billion babies.

You've Been Served -Omurwa

‎Fuck the mirror, look at you

‎Blame it all on you, all on you for you don’t want to see. It’s a whole universe in this shell where you want to walk to first?

‎

‎Face

‎Cheers, hands up for the most beautiful. Decorated and sassy I want to show. This snap is amazing and got a receipt for this cheekbone. Killer smile, diamonds my teeth, wonder why my words shine.

‎

‎Case

‎Eloquent and eyes piercing. Curtains down lights on, this one I want you to see. This fit is marvelous, my tongue a smile to the taxman. I’m your saviour let me get back to you after three days. The sun rose, only way yesterday was different but today another mask.

‎

‎Light

‎Eyes touching what we can’t feel. The rainbow beautiful until it’s all white. The white that scares, it cries nakedness so let the brushes cover. Not rain but drops of water, there there and it’s a DIY rainbow. It separates and clusters. Forces belonging so I ask, can you touch what you’re seeing?

‎

‎Skin

‎Not just a cover. Connects and shutters. It’s easy to claim for everyone sees. Let it be a cover for me. My heart in its cage a different person and the big man renting skull, what an op! Lungs on this intoxicating air and the mouth always trying to make a home off everywhere.

‎Flesh and bones intact as one, the soul giving away to all. I is eating me.

***

If you've made it this far, we're glad we could be of service to you. Unfortunately, due to the email length limit, I'll have to publish the remaining pieces of this anthology in a second post. You can read it HERE.

Gratitude from Sande, Azan, Amrita, Wanjiru, Omurwa and myself for reading.

Less Than-Kanvas

Cannibalism. It’s disturbing, to say the least. Horrific. That’s what it is. There is no justification for it whatsoever. Throughout the years, it has shown up as exactly that—or something entirely different, whether in real life or in works of fiction.

Take Jeffrey Dahmer, for instance. He ate parts of his victims, describing it as a way of “keeping them with him forever.” An act of sentiment. An act of want. In film, we’ve seen it represented in various ways. Wrong Turn gives us cannibalism in its most primal form: sadistic, monstrous, less than human. The hillbillies embody exactly that. They aren’t simply people who happen to eat people. Everything about them is constructed to make them feel like something that has crawled outside the boundaries of humanity.

Hannibal takes a different approach. He’s a more sophisticated animal. His pleasure extends from the hunt all the way to the plating. He sees it as artistry, aesthetic. Dahmer picked out “friends” and kept them all to himself. For Hannibal, it’s picking out an ingredient. One is possession; the other is presentation. Both turn a person into something that exists to satisfy a desire.

Then there’s one that manages to keep the human behind the monster. 2022’s Bones and All, directed by Luca Guadagnino. Here, we don’t get the mutated horrors of Wrong Turn, Dahmer’s psychopathy, or Hannibal’s sadism. We get people. People you’ll watch sit across from each other with a bowl of cereal in the morning then eat a man in a cornfield by night fall. They talk about the rush they feel when they feed, that surge of pleasure, but the guilt that follows shows. They circumnavigate it by finding freshly dead people or people at the brink of death, loners, people no one would miss, anything to avoid the heaviness that comes after. But even that doesn’t always work.

When they feed, they don’t transform. No separate set of teeth. No acid for saliva. No supernatural digestive system. They don’t cook it either. They indulge as they are, as people. And, logically, peeling human meat off the bones has to be tough. Yet in Bones and All, they do it like they’re taking a bite of bread. That’s what made me consider the possibility of something underneath, something beyond plain animosity. I started thinking of it as a metaphor.

Maybe for the parts of ourselves we consider less than normal. An addiction. An impulse. A compulsion. The things we’d rather keep to ourselves. But sometimes you recognise those things in other people precisely because you know them in yourself. Bones and All explores that beautifully. It shows what it might feel like to meet someone who understands the part of you you’d rather hide—not because they’re particularly compassionate, but because it does the same thing to them. Maren doesn’t have to explain the hunger to Lee. He already knows.

By the end, I was left somewhere between compassion and disturbance. I got to watch these people devour a life and somehow still think of them as better humans than I am. Not because what they were doing was better. It wasn’t. Again, cannibalism is inhumane, disturbing, horrific. It’s a want that pushes itself to an extreme.

Yet, there is a certain familiarity to it.

The metallic taste of blood when you suck on a fresh cut. Sometimes, I nibble on my little brother’s earlobe when he least expects it. It drives him nuts. He’s grown weary of me lately. But neither of those things makes me a man-eater. Obviously, one is instinct, the other is just me being annoying. But it does make me wonder about the distance between the act and the meaning we attach to it.

Intimacy as Consumption -Kawaraaa

Intimacy begins not with hunger but with love.

Most people, me included, hear the word cannibal and simply associate it with the barbaric tearing of skin and an animalistic greed of consumption. But consumption is much more romantic than a mere appetite. It’s the greatest form of love. A surreal form of devotion. An act of total possession.

To be madly in love with someone is to want to consume them, and to consume someone is to want to take them into you. Fully and deeply. To get rid of the space between me and you and become just us.

I mean, isn’t that why we say we’ve fallen in love? We fall into this abyss where love crosses the threshold from wanting to be with someone to wanting to be them, or to have them inside you forever. Not literally of course. That would cease being as romantic and start being terrifying. We’re much more civilised than that. So that’s why we use alternatives instead.We share beds, we pick up each other phrases. We learn about each curve of the body and where each mole is placed. We even used words.

Love reaches a point where holding someone isn’t close enough. You want to collapse into their space entirely. You want to know them so completely that knowing them is no longer enough. You want them to become part of you. You body stops being the only thing that yearns for them coz your soul joins in too. Then you start saying stuff like “I can’t live without you” and “I need you” NEED not WANT.. because you have to consume them in whatever way your love allows in order to feel whole.

Perhaps that’s why we say things like “ I could eat you up” when ever we feel overly affectionate. We whisper eat into their neck and dissolve into giggles, suddenly overwhelmed with all the tenderness we feel at the moment. We don’t mean it literally, of cos, but at the point and time, “eat” feels like the closest word we have for what we are trying to say. We just want to swallow our own source of joy. Like I want you so close that there’s nowhere else for you to go than into me.

To consume is to possess and to feel whole and to be consumed is to be preserved. That’s the final truth of cannibal. They do not destroy the people they love but preserve them in the most beautiful way possible.

When you strip away the social pretence of romance, what you find underneath it all is just intimacy. We offer ourselves up to be tasted, picked apart, and slowly devoured by another, all while hoping that in the process, we get to do the same,, to finally become immortal beside and inside them.

CANNIBALISM: A Comprehensive Research by Dyna

From Britannica: cannibalism refers to the eating of human flesh by humans. Spanish name (canibales or caribales) for the Carib, a West Indies tribe known for cannibalism.

Over the years, cannibalism has been practiced in different times and geographic parts of the world.

The following are summarized recognised incidences of canniablism:

Survival cannibalism (necrophagy) and famine

1. There is also prehistoric evidence in this case, the Neanderthals. Neanderthals are said to have practiced cannibalism because archaeological sites contain fossilized Neanderthal bones bearing distinct cut marks, intentional breakage for marrow extraction, and processing similar to butchered animal remains.

2. The Donner Party, led by George Donner: In 1846, 87 American pioneers became trapped by heavy winter snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains and turned to consuming the dead to stay alive.

3. A plane, mainly of Uruguayan rugby team members, crashed in the Andes Mountains in 1972. Of the 45 passengers, only 16 survived the 72-day ordeal, which included cannibalism, an act that those rescued later compared to taking Holy Communion.

4. The Chichijima Incident (1944): Japanese soldiers during WWII consumed Pioneers of War(POW) and civilian laborers.

5. Korowai of New Guinea were within their rights to eat men thought to be witches.

Endocannibalism, Ritual and cultural practices

1. Wari’ people of Brazil ate the flesh of deceased relatives as an act of profound mourning and love, keeping the person’s essence close rather than leaving them in the soil.

2. The Fore of Papua New Guinea ate the bodies of their deceased as a sign of love and respect, preventing corpses from rotting or being devoured by insects and protecting the body from any dangerous spirits.

3. Ugandan leader Idi Amin (1971-79)was accused of cannibalism by opponents but there is no verified historical proof that he actually consumed human flesh.

4. Caribs of Caribbean Islands were thought to have eaten their enemies. European colonizers weaponized these indigenous practices and coined the term “ cannibal” as a way of colonial subjugation

Medical cannibalism

1. Chinese compounds included human organs as well as nails and hair, while in early Greece, human blood was thought to treat epilepsy. Follow

2. Followers of 16th century Swiss physician Paracelsus sought to cure dysentery with medicines that contained powdered human skulls.

3. In the 17th century, England pulverized mummies were used in treatment for epilepsy and stomachaches. In some cases, not just any mummy would do: one concoction called for the body of a redheaded man who had died from hanging.

4. In China, human-based dishes were once considered a luxury (cannibal cuisine - similar in taste to veal or pork). During the Yuan dynasty (13-14th cent), it was noted that “children’s meat was the best food of all in taste.” There were reported cases of children cutting off various body parts (usually a section of the thigh or upper arm) to use in dishes for their elders as a show of respect.

Pathological Cases and Murder

1. Armin Meiwes (The Rotenburg Cannibal) 2001. German man gained international notoriety for killing and eating a willing victim whom he met online through a fetish forum.

2. Issei Sagawa. A Japanese man who murdered and cannibalized a fellow student in Paris in 1981, became a dark media figure upon his release due to legal loopholes.

3. Serial killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer used cannibalism as an extreme extension of control and sexual pleasure over their victims.

Cannibalism today

There have been rare reported cases of cannibalism today, as it is considered a taboo practice and is discouraged due to the discovery of the Kuru disease. The few reported incidences include:

1. Aghori Sadhus of India. A small sect of ascetics lives near cremation grounds along the Ganges River consume small fragments of human flesh from corpses floating in the river as part of spiritual rituals meant to transcend earthly dualities and achieve enlightenment.

2. Korowai of Papua New Guinea - ceased due to modernization.

3. Fore people of the Eastern Highlands- (ceased due to the kuru disease)

Cannibalism in the Bible

The closest the Bible gets to directly addressing this issue is in a few select prophecies to Israel that their sin would cause famine and hardship, resulting in cannibalism during sieges (Lev 26:29; Deut 28:53–57; Jer 19:9; Ezek 5:10). Additionally, three other passages record that cannibalism happened in Israel’s history (2 Kgs 6:24–31; Lam 2:20; 4:10).

None of these passages directly says, “You shall not eat human flesh.” However, that does not mean the Bible is neutral about the issue. In each of these contexts, cannibalism is presented as a horrific consequence of sin and judgment. It is not treated as normal. It is not treated as acceptable. It is one of the lowest points of human desperation and covenant curse.

When Scripture speaks of eating human flesh, it places the act in the category of horror, shame, and judgment. That should make us very hesitant to treat it as morally permissible.

Human beings are regarded as sacred in Christianity, as they are special, for they are made in the image and likeness of God, and hence burial is treated as an act of honour and respect. Even after death, the bodies of human beings were still regarded as sacred.

***

And then there were none. There's something strangely satisfying about witnessing the art of human subjectivity. I say art because that is the term that we collectively nominated to represent the expression of our internal architecture to an external audience. I mean, point at a random cloud across the infinite vastness of the sky and chances are, everyone will have a unique story attached to it. Some will prophecy the brewing of rain, others discuss them as a metaphor for their emotional weight, others the eternal beauty of the cosmos, others the machinery of science behind cloud formation, and some, the rarest kind, will have been staring lustfuly at your eyes all this time, planning their next act of consumption.

From the sophisticated hands and minds of Kanvas, Kawaraaa and Dyna, heartfelt gratitude for reading. We hope to see you on the next one.

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Ten little rings on my toy phone and I’m nineteen.

It used to be a senseless ‘ayaya ama$%@?*fai’

Looped and replayed under a tired moon on July.

Now it’s a crisp lie…

‘I, I, I, I’m your little butterfly’

I am not…

I am heavy with remorse and my wings are soaked in cheap liquor.

I put them out in the sun to dry on my twentieth birthday and they shrivelled and died.

Fragile little promises that can never fly me away from here.

I sought out my old cocoon and built a prison from the memory of it’s service to my fear.

What was it again? Something about beauty and change and the freedom to fly?

Boyhood on waxed wings... and a tattoo of things that look like caterpillars on trees?

What’s ugliness to a beauty that only craves flowers and chokes on leaves?

The batteries died a long time ago but pressing those buttons is ritual.

I press them once and press them twice and press them until it's something spiritual.

Yet

I...

I...

I...

I’M YOUR LITTLE BUTTERFLY

There’s commotion in the other room, not that it is really a room. In its entirety, it is a partition of the single room that I am in, separated by a membranous curtain that, in another life, might have passed for lingerie fabric. The shadow of my mother hustling away seamlessly and that of the person cosplaying my father labouring mechanically, vaporises my stubborn urge to keep sleeping. A bellowing from him beckoning me to get up, taking the shape of a “bado umelala wewe?”, advices that I should do so promptly.

He’s always loud and agitated while speaking to me, I never understood why. From what I picked, during intimate conversations between them that I had chanced upon when the night had gotten a bit too cold to accommodate sleep, he used to be a chronic drunkard. The way he had said it suggested that he had been certain he owed his explosive temper to the addiction, I doubt that very much. My diagnosis of it was that his parents had done a shitty job being parents, and that in response, he had weaponised his rage, inherited from denied attention, to protect his vulnerability. A useless psychoanalysis really.

The conversation between them shifts occasionally into argument, and every time it does, my malnourished heart loses rhythm. I am aware that at any moment, it might spill over to me, and when it does, it will cease being a verbal one and I’ll have to labour away with pain on an undetermined body part. Distracting myself with a chore is the only way I can resuscitate my composure.

Without warning, the fat uncalloused projections of the things supposed to be my brother’s fingers find my face, I shove them off uncouthly. I loathe him, he is not my brother, he is this man’s hell spawn, and a thing I can project my rage on to. He starts sobbing, bloody nuisance, and the father ruffles away the curtains to investigate the predicament.

Instinct momentarily glues me to the spot, apprehensive in situ if you will, nothing happens. It was just a false alarm. But I know better than to just stand there doing nothing. I fold the thing I have for a blanket and place it on the chair I’ve just woken up from, my skin is a mountain range of little red bumps. I run my nails through them to prospect for some relief, but instead find the swollen abdomens of a latched bedbug.

I peel it off like an overdue bandaid, and do it with the gentleness of a surgeon to avoid accidentally popping it. You see, I have learned that you can’t just go around squeezing the abdomens of these arthropodous vampires, it’ll just leave your fingers smelling repulsive, decapitation is the only safe way to kill a bedbug. Plus I get the satisfaction of playing executioner. I spend the first ten minutes executing about ten more that are spread out across the chair. The little hoboglobin on my side watches me puzzled, my eyes find his with pure malevolence.

I am no stranger to the activities of the day, I have done this about five times by now, that's a three year window of evictions and resettlements, it is also the amount of time I have known this man and his offspring. My mother instructed me to call him ‘daddy’. I never unlearned how to pronounce it without spite on my tongue.

I find the containers that normally hold laundry and rush them outside for a quick rinse. The sink is full of our utensils, they announce their demand for chastity like starving chicks in a nest. I don’t mind attending to them, if anything, they are the least eroding activity I’ll be engaging in today, and I love doing dishes.

As I busy myself away, I try piecing together the ordeal of events that led us here. I find the prologue rooted in a memory that is now a week old. Mother had answered a knock on the door, and suffered an exchange with the man I now assume is the property caretaker. She’d resorted to begging, even made her voice do that thing that it does when she’s crying. But the man had only responded with a deadline. A full week, nothing more.

Today is the fruition of the man’s prophesy. He’s out the door overseeing that we’re obliging to his decree. A few neighbours peek through their windows to try and make out the commotion, you can tell by the hypocritical concern in their eyes that this is going to make for good chama tea. Vultures circling a cadaver.

7 A.M finds the last of our owned items neatly arranged outside the wooden door of the place I had learned to call home for almost a year. I had barely made any friends in the neighborhood this time, after learning the hard way to go easy on the platonic infatuations. The faces of the last four batches I’d made acquaintances with are currently bokeh portraits, and I’m old enough to realise that adding more to that gallery is fuel for despondence.

This exact sequence of events will happen again ten more times. And it always has a hurtful aftertaste to it, I felt it when I moved into my own place yesterday. Associative reflexes I guess. Fuck you Pavlov! At the very least though, I learned to love my brother, and my skin is immune to bedbug bites, and I’m taller than my mother, and... my heart doesn’t race as much when I hear his voice in my nightmares.

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Thank you for reading

Your ever smiling Sisyphus

Viktor

It took me a month and some days to finish the portrait. It could have been a bit longer but I was impatiently eager to reveal it to her; my careful expression of affection, my articulation of an unnamed obsession. It was impossible not to dream of how the conversation would go, how’d she’d softly smile a second before the revelation, and gleefully exaggerate the contours on her face when she finally set her perfect pair of eyes upon it. The warmth of an embrace yearned for danced like a ghost around my neck, there wasn’t enough time to correct anything else, it was perfect.

There is a phenomenon whispered among artistic circles. And due to it’s ominous nature, it has been lazily christened the ‘Artist’s Curse’. It goes something like this;

When an artist captures a loved one in paint, the relationship begins to drift apart.

And boy, do I have a story for you.

I knew there was no grand way to do the presentation, the grandness was inherent. A frame might have done a little justice to the aesthetic of it all, and maybe some wrapping paper around it, but I was too ghetto for all that romantic Da Vinci crap. So, there I was, portrait of a muse in a brown envelope, and a head half-convinced that this was a ticket to all the grand dreams I had about us. To be a boy with grand dreams.

I called her name out softly at first after a failed attempt at gently knocking the gate. When that didn’t work, I let my restlessness amplify the second call, her name was a musical number. When the lock clicked and the hinge creaked, my body shuddered. I saw projections of her everywhere that was anywhere. But the face that met me was wrong, its eyes were familiar but everything else was amiss; her lips weren’t magical and her nose was flawless.

“So this is the sister,” all hail genetics.

The small talk was repulsive, and the disappointment of her absence held a knife against my lungs. I handed the brown envelope to her grudgingly, and outlined the terms under which it was to be ferried to the right pair of hands, and the perfect pair of eyes. The hope of what she’d say when she got it cradled me back home. That graveyard of fantasies.

Heartbreak, you know, drives a big black car. I swear I was in the backseat just minding my own

The night went by like nothing was expected of it. Its indifference to the events of the day, a culmination of a month’s work, felt like an insult to my person:

“Should I text first? Maybe her sister made fun of how big the eyes were and how imperfect her nose was and she ended up loathing the art and it’s maker. What the fudge was I thinking making her lips that small?“

As if by astrological alignment, the screen flashed. Her name and a daisy emoji besides it were like poetry, and I was certain everything else was. And there it was, the reward of my chivalry, the ghastly, unremourseful chant of pure bleakness:

typiiiiing…Thanks!

It’s safe to say that that would be the signal of the inevitable decay of my boyish delusion. A ghoul that had been prowling acidly in the crevices of my youthful fantasies. The conversation that night was thorns on my bare back, clever efforts to salvage hope and light in this utterly hopeless montage of events went unrecognised. With a swallow of bile and whatever poisonous wine was swirling in my mouth, I conceded defeat. She loved neither the art nor the artist. And everything that was anything to me became nothing.

Apophenia is the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns, connections, or order within random, unrelated data or noise. We are creatures that excel in pattern recognition. It is a survival mechanism we picked up along our evolutionary tree. In a chaotic world, meaning makes living feel deliberate and our minds will find it everywhere just to ensure our survival.

The artist’s curse is one of the many instances where our brain bypasses cold logic in favour of meaningful fallacy. It is far much easier...nay, kinder...to accept the narrative that a metaphysical phenomenon is responsible for our hurt, than it being because of some random sequence of events.

Little did I know that we had been drifting apart way earlier before I even considered creating the portrait. The red flags had been simply overlooked in favour of some comfortable lie. And, in some way, the act of etching her on paper was my subconscious trying to close the ever growing chasm between us. Faulting myself was easier than faulting this person I had come to associate ecstasy with.

See the thing is, I have done portraits for people that stayed. I might add that I am not very good at it, so, no commissions people, but, regardless of the flaws, they chose to stay. And, I can comfortably disapprove the artist’s curse, at least in relation to my work and my relations to people.

Correlation does not justify causation. Coincidences happen, scary ones that feel targeted and meaningful, but, we don’t have to impose meaning on something for it to make sense. Most times, things just are, and I think the kindest we can be to ourselves is accepting that as truth.

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Your ever smiling Sisyphus

Viktor

The guy in the video about fixing a heartbreak holds his chest high. It is evident from his eyes that he has done a lot of research about the topic. His gait and eloquence are enviable. There is an aura of deliberation in the way he holds himself up, and the crowd beneath him acknowledge all this.

There’s a lot to unpack from what he is saying. About how we lose a sense of identity when we lose someone we’d come to expect external validation from. Hozier said it best in his song Unknown/Nth.

So much of the living, love, is the being unknown

I've always interpreted this line as 'the worst outcome of a breakup isn't the distance, or silence... it's the loss of the meaning that you'd learned to associate it with the other person'.

All this, however, is surface level, it’s nothing I don’t know already. He goes on to describe the biology of a heartache, pompously expounding on the hormonal dysregulatiom that occurs as an aftermath of loss. He maps the neuronal reward system with tenderness, something resembling religious warmth. He’s not here to accuse you or your body for failing to cope, he’s kindly serving you clarity.

I sit with it for a moment. Maybe being patient with clarity will yield closure. But hours go by, clawing deep into apparitions of the next day. I’m not used to staying up past midnight, on a normal day my eyes would be protesting against my rebellion to routine. But today isn’t a normal day, and both I and my eyes acknowledge that. They well up with a lachrimal promise that we both know is nothing but an outgrown yearning. I can’t cry to save my soul.

The man on the screen said a lot to make sense of the feeling, but absolutely nothing to stop it from stinging the way it does. What happened? Why now? Did she know it would hurt this way? Did she intend to make it hurt this way? The reality of pain is it doesn’t care whether you understand it or not, it’s there to be felt. And feel it I do.

I try to laugh it off, feign a sliver of stoicism to belittle it... to no avail. Phone in my hand, I replay the voice note again. Did she really say I was stupid for wanting her the way I did, while being incapable of doing nothing more than wanting her? Or did she mean, that it had appeared stupid to her, that the universe had purposefully paved a way for us to cultivate intimacy, only to be corrupted up by her egoistic expectations of grandeur?

Being young is stupid. You think you know and understand a plethora of things, just to be face slammed with a plateful of bitter unknowns. It’s like waiting to join a verse in a song you’ve heard a thousand times before, only to realise you only thought you knew how it goes, the words you’re saying aren’t the words they’re singing.

I thought I knew love, I thought I knew her, I thought she thought the way I thought. To what end does my naivety stretch? What else don’t I know? Is the sky even blue? Damn it all!

Still, my mind, that overglorified traitor, tries to comfort me. It’s less comfort and more invalidative therapy. But it works for the night “You have no right feeling the way you do, it’s not like she’s dead. Additionally, you knew it was all coming”. I did.

The morning is met with a hollowness inside. It’s hardly an emotion anymore and likely a sickness. I’m nauseous and pale, and my chest feels like a vaccum. A cold shower adds some tactile restlessness to all of it, every drop of the cascade threatens to drown me. The breakfast is no better, it’s bland at best and devoid of warmth.

Is anyone aware of the way I feel inside? Can they peek and see that I have been stripped off my identity? That I am become a complete unknown? My name is random letters and no hands can claim me. Are they aware of that? The day passes by like it owes me no explanation, and the subsequent nights are no better.

Months go by, the man on the screen said that time heals every wound. But you wake up feeling the same way you did when it all collapsed every morning. What banal bullshit was he on to! But, admittedly, in the crevices of my person, I realise I don’t think about her as much as I used to. I get things done when I want to get things done, and she’s no longer an excuse for my incompetence.

And just like that, after a year of braving a silent storm. You get acquainted to the shape of a new pair of eyes, and the texture of a new pair of hands. And it all becomes a nightmare you’ve long been awake from. Your name is no longer a random assortment of words, and your voice is someone’s new best part of their day.

Or not :)

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Your ever smiling Sysiphus
Viktor

It’s 8:10 A.M. I’m sat on a metallic bench inside a bodaboda shade that’s cold with the memory of last night. The African sun in its full yellow glory beckons my eyes to squint a little. And the polluted air circulates around my nostrils like flies around a carcass. It’s a beautiful morning in Kariabongi, as beautiful as the scenery of the place can afford to be.

I hold my phone with a stern deliberateness in my right hand, and cap the left hand around it to shade it from the radiance. The call that I am anticipating is taking longer to disrupt the ambience than I had hoped it would. A blessing disguised as wasted time.

The touts are advertising their matatus charismatically, each determined voice bellowing the same three words: Two of them are unchanging destinations that I am too familiar with, and the remaining one is a price that flactuates with every new announcement. The competitiveness in their voices has something of a primordial charm. I let my ears indulge it a little longer.

On my left, two mathes are discussing an assortment of random things. The conversation is a shapeshifter, and it’s dreadfully impossible to figure out how it all started. From what I can make out, the crux of their discourse is domestic violence, adulterated sparsely with allusions of religion. Photographs slip in and out of their conversation, almost like they’re the floor plan on top of which this evidently unsettling subject rests on. Seeing that my untamed curiosity is dangerously starting to border suspicious nosiness, I divert my attention elsewhere.

On my right, poised like a person itching to be anywhere but wherever here is, is the young visage of a guy with a rowdy complexion. His face is a dangerous one, it leaves little room to interpret it as anything else than sinister. I know better than to communicate the nervousness bubbling beneath my skin. Which is further necessitated by the pungent odour emanating from his person. It tells a story of garbage and poor hygiene. And the crust of dessicated skin on his neck confirms my diagnoses.

There’s a carwash nearby, a quick glance towards its direction rewards your vision with a pleasantly unlikely rainbow. The ‘syntheticness’ of it feels a legion poetic, there’s little to say about the magic it conveys. Wandering mists of water find the back of my neck, and they offer a temporary relief to the fever that I’m brewing inside. A chore that the cold bodaboda shade bench has long abandoned for staleness.

A vendor pitches me some flowers, the look on her face communicates a slight desperation. There’s likely a graduation taking place somewhere nearby. Which promptively evokes memories of my own, a relatively few number of months ago. Resentment follows the remembrance, and dissatisfactio. My face betrays the internal landscape of my loathing. I pull up a mental estimate of my Mpesa balance, the values that come up make me disregard any nudges towards careless philanthropy, they don’t sit well with generosity.

Every instant my eyes escape from the prison of blue light and investigate my surroundings, they register at least ten different faces. There’s youth and ambition in most of them, but some are canvases of wasted years and rotting dreams. There’s a pretty face squeezed to the far left of the metal bench, a body or two beyond the women philosophising. Her eyes are glued to her phone in the same dystopian geometry as mine. We’re both playing out roles in perpetuating the stereotypes, perfect embodiments of twenty-something-year-olds.

My legs are getting numb, whatever business I have here is almost concluded. I’ve seen this same scenery for almost two decades now, it’s not something that grows on you, life expressing itself through the commonplace expression of strangers. Their smiles, their frowns, the very architecture of BEING on their persons. The stubborn parasite of life hitchhiking otherwise lifeless bodies. The poetry of humans BEING.

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Your ever smiling Sisyphus

Viktor

It seeps into my chest like radiation. And corrupts my skeleton with an unfamiliar lightness. My spine radiates with currents of excitement, making every inhalation feel like a dopamine leak. I can feel the air tickle the bristles lining my wind pipe. It abandons the rejuvenating cool of a sullen morning for the life-giving warmth of an afternoon. I am a spectator of little things that make living momentarily arousing. The concenting audience of a universe unbound.

I endear the seconds like pauses in poetry. Fragile little moments that push back into memory. They’re forgotten and remembered with the passing of the wind. They linger on my tongue like absentminded kisses. My mouth is full of words that bounce off the shapes of my lips. Melodic little chimes that are mostly heartbreaks... and my sister... and the gap in my mother’s teeth. They are the person I am behind a cage of dusty tears, and the person I will be when my hands learn how to touch dreams.

Little glow worms floating on nothing. They dance on rainbows and leave little to wish for. A sky that takes the shapes of birds and paper planes, then unremarkably remorphs into forever. You could hear the rising of a drunk old moon if you closed your eyes and opened your heart. Tracing her wobbly path across a silence of dying stars, she is the curvature of my every desire.

Silhouettes of butterflies trapped in my ribcage, they cough in the fog of my addictions. I’m half a man and half a boy, and the sum total of my convictions.

I stretch my fingers to touch the meaninglesness of it all, and watch it form vortices around my fingernails. The colors of my reverie are careless ambers and gentle sweet-tongued indigos. They blanket my head from familiar blues, that build houses in the desert and gift me turquoise oversized raincoats. The cloudballoons are weather stations that follow the wind like afterthoughts. My feet are rooted in cold cement and I yearn to be a weatherman.

Pupils dilated like black holes, they siphon every pleasantry of the scenery. A freckled cat on a rusty roof and branches that look like they’re dying. I smack my lips and call to him, and watch his limbs obliging. The shape of his tail is happiness, and he lets it find its way to me.

The fur on his body feels like freedom. It has known the cruel shivering of monochrome Julys, and the desiccation of tired Januarys. The callousness of my fingertips is welcomed by a seismic undulance of loveliness. I stroke him once and stroke him twice until his joy is mine.

I love words and bite marks, and things that look like decay. A rotting branch and senseless poems and the taste of coffee on a different tongue. My eyes are islands of withered brown on a sea of ivory and jaundice. They trace constellations on the ugliness, and call it magic on journal entries. They find her face and call it love, for that is the shape of happyness*

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Your ever smiling Sysiphus

Viktor

Brace yourself for a splash!

Doing dishes is one of the few mundane things I genuinely enjoy(talk about eccentric kinks). The gratification I get from slowly, but steadily, shrinking a pile of greasy plates and crusty cups from the sink, and neatly arranging them into their respective containers is nothing short of blissful.

I was introduced to the chore at a relatively young age. We were barely ten when my cousin and I were permanently allocated domestic roles by our older cousin (claimed the orders came from above... lying piece of fluff ). My cousin would henceforth brush the carpet, mop the floor and change the seat covers (iykyk) ... I’d deal with cleaning anything that closely resembled a dirty utensil.

Limited on ownership of toys (except my trusty pencil and crayons), doing the dishes was as playful an experience as any. The cups would lead the procession, each plunging gracefully into the lathered basin, patiently awaiting their baptism from corruption. And then the spoons and knives would follow suit, closely succeeded by the plates and lastly, the treacherous final bosses; THE SUFURIAS (shout out to the ugali one, tough bastard).

It’d take me an hour or so to get done with them. This was hardly because of the volume and mostly because i maximised the fun out of it to the very final rinse.

You can stop here.

Please stop here.

Fast foward. Two years into a future that would rewire my entire person, my mom moved in with the person I’d grow up to save ‘Father’ on my contact list before later cutting him off indefinitely. A lot changed within a very short time, most of which I wasn’t as equipped to maneuver back then(I’ll spare you the details). Luckiky, dishwashing was still a chore designated to yours truly. And mopping the floor, and arranging the house, and babysitting the new arrival. The trauma hibernation lot. My love for the former never faltered.

The vividness that accompanies the recollection I have for this memory petrifies me sometimes. Everything I felt on that day materialises when I recall it. And maybe it doesn’t do as much damage as it did then but, old wounds and whatnot.

It was a Saturday morning. Weekend tuition had been called off the day before and I was aware today would be a demanding day. Mom and the brother had gone out for a doctor’s(barely) appointment, and it was just me and the old man in his little single-roomed mansion.

We never said anything to each other, unless he was screaming at my face to do something, or he was demanding to know what productive thing I had done during the day. This one having barely started, there wasn’t much to be said or complained about. Not that I minded the silence, but being with him crammed up in a room was hardly pleasant and mostly nerve chilling, and I was itching to be anywhere else. After having a not-so-pleasant adequately sating breakfast of sweet potatoes and nonsense in the silence , I excused myself and shot straight for the pile of dishes.

It’s difficult to explain the trance-like state I get trapped within while engaging in this socially repulsive chore. Back then, I’d be carried away and my mind would be beckoned to create or recreate fantastical scenes that had either been made up from scratch(creative genius btw) or that I had amalgamated into my frontal lobe shenanigans from an action movie I’d watched at my uncle’s place. This specific day, I was Tobey Maguire’s Spider-man(yes, it has a hiphen you uncultured sweetheart ) doging green goblin’s fancy bladed in slow motion.

I was aware that the knife on my hand was sharp, it didn’t help that I had had an incident or two with it while helping mom out with the tomatoes. But this was too dazzling a recreation to care about a theoretical blood bath. Satisfied with the precaution measures I had set in place to avoid any unpleasant accidents, I invested my entire soul in the art. And minutes were meteors.

It was difficult to tell how long he had been standing there. Everything in my field of view that wasn’t the dishes I was doing became irrelevant. Becoming aware of him there didn’t do much to startle me,. There was a little embarrassment at the very most, that made carrying out the stunt feel a bit silly, but all was forgivable in my head. The ground beneath my soles was intact, very intact, and so I carried on with the dishes. Splashity splash.

This wasn’t the first time I had felt the lash of a belt on my back, hardly the first one it had caught me unaware, boyhood has its charm. It was however my first encounter with a cascade of them, not just on my back but everywhere on my person. I shrieked bansheely, not out of pain but out of startlement. Instinctively, I scurried beneath the sink, I could tell I had pissed myself. He could tell I had pissed myself. It was written all over his face, in an ink murderous intent... and disgust. My being was paralysed.

After a while, he stopped, rushed into the house, and came back seconds later with a Maasai whip in his hand. It had licked my flesh only once before, and reflexively, my hands stretched out to block the first strike... Poor hands. The successesive strikes were carelessly timed, a few found my head, the rest my torso, was this death? I’m I dying? Was what I was doing so horrendous it had earned me a death sentence?

At some point, the pain stopped, the landing blows felt numb, my voice escaped me and I had no strength to resist anything and...he stopped. The man stopped. He rolled up the whip, went back into the house. Came back out, put on his shoes and left. I got back up and proceeded to the sink, the neighbours had been alarmed and were forming a little crowd behind me.

“Hio ni damu?”

Oh fuck! I was nosebleeding and mouthbleeding. I should probably take care of that.

The dishes were done, every other chore was too. I snuffled the pain away, the t-shirt hid the battle bruises well enough, luckily none got to my face. And when she came back later, mother dearest, I couldn’t get myself to tell her about it. I was a child, children don’t get mauled without a reason. Also, as a twelve year old, who do you even tell this stuff to? He was the adult. Adults are always right, and that meant I was in the wrong.

This is one of the few vividly reminiscable occasions I have of the times he had me wishing he’d just finish the job. Good old days.

I still love doing dishes though.

image credit: Pinterest

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Your ever smiling Sysiphus

Viktor

Some of the things I’ll share here will sound exagerrated, and I think this would be an easier write if they actually were. I’ll advise you read it with a grain of salt though, I’m as sentimental as they come. Bon voyage!

Being homeless is not an easy feat to pull. It requires a magnitude of bad luck that dwarfs being a victim of someone’s twisted cannibalistic ideations in the blistering terrain of the Ruiru jungle. Basically, a homeless person is a human being who not only doesn’t have a place to stay, but also lacks the means to afford a place to stay. It’s not an ‘I got unlucky today so I’ll try my luck tomorrow’ situation. It is a ‘this is the hand I’ve been dealt and i have to suck it up and live with it’ reality.

Generally speaking, owning or renting a place is quite expensive. This becomes infinitely more unlikely when you have no source of income whatsoever. Homelessness is the cheapest alternative for anyone who doesn’t have the luxury or comfort to financially accommodate a choice. But how, does a person get to a place where they can’t afford to rent out a place for five hundred shillings a month (that is the cheapest rent rate I can think of here)?. Living almost all my life in a place where a majority of all homeless cases begin, this is the closest I have gotten to mapping out the narrative.

Where I come from, there are more homeless people than there are stray dogs. That might sound a little comically exagerrated but, you’re more likely to stumble upon a ‘pack’ of street children than you are of mongrels in the ghetto. A huge demographic of people living in here are ones who have migrated from the rural places to find some source of income in the city. Those who end up getting integrated in a form of trade or the other work up their way to afford enough for the bare necessities, but hardly enough to indulge in unnecessary trivialities. But then there are those who don’t, and therein lies the seed of homelessness.

I’m pretty sure there’s a myriad of other factors that lead to human beings getting deprived of this BASIC NEED besides this one. But it’s the one I am most familiar with hence, it’ll have to do.

Now, I’ll need you to wear some uncomfortable shoes with me for a minute. Strip yourself off the privilege of human decency. You have left the discomfort of poverty in your rural home, and have come to seek sanctuary in a city that knows no man by name, except the names that can’t not be known. Familiar to no one and nothing, except the memories of a village that was threatening to unalive you at any chosen moment, you crawl around seeking for anything you can do in exchange for bread.

Every effort to secure something substantial is met with the scornful faces of rejection, and days go by without a promise of salvation. Homeless, broke and with nothing left to lose. The only thing left to do is either let yourself succumb to the gentle caress of oblivion or, like everyone else who shares a narrative with you, scavange for your survival. ‘Luckily’, the ghetto is a goldmine of discarded refuse. One man’s trash becomes one man’s literal treasure here. Leftovers become a sort of elixir to soothe your wailing intenstines and you learn, like everyone around you has, that man can actually live outside the comfort of a house.

The first few nights are a waking nightmare, your body struggles to understand your surroundings, refusing to believe that it is equipped to adapt to this abysmal topography. Your mind valiantly tries to preserve whatever idea of decency that’s still fighting for a spotlight inside you. Very soon, however, you learn that dignity is a disease for the homeless man, and a homeless man is what you are right now. People with dignity have money to keep it flaring, and you... you can’t afford to give it that warmth. As a result, it must be purged out like a plague.

After your body gets accustomed to the terrain of misery, your mind is beckoned to catch up. This proves to be quite difficult at first. Mainly because human minds are encoded with some kind of entitlement to comfort, comfort that homes are brumming with. Can you blame yourself, though? Isn’t that one of the few things you learned about in school a week before you dropped out? What the teacher that called you stupid a few too many times defined as BASIC NEEDS? This entitlement has to be exorcised, otherwise you have no chance of survival here.

This again proves difficult, but nothing is impossible for a man with nothing to lose. You get introduced to ‘kayengi’ by your fellow survivors. “It’ll keep you warm” they say, and it does more than that. Sniffing gum is the only comfort a homeless man can afford, and the occasional cigarette. It cleanses the filth you feel inside, it distracts you from hunger chewing on your muscles, and it gives you the strength to say “Sasa Auntie” to the ruthless crowd swarming the Nairobi streets.

‘Chokosh’. It is the belittling nomination that has replaced the names that were supposedly once yours. Those that christened you with it are no more than you in terms of appearance, and you can bet on your horrendous life that the dogs can’t tell any of you apart, but there is an awareness that they can afford to walk in town without anyone glaring at them with disgust, and that makes you inferior to them. They are people, you are Chokoraa. Deranged, filthy, NO LONGER HUMAN.

In 2015, during Barack Obama’s presidential visit to Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. Thousands of street families were evicted from the city and ditched in neighbouring towns. The government, in their fullness of grace, termed it as a necessary relocation. But you see, only people get relocated, chokoraas are not people. To the government, they were a blight that needed concealment, animals that tarnished Kidero’s streets of gold, and concealed they were.

In Nairobi alone, as of 2021, there is an estimated 70000 children roaming the city every day. This is a government tally, I wager they picked the prettiest looking set of numbers. But, even with the benefit of doubt extended, that doesn’t account for the adults, or the families battling starvation in the ghetto streets . And it gets worse, it always gets worse, the difference between someone living in the ghetto these days, and someone braving the streets is luck. Fucking LUCK!

Perhaps the reason it’s an uncomfortable topic to discuss is not because of how inhumane it is. Or how triggered we get around it. But due to the simple fact that we are so helpless before it. Because of how unable we are to sit with the thought of becoming a chokoraa. And if you asked me, if there was ever a fate far worse than death, homelessness makes the list.

So go yee to Tom Mboya street today. Memorise the bloodshot eyes of every maniac staring at you dangerously. Because that, dear reader, is a version of you that didn’t get very lucky with life. And while at it, tell them about how capitalism is the problem, humor them about classism, perhaps it’ll alleviate their hunger and rejuvenate their sanity.

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Your ever smiling Sysiphus,

Viktor

Yesterday presented such an evening for me. And I let the ambience of a dying sun guide my feet to a destination that hadn’t been candidly given a name yet. It was all giggles and glee until, some twenty minutes into stroking my lungs with the evening air, a sudden pang of pain afflicted my hip. Right side, somewhere between my greater trochanter and its acetabular housing (laughs in mediocre academic prowess), it came upon me like a jumpscare.

Out of genuine respect for the pain, and a general willingness to not tempt my body’s endurance threshold any further, I ushered my bag of bones down on to a nearby grassy sidewalk, and let the little medicine persons inside me indulge in the logistics of easing the discomfort. There was a sudden rush of relief when I made contact with the ground, little spasms of gaiety that I have come to associate with gently easing your body into the loving and capable hands of nature. And, grateful for the privilege, I allowed myself a little baptism within that much needed dopamine leak.

But this was short lived, as these things often tend to be. A few minutes into recovery, I became aware of an unsolicited thought budding inside the bliss-infested crevices of my mind. It first presented itself as a suggestion, a harmless opinion about life and the absurdity of ‘lifing’. But then, after an uncomfortable long while of seasoning it with some logic and a cautious dose of criticality, it slowly matured into something bordering a factual declaration. It went something like this:

“my life has been one long charade of unnecessary anguish”, emphasis on unnecessary.

I am ridiculously overfamiliar with pain. Physical pain from whatever my stepdad used to inflict the fear of god upon me with... psychological pain from being exposed to the misery of being poor at a very young age...whatever type of pain is responsible for the agony felt after stubbing your small toe, or hitting the vertex of your of head on a ‘kona ya dirisha’... and, the godawful sensation inside your chest that accompanies grieving the mediocrity of whatever passes for love within you.

It hasn’t bestowed upon me any bragging rights, my experience with it, but I love to pretend that it has secured me a seat on the round table of men and women who have a thing or two to say about pain. It is with said authority that I’ll attempt to address a pain that is rarely brought up during casual conversations within the Kenyan household. The pain of existing aimlessly.

Stripped down to it’s basic biology, pain is a signal. A message to you from your brain that a part of your body, or the entirety of it, is interacting with something it’s not supposed to be interacting with. Contrary to popular belief, it is not a response to suffering, it is an acknowledgement that you are indeed suffering. And, with that in mind, it is then logically sound to conclude that pain is not something you are supposed to endure, it is a signal you are supposed to acknowledge and respond to. Congratulations, that is what we refer to as irritability.

But there is a pain experienced by the human psyche that, like any pain, communicates that you are caught up in a perilous state you aren’t supposed to be caught up in. But, unlike the other kinds of pain, never really tells your brain what it is you are specifically supposed to respond to. It goes by different aliases; existential dread, agony, angst, anxiety, anguish, ennui and...my all time favourite... MISERY.

Living, especially when you’re not born into any grand pursuit of glory, inheriting your grandmother’s mafia empire etcetera, can feel like an indulgence in mindless dredgury(pointlessness). The disappointment that comes with realising that the effort you’ve invested in perpetuating your survival is pointless in the grand scheme of things, is often always a blunt knife to your skull.

It is not isolated, this pain. At one point in their lives, every intelligent person will experience it. And because it isn’t, no special attention is accorded to it, no urgency is invested towards its alleviation. Since it is not unique to any single individual, the only preached prescription is learning to accommodate it. And that’s the thing, when pain becomes a universal phenomenon, people lean less towards curing it, and more towards tolerating it. It becomes a part of life, that everyone should learn to live with.

Now, I’d be okay with enduring it, everyone else is for god’s sake, except, it is a pain that feels unearned. It is not a reprimanding for failure, or a reward for overexertion. No! It is just that, meaningless pain that sits with you through ungodly hours of the night, and reminds you that you’re merely an unspoken thought in a world full of whispers and noise. How can I, someone who’s entire being is fueled by a fierce need for purpose, endure a pain that invalidates me like that?

From an early age, we are taught that growth is a consequence of enduring pain. At least I have, for the last, I don’t know, two decades? And there is an array of evidence to prove this. Most notably, pain is a byproduct of hard work, work that contributes to apparent personal growth. Hell, one only needs to set foot in a gym to come to this conclusion. But, the pain I speak of, this discomfort of being aware of one’s own insignificance and the disappointment of realising that that hardly ever changes as you grow up, it has no obvious end. It is only there as a twisted sense of cosmic humour. A mockery of our civilised evolution.

There was this moment in time when I inadvertently became aware of the cars blurring across my peripheries. And I thought of every hooman inside each one of them, all far removed from my meaningless musing of misery. Each one of them has lived a life very different from mine in all aspects except the stuff we christened ‘universal experiences’. I wondered if they too have had to confront the angst of existing. The tragedy of being aware of the futility of your own being. I think they call it sonder. That moment when you get your head out your ass and observe others as you would yourself.

It yielded nothing, no comfort and certainly no cure. But, in the few minutes I was sat there, I found myself idealising a world where pain was a foreign concept. And, by the time the sun had buried its light under an indifferent horizon, the pain in my hip was a long forgotten inconvenience.

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Your ever smiling Sisyphus

Viktor

It’s poetic in the most mundane ways. The way a child looks at the moon and makes a decision that it is a hole in the sky. And that the sky is a big blue magical field that cloudsheep graze on. Silly little humans.

I too am fond of rationalising things that are way bigger than me. Life being the most conspicuous of said things. ‘Life’ in the sense of experiencing the passage of time. When logic can’t reach into all the nooks and crannies of being alive, I turn to poetry, or my idea of what poetry is. The other day, to kill boredome, I scribbled on my notebook that living is a game of tennis between being and not being, and that time is the racket that flings us across these two opposing states.

It felt rather belletristic and pretentious. And I made a squiggly line all over it in an effort to save my literary dignity. But the thought refused erasure. As such thoughts refuse to be given up on. I imagine that is the nature of God, and faith, and soulmates. I thought of death in the same regard. How it’s the permanent cessation of the game. A refusal of time to partake in the tomfoolery any longer.

And I thought of time. Not as a divine player in this ruleless game. But as a clueless participator. From an objective point of view, time is a man made concept. It is how long the rain makes the sky grey, and how slow the barista prepares your coffee, the rhythm your breath assumes while you’re kissing, and how valiantly you can tolerate the everythingness of it all. Time passes by, oblivious of its motion. Unsure of its direction.

The poem holds some sense now. But not too tight, one must never hold sense too tightly. Time is a costant for all of us. It is the wave that pushes us gently to our ends. Gentle but unbending. And the thought of it gets uncomfortable. Is existing just drifting towards not existing? Is it all really that pointless? No! There has to be some sliver of purpose to it all.

I turn to men who thought of what I’ve thought of. And like me, have tried to trap it in a cage of words. John Mbiti. A man larger than the three syllables that make up his name, conceptualised that time is a river that flows backwards. And that it did not exist outside the human experience of it. So cleverly, he explains that there are only two states of time. Sasa(now) and Zamani(then). The future, he demistified, was an unconceived child that had no business dwelling in the minds and mouths of men.

Furthermore, he explained that events weave out time... time is dependant on events. A year is nothing without the four seasons that confine it. And that no man could ever hope to catch up with time, because it unfolded with the doings of every man.

In that silly school of thought, I find some comfort. Time is no longer a radarless ship ferrying me towards my permanent unbecoming. It is a gentle stream that ebbs and flows gently towards my past. An unborn FUTURE that means nothing. A PRESENT that only exists within the confines of my own being. And a PAST into which all time recedes.

Within the poetry of men that are no longer men. People that chiseled words that will always remain words. The abstractness starts to take shape. Perhaps reality is just a construct, a simplification of the stark vastness of existing by our silly minds. All this is greeted with a yearning of sorts. If I believe this... if I truly concede to the comfort that this thought advertises... will I finally be freed from the prison of my fear of not knowing, and released from the cage of my dread for living?

It’s an interesting concept. If anything, I’ll give it a fighting chance.

Silly men. That see the world through a keyhole, and make up stories to patch up the gaps.

From the perspective of death, assuming death is an unconscious nothingness. Life looks miraculous and impossible. Almost like a rebellion to the chaotic nature of the unconscious universe. A serendipity. And if poetry had anything to do with the business of making meaning. Then life would be the unconscious trying to experience itself. Chaos cosplaying order. An eternal meaninglessness etching marks of meaning on its own skin.

Death is less poetic. At least in the sense of how Life is poetic. While easy to romanticise, it remains cold and unfettered. I used to find some closure in the idea that one simply transfigures after dying. Consciousness remormphs into oblivion. The dead universe recycles itself. But it’s all silly now, nothing barrs out the heartbreak of grief.

Perhaps men can’t poetise away the tragedy of dying because nobody really knows anything beyond what they do. And death is a place where all that is known means nothing. Where everything we say about it is just a child seeing holes in the sky, and calling them stars.

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Your ever smiling Sisyphus

Viktor

First of all, let’s do definitions. A curse is a supernatural detriment that befalls one as a consequence of ill will from an imprecator. At least that’s how Merriam and Webster have worded it. Simplified for the common mwananchi, it is a hindrance that is set by one person (the curser) for another person (the cursee) with malicious intent.

On the other hand, a generational curse, according to some random redditor, is an inherited propensity (think susceptibility or inclination) to a specific sin, ideally perpetuated by some metaphysical manipulation (the devil/demons). Simply put, it is a tendancy of a person to get afflicted by calamities that happen to have also afflicted other members in their ancestral lineage.

With that out of the way, the next important thing is to unearth the origin of the two phrases, an etymology of sorts if you will (the jargon will pay off, trust). Although the origins of the concept of a curse is quite controversial and universally debated, I can make a confident assumption that it was popularised to most of us through Biblical literature. A good example is when God cursed the serpent to eat dust in Genesis after man’s Fall, or when Elisha cursed the young men to be mauled by two bears, after they lovingly pointed out that he was in dire need of a hair transplant. (2 Kings 2:23-24)

Generational curses however, rarely get mentioned in the bible. Sure they have been implied once or twice in several sections, but they were never explicitly outlined as such. All this was the genius of a branch of the Protestant (not Catholic) Church, popularly refered to as the christian pentecostal denomination. ‘When’ it happened is not a matter of importance, and so I invite you to explore with me the ‘why’ of its conception. Because therein lies the marrow of my exposition.

If you’re an individual who swears by rationality and logic in your day-to-day dealings. Dismissing generational curses as cheap shenaniganry, sold by the Church to maintain societal relevance in a secularly evolving community, almost comes naturally. Believing that some malevolent deity is responsible for generational misfortune feels like a betrayal to common sense, especially when biology has proved, through repeated experimentation, that most conditions passed down from parents to children are simply congenital i.e. shitty genes inherited by children from parents through predictable Mendelian genetics.

However, generational curses rarely just manifest as physiological conditions. They span across the general lifestyles of individuals, across the personalities they possess, and basically across anything that serves as evidence to justify that some dark forces are against your progress, and that your maternal great grandfather somehow has something to do with it. Most obvious, in this list of imprecations (curses) is typical hand-me-down poverty.

Essentially, if you’re poor, and your father was poor and his mother was poor and the guy that impregnated her was poor, you are a victim of chronic generational poverty. Since biology is useless for rationalising poverty, and making sense of inherited gambling addiction, the second most convinient thing is invoking the divine. Something refered to as the God of the Gaps Theory. If your mother didn’t pass down poverty genes to your impoverished ass, then the devil/God did. And, as they say in show business, spiritual warfare is due.

The business of undoing these curses is no new scenery for anyone with access to media platforms, it has all been demonstrated on television countlessly, and there’s an entire ‘cult’ of people that make a living by chiseling memes out of the demonstrations. What with the gentle hand placement, and olive oil marination, and ‘subtle’ sexual assault, and public humiliation. The divine lot of it. I know people who swear by their fuliza limits that it works. They even go a generous step further and extend an invitation to your ‘spiritually-molested’ self, promising some sort of miraculous intervention that will aid in alleviating your misery. But nothing has really convinced me that getting flogged in front of a congregation, by a formerly convicted rapist, can cure my coffee addiction.

In order to give some relevance to what I am saying, I’ll need us to do something that most religious bodies have perfected over the years. I’ll need us to redefine a word so that it can back up the idea I intend to sell with this article. Remember the definition of the word curse I handed out earlier? Let’s pull that back up. Stripped off the spirituality, a curse is a phenomenon that prevents a person from realising their ‘full potential’. It is a cage of ambition and a prison of progress.

That said, I have inherited a myriad of misfortunes from my parents over my short lifetime. And, true to the definition of what curses are, each predicament that has been passed down has played an integral part in holding me back from actualising my own success. But the thing is, tempting as it is, I cannot accredit any of it to some old woman in the village who once spat on my bossom because she hated how I looked at her. I know why I am surrounded by the lineup of unfortunate circumstances that kiss me goodnight every night as I go to sleep, and wave me adieu every morning as I go out to stroke the grotesque phallus of capitalism.

Most notably, in this repulsive list of logical reasons, is my geographical luck. I have the geographical luck of a potato. As I have explained in previous articles, I am matrimoniously welded into the ghetto. And the ghetto is where you end up when life doesn’t owe you anything except raw survival. This fully checks out against our criterion for defining curses. My geographical locality is a hindrance towards my progress. And, as a bonus for this article, it’s inherited. Hence a generational curse.

The list is adequately long, this list of generational curses. What with a non-existent social network, limited access to financial capital, and poor money-handling literacy. All of them can be conviniently linked back to having grown up in the ghetto. A cow I have milked to bones at this point but, bare with me. Because this article isn’t about the list of generational curses I carry around, and rather about how we can go on with the business of breaking them. I’ll need us to consider the following:

If I am confident beyond doubt, that my predicaments aren’t in any shape or form caused by a supernatural deity, then spiritual intervention is useless against them. Subsequently, I also don’t imagine they are merely consequences of terrible luck, because that would mean that the only solution is hoping for the best. To be honest, I find it a little odd, that evolved and sophisticated as we are, we still consider luck a major stakeholder in determining the overall success of an individual. I refuse to believe that it is, and that in reality, it is implied as so in order to mask the real reason anyone ever ends up in the trenches of poverty.

Poor people are poor because rich people are rich. It’s as simple as that. Luck only decides which side of the fence you get born in. You don’t cure poverty by smearing olive oil on a forehead, you cure poverty by implementing measures that ensure everyone, regardless of background, has an equal shot at accessing the same propagative factors towards whatever success is. This translates into everyone having equal access to quality education, nutrition and job opportunities. Maslow yapped a thing or two about that.

The curses I have inherited are not because my parents sinned. I mean sure I was born through fornication by a teenager who didn’t know any better at the time. And my dad slitting his own throat might have violated a commandment or two that the good Lord had set up for ‘His people’ (also permitted mass genocide and slavery for the plot). But they were poor before all that. It wasn’t a consequence of their wrong doing. If anything, poverty played a primary role in perpetuating their ‘sinning’.

The way I see it, there are only two ways I can break free from the cruel shackles of my generational curse. The first way is plain ol’ suicide. Follow my old man’s footsteps and go out with a dramatic kablow. But that isn’t happening anytime soon, I am a rigid disciple of whatever Albert Camus taught in his interpretation of The Myth of Sisyphus. The second way, which I am hopeful I have been able to elaborate in the dragged course of this pitiful discourse, is exposing the insanity of the trope and snipping it at the bud.

All over the country, and conviniently in impoverished areas, Religious Education is sold more fiercely than illicit brews. Until recently, it never occurred to me that this is no mere coincidence. We have Churches and Mosques and Temples and what not, what business does religious education have in an academic set up? I mean come on, the time I spent learning the call of Abraham would have been adequate time that was used to impact me with skills that would help me navigate poverty and ensure I achieve financial freedom in days to come. But no, the education system said, knowing why Israel is a chosen nation takes top academic priority (CRE was compulsory in my schools)

Of course, I am going to run to the church for salvation, if all my life I’ve been taught that ochastrated catastrophes meant to keep power in the hands of the powerful are acts of god and the devil. Of course I’m going to starve my children if that’s the only way I’ll secure a blessing after contributing to the pastor’s Audi fund. Of course I’m going to be content with mediocrity if I know that God knows the unmalicious plans he has for me.

Conformation to a predictable delusion will always be safer than investment in an unpredictable confrontation. The system understands that we are victims to that false sense of safety. But, if you asked me, that’s the biggest generational curse of all. A curse placed on most of us by a corrupt regime, that would rather we associate poverty with supernatural inconviniences rather than shitty government policies. And whether you accept it or not, religion is a tool of control. A hypnotic medium used by those in power to ensure no one questions the authority of said power.

In summary, I am not cursed. I am suppressed by a system that weaponises religion and bigotry to keep the masses from confronting the real culprits of injustice. I have a long way to go in undoing all the damage caused by the shitty set of beliefs that have chained me to a delusional sense of righteousness. But, I believe that awareness is the first step to detoxification. Knowing your poison is curing your poison and what not. And I’d only wish it gets easier from here... I know it doesn’t.

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Your ever smiling Sisyphus,

Viktor.

Exasperated from the shock that’s mostly disguised as composed intelligence, I do an arithmetic simulation to project how much more time I have left until I am unredeemably late. At the back of my mind, I know there’s no salvation for me. But a man in desperation is rarely a man at all. He is a wrecking ball that goes through all unmovable walls of logic.

Skipping the shower doesn’t cross me as sin, personal hygiene will not get me there any faster. My latent self-consciousness beckons me to at least consider my dental hygiene, even proposes a quick toothpaste lick or a gurgle of salty water to combat the morning breath. These pleas find my body half flung out the main apartment gate.

The bodabodas look excited to see me. They have studied my pace and concluded I am easy prey, I just haven’t caught up with their tactical analysis yet. My hands are in my pockets, but the little awkward tumbles betray my feigned composure. One of them honks at me, and my head turns to face him faster than I can negotiate stiffness with it. My legs follow suit, and the man in a leather jacket that isn’t really made of leather warms up his motorcycle to recieve me.

The cold air currents assaulting my face do little to cleanse away the uneaseness. I run estimations on how long it’ll take him to reach the matatu stage. I fish out my phone to check the time and it’s still 7 A.M. However, this is not the same 7 A.M. that had greeted the pertubation in my eyes earlier when I woke up. It is the 7 A.M. of a man supposed to be at the airport at 0600hrs. The 7 A.M. of a man that woke up in a ditch covered in grass and sewage, and realised he was supposed to be home yesterday at 9:00 P.M. for his fifth anniversary.

I hand the charioteer a poorly crumpled one-hundred note, fished out of the shallow pockets of a dusty sweat pant. This is double the price he’d normally charge, and I’m surprised it even survived the ride. My orders were that he ride like I was late for a job interview. And he interpreted that as ‘I’m willing to see how fast this thing has to go for it to fly’. There is little to complain about.

The stage is brimful with all the wrong matatus. I can tell from a distance I’ll be standing there for quite a while. Desperate, but a little indignant, I guide my feet towards one that will only get me halfway there at the very farthest. The donda is unbothered by my advances, he’s a baddie watching a Kang’ethe mess up his pickup lines. Just as I am about to submit into his unseductive indifference, I see the crowd behind me initiate an outright stampede. Moths drawn to the right matatu.

The 180° turn of my person is a thing to admire. The agility of my feet as I guide my body towards the vehicular miracle, is likely a poetic demonstration of gracefulness to anyone with an eye for kinetic art. This, however, doesn’t go unnoticed by the common eye either. A careless barbaric grip on my wrist, followed by a quick procedural rotation of my head towards my 6 o’clock, makes me aware of the tout that had earlier demonstrated disinterest in my person.

His rumblings are filtered by the ANC of the Oraimos unrecommendedly deep in my ears. But I can tell from the wrinkles on his face, that he’s demanding to know why I have betrayed my earlier devotion to boarding his visually stark vessel. The matatu business is a sacred one, some choose the transit and others are chosen by it. I am a victim of the latter.

I yank my arm off his callous paws menacingly, trying to limit my vocabulary to grunts and clicks. The man in the poorly stitched maroon half coat is however relentless, and to demonstrate his dissatisfaction, his hands find the straps of my bagpack and tag on them savagely. The contraption tightens itself around my shoulders, as I struggle to shake him off.

I can tell from a distance that the right matatu is almost full, and this awards me some slight adrenaline surge to turn around and push him off. Gradually, a commotion of men, that as far as I can tell are also touts, start forming a small circular man-fence around us. I didn’t come prepared for a gangbang.

The cherry blossom graffiti of my target vehicle blurs out of my peripherals. Whatever this Philistine meant to accomplish has already passed. Ridiculously though, he comes at me a second time. He’s going on about how me pulling my hand away from him gave him the impression that I thought he was, to quote him, ‘gay’. All this is received with a straight face by yours sincerely, a bit unsure of what the next course of action or stream of murmuration is supposed to be. I’m I supposed to tell him that I don’t give two fluffs about his sexual orientation, and I was just trying to catch my ‘right’ matatu? Or, appeal to his inner humanity and give him an earful about proper human etiquette? I take refuge in bland, senseless humour.

“Rada chaji, si adi ungenishikia mzinga kwanza.”

This is a direct translation of a corny one liner that cosplays humour in all the shitty TV shows I’ve ever watched. There’s no way he’ll decipher my meaning, the puzzled look on his face confirms my analysis. Either by divine intervention, or the strategic meticulation of my wit, he backs away into his empty cusk, and his troop of manhandlers follow suit.

The bustle had distracted me from the new arrival of a vehicle, that’s as right as the one before, but nothing as dazzling as my Sakura chariot. I hop on it unceremoniously and put my earbuds back on, the ivory clock font on my phone screen reads ‘08:13’. At this point, my hope has shrivelled, and with it my apprehension. The worst that can happen now is not arriving, and the matatu I am in guarantees otherwise.

The revving of the engine excites me. I can feel the vibrations through my eyelids. It promises that everything might be okay soon, but is very careful to not let it be a guarantee. Sure as death from a post heartbreak bender, the gates of my destination glare at me unremorsefully. Everything that should be in place is in place, nothing is there unless it always has. The men in blue uniform read the beads of sweat on my temple like braille, and do little to bother me with formalities. They understand my predicament, and usher me in.

Pacey but mildly composed. With an understanding that I am as late as I could ever be, I navigate my hygienically questionable body to my destination. The foreboarding halls are eldritch dungeons of despondence, and I study every crevice like a crime scene. The papers on the floor are testimonials that the deed is done, and all I can do now is sit and bargain with the absurdity.

He had said that he won’t be giving any resits. And he has a clean record of standing by his words. I should probably text my idiot friend and explain to him my predicament, maybe he’ll help me figure out if the old man has a weak spot. After negotiating the right words with my keyboard, and amassing composure to send it, the ‘typing... ‘ on the header of my sorry state dm reignites my apprehension.

The two water droplets that make for my notification sound are verdicts of my sentence. And as I slowly align the screen with my eye level, I’m greeted with the following decree:

“brooooo 😭😭😭😂”

“CAT ni kesho”

My eyes mapped out his jaw. Memorised the little bumbs on his chin that would, in a scantily thought-out future, bloom into a covetable canopy of beard foliage. There was a strangeness to his eyes that made it feel electric trying to figure them out. I was certain there was no intelligence behind them, not an ounce of sophistication called them home, but there was an odd brilliance in the way he let them dance across the room while still glued to his face, almost like they had a life of their own.

It wasn’t surprising when they finally met mine, I had known it was well underway. Silently hoped for it even. There was no surprise in the way he acknowledged my perusal either. It didn’t feel like an invitation to indulge further, but there was no hostility in his expression. Far from it, his brow made a shape that suggested he wanted to know why my eyes were trying to find his, and why it was taking me too long to acknowledge he had noticed me.

In an effort to make light of the situation, I caught myself faking a laugh... a mockful laugh... and he responded with a puzzled one. Slowly, he dragged the chair in front of him to make a little room for his exit, and the little bulge under the sleeve of his shirt sent a small gulp of air down my gullet. The way he matched towards me wasn’t unfamiliar, his gait had become a little obsession of mine. It was careless and thoughtless, the way a child walks, as if trying to catch himself before conceding to gravity. This only widened my smile.

I couldn’t explain it well then, and I can’t explain it well now. The way my body loosened up around him, the way my face softened when he asked what I’d been laughing about, and the way my mouth didn’t stutter when I told him his chin looked like Damon Salvatore’s. I was unsure what the words coming from my mouth were meant to achieve, and what the smile on the canvas that was his stupid face was supposed to communicate. But it was understood that there was no trace of malice between us, nothing in the nebula of anticipation engulfing us was engineered to arouse discomfort. And we both acknowledged this with what felt like a stubbornly indelible grin.

Saturday tuitions had been a subject of resentment among many a pupil. There was no appeal in braving to completion a full school week, only to be greeted by half a day of casually dressed teachers making unethical sex jokes that hinted at their pedophilia, and expounding on concepts you had long given up on. The only ‘joy’ the day brought with it, was the satisfaction I got from judging the livelihood of my classmates, based on the sole merit of how fashionable they’d chosen to present themselves. The ‘Mikes’ and ‘Abibases’ especially made for a good laugh.

This Saturday, he’d worn a light grey t-shirt that dangerously bordered looking like ivory. He complemented this with some generic slightly oversized denims that made his legs look like two organic blue columns. And, to garnish it, his toes were little delightful shapes protruding from his leather sandals. Everything else, from his fake casio watch to his Kamkunjian stainless steel chain was in strong agreement with the statement he intended to make with his fit.

That t-shirt did nothing to hide his physique, at least not for me. On one occasion, during our gymnastic shenanigans, I had ‘accidentally’ stolen a glimpse of the sculpturing of his torso, and all I can say is that it was a very well maintained one. The slight elevations that made for his pectorals, and the little indents spaced out evenly around his abdomen, told you all you needed to know about the kind of heat he was packing beneath that greyness. I might mention, lest you be misguided, that all this scrutiny hardly passed for anything that could be confused with lustfulness. I was simply in deep admiration of the thing that was my best friend’s body. Professional platonism if you will.

After a few seconds of a silence that unwelcomely imitated an uncomfortable one, he proposed we abandon the monotony of the classroom and prospect for some leisure in the school’s playing ground. Having nothing to clutch on to as a justifiable excuse for turning the offer down, I shook my chair off my person and lightly headbutted him off my table. This helped me make out that his t-shirt, the one that couldn’t decide where it wanted to be on the light spectrum, was a nylon one and not woollen as I had initially assumed. It was good to know that, pointless, but good.

The walk there was nothing short of a fantastical ambience exposure. The depressing cool of the morning that had fogged up the classroom, instantly got dissipated by the warmth of a juvenile sun. There was a strange magic in the way the dew on random leaves lured the sunlight in and made it its own, turning itself into little crystals of unexpected delight. I could tell that he had taken note of all these mundane occurrences too, only that I was unsure whether it had ignited in him the same whimsy it had ignited in me.

My deskmate had been outright about the confusion he had towards the nature of our friendship. Never, he explained, in his thirteen years of life, had he ever thought a friendship between two ‘ndumes’, as he mercifully christened us, could involve the levels of strange affection we displayed around each other. I had promptly dismissed this route of demonic ideation as a flaw on his own imagination. Perchance a projection too. In that moment, my lips were building up some momentum to communicate this blasphemous accusation to the idiot dragging his manliness besides me.

Before the words left my mouth, I felt the full weight of his body push against mine. There was no warning before the entirety of the situation took form. This made it hard to make out whether what I felt was simply startlement or some foreign strain of a delusional excitement. There is no denying though, that the few seconds that my body acted as a barrier between the damp ground and his very well maintained torso, administered calculated doses of pure ecstasy. In the fraction of time it took me to regain my consciousness, I got a closer look at his face that was now even easier to map out in the sun. How could a face so full of stupid have such a perfect row of teeth?

There was nothing in the way that he pinned me down that felt unnatural. Once again, my features retreated into a tranquility that had now become strangely synonymous with him. In my head, burdened with the memory of the last Ben 10 episode and tempered with an anticipation for the next In the Name of Love episode, never did it occur to me that I could have been sexually attracted to this academically handicapped bimbo. It wasn’t a thought I was in conflict with, it was simply a nonexistent one. This idiot, whose idea of humour was immobilising me on damp ground, was only a friend I cherished very much and that I wanted him never to get off me was a testament to that.

After what seemed like an eternity of pure bliss, he got off me unremorsefuly. It was made apparent how heavy he was by the sudden lightness that overwhelmed me. And the cold that I had long buried in my vault of forgetfulness reclaimed my skin. In those very few seconds I was down there, my heart had cultivated yearnings that had NEVER once, in all intended meaning of the word, threatened to plague my youthful person like they did right now. What in those taboo skippable Teen Wolf scenes was happening to me?

He and I walked a little more around the ridiculously overscaled playing field, both ignoring the distant unrythmic bell ringing that signalled the commencement of classes. We momentarily sank in the trenches of a pointless conversation, and talked about the girls we thought we liked and the kind of people we thought we’d be when we grew up. Words soon became incapable of handling the weight of things I wanted to tell him, and we allowed silence to reclaim its place as a tolerable third wheeler.

Going back to class after all that nothingness we’d both indulged in felt anticlimactic. The blankness in the air around us suggested that there was still more to be accomplished before giving in to the fearful allure of that dreaded room. I made up little alternate endings to his little stunt that had caught me by surprise earlier, and shook all of them off immediately as soon as they were made manifest in my mind. I noticed that it had also become impossible to read his mind currently, and his silence had stopped being a satisfied indifference, and transformed into a cluelessness that I found hard to accept or acknowledge.

Stepping across that doorframe stung like punishment. Luckily for me, it would be the only one I withstood that morning. The teacher, as my very ‘Sherlocky’ classmate had elaborated for me, had left them some work and skedaddled to god knows where (local). The way he folded his face when I explained to him where I had been all morning told me everything I needed to know about the impression my little safari had left on him. And, as a final resort to clear any seed of vagueness that was germinating within him, I said with the absolutest of conviction.

“mimi si shoga 🙂”

Photo Credits: Pinterest

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Your ever smiling Sisyphus,

Viktor.

I wake up and close the door my cousin left open, he couldn’t lock me in. It’s 10am again, there’s shame in waking up at 10am consecutively for an entire month.

I pick up my phone and check the notifications, Safaricom wants their money back. Medium and Remit are begging me to check out something interesting they have to offer. I laugh at a time I’d be gullible enough to check. Times have changed though, I have since lost my amusement for flashy adverts, what with the same marketing structure and what not.

Substack recommends some reads, now this I can do. I click on the email notification mechanically and read the first piece. It’s an unbound journal about musterbation. Well written, expressive, short, the kind I like. I read one more, what could be the harm. It’s by Jeremiah, about his heartbreak. I enjoy how he words it and hates how he immortalises it. Sex and heartbreak feel like clickbait at this point, I hate that I’m still interested.

In the background, thoughts are welling. “Why am I still here? I should be trying to get out of here, go out and look for a job like mommy’s good boy.” But, that scares me shitless and I hate myself for being scared shitless. I console myself with alleged reason, “they won’t take you in, they don’t take people in without referrals”.

Guilt pours in, fueling an engine of shame. “What I’m I becoming? Who am I at this moment?” She sent me some money last night, because I implyed I was dying. It’s the fourth time she has, I know she’s getting tired, I know I’m making her tired. Dependance has never been my style. In another world, I’m a ceiling decoration.

There’s hope in the foggy undergrowth, creeping dangerously to calm my nerve. “You’ll get a job soon” And reassurance, “you’re doing the best you can, you took up coding, you are applying for jobs online, you took up an art learning course, you’re reading a book, you’re not starving anymore”.

I wish for demise, but dying is hard, we underestimate our will to live. I am 23 now , I’m genuinely surprised I survived this long. My mind sells me hope, because it is a drug I can afford, “You’re destined for greatness, you’ve made it this far against unfair odds” Pft! The flattery.

I am tired, I need to shower, and drink a coffee.

Image Credits: Pinterest

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Thanks for reading,

Your ever smiling Sysiphus

Victor

It is a difficult thought to sit with, especially when the circumstances around it’s conception are spontaneous and unmalicious. This ideation of mortality is hard to categorise as suicidal, since it’s more of a yearning for a gradual unbecoming and less of a craving for instantanious erasure. When I think of dying, I think of liberation from the boredom of mechanical routine and from the bondage of pointless misery.

But, dying is hard. I am convinced beyond doubt that it is. I have tried killing myself a few times and, it’s not as easy as they make it appear in books and films. First time I made an attempt, it was a small slit along my wrist, with a paper knife blade. It mocked my sorry effort by yielding a little puddle of blood, and a slight pang of pain that had the makings of a warning. I think it’s because our bodies are designed to keep us alive by evolution or whatever. It takes a lot of unbearable agony to make anyone choose death over survival.

Epistemically speaking, not much is known about death. I’d love to imagine a lot has been said about what the state of not living feels like. But as far as I can tell, I reckon it’s all wishful theorising. A documentation of opinionated fantasy.

Is DEATH evil? Is it an indifferent equaliser? Or have we, like we are very fond of, humanised it over our short history of being in order to make it feel less FINAL? I don’t know anything about death, which is hypocritical considering how much I have said about it. But, have you ever noticed that when we don’t fully understand something, we either give up on trying to, or go with the easiest-to-accept narrative about said thing?

Dying is an entirely different story. We know a lot about dying. How couldn’t we, we are grand architects of killing machines. I was ten when I first saw something dying. It was a baby, on the side of a street, purple as a plague, with flies holding a communion on its orifices. It’s not a memory I’m fond of. There is a discomfort that comes with watching something struggle to exist. Perchance it’s basic empathy, or maybe something in us that dreads the discomfort of spectating demise. Or the realisation that it could have easily been us instead.

When Keanu Reeves was asked about what he thought happens when people die? He put on the smug face he always has on and said ‘I know that the ones who love us will miss us’. Scripted or not, that man has known loss, and loss is the prized breeder of grief. Grief is the only absolute certainty that death offers.

The much I know about life is because I am alive. I experience living on a daily basis and I can write about my experience of it with utmost, albeit convoluted, conviction. I have no experience of death however, and I doubt anyone alive does. It is hence an unresolved mystery for me, and I refuse the comfort of unearned certainty. And perhaps that’s what we’re most afraid of about IT. Not the finality of death, but the uncertainty of it… the not knowing. We cry for an absence we can’t draw a map to, and for the yearning of hands we can’t touch when we stretch ours out. We are animals that scream for resolve at the unresovable.

Last night was a difficult night. I thought about my mother’s face the morning after she got news of my untimely EXIT. And it was all that mattered... what life looks like after death happens. What else is there to think about when faced with something so final and inevitable?

There are no answers here, the only comfort death offers is the certainty of a life before it. And maybe that’s all that matters.

Photo Credits: Pinterest

Thanks for reading,

Your ever smiling Sisyphus,

Viktor.

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So there I am, satisfied by how much syllabus coverage I achieved during today's tuition session. The students seemed elated to have me, they always are. Something about my teaching being gentle and thought provoking, as opposed to the information dumping they are used to in their schools. I am glad and grateful that that is a universal bummer, tis what keeps me and my strategic eleoquence in business. Giddy as a clam, I skedaddle my way to the stage commonly referred to as EnGen to board a matatu home. Kahawa Sukari is done with me for the week.

However, this little pilgrimage is a slight deviation from routine. Normally, I cross the road on the undesignated pedestrian area like a proper Kenyan psychopath who, while not in any hurry to get anywhere, has perfected the hurried gait and form of one plagued with an episode of diarrhoea and can't wait to get home. That, and the thrill of hopping on a moving bus for giggles, is a high I'm sentenced to chase all my life.

Today however, I decide to give my step counter a little aura. Satisfied by my own subversion of expectation, I do the righteous thing and walk to the legally nominated bus stage. Competence should always be rewarded with civil conduct. Quote me.

Unfortunately, the buses at the stage are either little revving metallic Colosseums or, their pricing is a little above my financial comfort. The bus fare from Kahawa Sukari to Alsops is thirty shillings. Anything else is capitalistic overambition I am not willing to participate in. This is a shared philosophy among myself and the other bystanders at the stage, hence the overly congested buses.

I linger there a while longer. I am genuinely in no rush. The mellow on my face is a catalyst of contempt from the touts urging me to hop on one of their overcrowded obscenities. My nods and smiles are greeted with dissatisfied frowns from the men in maroon. And all this makes me the merrier, what is a little passive aggression to one overwhelmed with so much gaiety? They couldn't possibly understand the euphoric spell I am under right this moment. Sucks to be them!

Anyway, the devil knows his people. And he knows me by all my government names, including that one offensive nickname Salome Wangui christened me with in class six. My legs start protesting the burden I'm inflicting upon them to satisfy my pride. And threaten to give up on me if I stand there any longer. Aware of the implication that this would have on the stoic image I have been selling to the uninterested bystanders, that have been progressively getting replaced by a new batch for twenty minutes now, I concede that it is in the best of my interest to find a vehicle and settle into, regardless of pricing or questionable carrying capacity.

One foot in front of the other, I track down an almost full Super Metro. Moulding my face up to show indignation at the fare price being announced (fifty shillings), as a futile attempt to sympathise with the conductor, I shove myself in and start scanning for a seat. There are only two empty seats in this greedy abhorrence. One is located at the far back, sandwiched between a woman of unconcelable proportions, and a man that either lifts too much or plays rugby. The other one is at the very front, directly behind the passenger door. A quick statistical analysis of how willing I am to walk when it's my time to alight, convinces me that I should take the one at the front.

There I am. Inside a bus that respects civilised carrying capacity, as intended by the good Lord or John Michuki, or someone that has reverence to both. Grudgingly, I type the Pochi La Biashara number on the prompt window of my sim toolkit, and do away with the abhorrence of the payment affair. The traffic is nonexistent, and the highway is an open sea of scarcely patched tail lights. And this rejuvinates my earlier found ecstasy. Calm before chaos.

The first stop is at Garden City. It is a weekend, and comrades want to experience a bit of that helb-sponsored night life, before heading to their locals later. I harness my phone in my right pocket when I clock the little commotion of alighters heading my direction, and lower the volume on my earbuds incase the tout wants to make an impromptu announcement about any changes in lanes. Alsops is the next stop.

All of a sudden, I feel something warm and wet drip unceremoniously on my neck. This is followed by a slight pat on my back that likely serves as an apology, and a second outpouring of what had come before that pat. The person besides me looks mortified, and I am not willing to accept that what is viscously trailing down my shoulder is what I think it is. I stand up to confront the source of this unsolicited baptism, only to be met by a row of disgusted faces and none that looks like the offender.

The tout, outside and unaware of the evil being conducted inside, shouts rowdily at the stagnant crowd to hasten their pace a bit. And after a few minutes of dragging and shuffling, the bus is on the move again. I do my best to wipe the puke, or what seems like it, off my person with a page I had promptly torn from my notebook. Being careful to not let the queries from my neighbor suggest that the matter is worse than I am deluding myself to percieve it is.

Satisfied by my little chastitisation ritual. And hopeful I can get home as soon as possible and burn every fabric that has come in contact with whatever the hell that was, I reach into my pocket to check whether everything else is in order. My pocket is empty! Why is my pocket empty? I frantically stand up and do a quick perusal of my chair. Nothing. I make a quick description of my ordeal to my surprisingly calm seatmate, he is clueless of whatever it is I am mumbling about.

Within no time, the bus is at Alsops and the tout is urging the alighters to lighten their feet. I am among them, but unlike their mechanically coordinated feet, mine are rooted on the ground and have assumed a kneeling position. I claw and dig beneath the seats to feel for anything that might resemble my phone, unbothered by the image I am selling to anyone idle enough to scrutinise me. Aware that the bus is about to start moving again, I abandon my prospect and regrettably get off.

Desperate but too exhausted to do anything dramatic, I dip my hand in my bag as a final pursuit for closure. Detecting nothing that feels like the blocky form of my beloved, I bitterly accept my odious fate. Inclusive of this unfortunate ordeal, is a 15 kilometre trek from Alsops to Umoja. This is benefactored by my radical modernity, that refuses the primitive and cumbersome practise of carrying cash around.

I get home at 9:30pm (I boarded the bus to Alsops at 5pm), strip myself off anything that can be used to bind me to the events of this tragic night, and hope the cold shower will numb me to this assassination of dignity.

Thanks for reading,

Yours initiated,

Viktor.

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I am an objectively poor person; misery is my friend and survival is my mission. It is therefore of utmost importance that I maximise my possession of things that either alleviate totally, the boredom of being poor, or do away with the misery of lacking means to outgrow poverty. In simpler terms, since poverty is not a prison I’m escaping any time soon, I should try making my stay there tolerable.

There is an awareness of how intellectually cheap this idealogy is, and that awareness comes to bite me up the ass after every successful overspending spree. Idealogies we tell ourselves are not meant to make sense, they’re meant to quickly help us get away with our corrupted convictions, and this one does exactly that.

There is however something uncomfortable about how easily I collapse into its twisted comfort. As a rational person, who is capable of making sound decisions about complex matters, I shouldn’t be incapable of seeing that overspending only ever worsens the perilous state I am in. Yet, part of me refuses to accept this as truth. It is that part of me that I aim to exploit here.

I have come to a conclusion that poverty makes financial management a nearly impossible feat. This sounds a bit counterintuitive, considering that people who have limited resources are supposed to be the most careful spenders and least reckless squanderers.

Why!? Why I’m I the way I am... Why do I choose to be that even with the legion of reason that proposes I should be anything but it? The reason is quite simple. Boredom.

Poverty is boring. This is a very understated characteristic it possesses. Most people in the low income class barely have enough for their basic needs, it goes without saying that leisure is a luxury they can’t afford too. But strangely, they always often manage to find a way to fund parties, and buy drugs, expensive drugs, and in my case, go into shopping sprees that spell financial doom for them.

To understand why this happens, in a way that won’t sound like a justification, one has to consider the financial life of the middle class. If you can afford to cover your basic needs without feeling the pain of being sucked out dry, then you can afford to dream. You can save up for a car, or a house or a vacation... you can manage to set achievable goals. This is not the case for the poor person, goals are impossible fantasies for him. As I have established already, there’s barely enough to go by.

So, whenever a poor person gets hold of some good cash, their natural instinct immediately pleads them to try and escape their current abyss. They are already at rock bottom, what more is there to lose. This is what economists refer to as Skeptical Optimism: if i can’t afford to invest in the future, I can at least try making the present bearable.

I didn’t grow up around any financial training. Money hardly ever found it’s way into my hands and, the few times it did, I’d make sure every cent made up for all the times I didn’t have any. This made it hard to develop any sense of financial discipline. It became difficult to percieve money as a resource that could be used to guarantee a not-so-harsh future .

It’s a paradigm that grew up with me, into highschool then into campus. It was in in campus that it presented itself as a real problem, because now, money meant to serve me for an extended period of time hardly lasted the week. I found myself occasionally lacking any for basic maintenance and one or two times, I had to brave a spell of starvation.

I have a theory, it’s a far fetched one and it will sound ridiculous but it’s based on a logical framework. The ghetto has always felt engineered to me. Sure, those who end up in it do so because of shit luck, but staying there is never really a choice they make for themselves. The livelihood perpetuates these conviction that life outside it is impossible, and the relationship they develop with resource management and basic spending, further reinforces their incapability to break through the railings of its cage.

I have done my best to rise through the academic ranks but some indoctrination remains persistent. Even with my newfound perspective of how the world works, I can’t do something as simple as spend like a person with a brain. I understand the high that spending gives you is a temporary one, yet I am aware that there is no reasonable goal I could have achieved anyway hence the spending is justified.

It’s an ideal culling method.

“If we fuck up the Financial Attitudes of people who would otherwise reduce the pool of resources enjoyed by the few elites, then we make sure the elite remain elite.”

Poverty is not a mindset, it is conditioning. Mindsets are meant to nurture adaptability against an ever changing reality, conditioning is meant to foster resilience and perseverance. Mindsets are chosen, conditioning is not. Otherwise, no sane person would have to sustain their entire livelihood on the statistics of how many plastic containers they can solder back together in a day.

Photo credits: Pinterest

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