Tuesday 30 March 2010

Midnight Blues

This dry season was really dry. It was hot. It was mean. It was epic. It had an agenda.

The thing is that the wonderful LEC fried the air conditioner and I have been boiling away to glory since then. I could not afford to repair it and all ,so I decided to rough it for a while. There were some evenings when I thought my face would melt. In all honesty, it is not only the fact that I have to survive only using fans but also there's no freaking ventilation in the place where I work and live. Randall Street's a bitch as far as fresh breezes go.

I step out in the balcony, it's much cooler. I step into the next room - in the same freaking apartment - it's cooler. It is like the coolness is playing dodge with me.

So all the time we are experiencing a particularly lethal dry season - also do bear in mind, I tend to exaggerate a fair bit, I really don't know how to drive, swim or tell the temperature, once in the desert heat of Iraq, my colleagues were telling me, guess what, it was FIFTY DEGREES CENTIGRADE, and I was like, nah, it was all right today - the rainy season has also decided to show it's face earlier than usual. We have had some heavy showers dumped on us already bringing with it the humidity.

The past couple of nights, it has been too stifling for me. I was hoping to sit at my desk and do my night time work when I can catch up on e-mails, crunch out my invoices and receipts, prepare my paperwork, work out how much moolah I have made and so on. I like working late at night, listening to music or watching DVDs and preparing myself for the next day.

So the past couple of nights, I just took a lot of showers, tried to climb into the frigidaire, and tossed and turned until 2 or 3 am when it started to get a bit cooler.

This evening was actually cool. I could see the dark clouds at around 6 pm. I excitedly went out for my walk, came back sweaty and hot, took my shower and just as I was ready to sit at my desk and put in some work, LEC screws me over. I went to kill some hours at Mama Susu's, ended up eating a heavy dinner I was not planning on eating, shot some breeze with Mama, and came back at around 10 pm. The power was indeed back so I now I am at my desk , listening to Sinatra, trying to do some stuff I had planned.

You know I am glad I was such a melancholic kid, writing lousy poems, keeping a Diary, listening to Sinatra and jazz. It has had served me well in my adult life. I embraced the beauty of love with the naivete and passion as I imagined in poetry and great novels. I really experienced 'madness in a flashing moment,' sang 'songs of quiet passion,' 'soared among the stars,' and had a great love story with 'the man from Paradise.' And now that tragedy has struck me and I am alone again, I can retreat within myself, the spaces inside me and learn to accommodate the loneliness again. I am no stranger to loneliness and emptiness. I can listen to Sinatra, the blues, Led Zepplin and whatever Habib Koite and other Malian singers are on about and even appreciate the ache and pain even more so.

Now that my life again has some kind of a routine again and I am not so tired and overwhelmed, I find myself restless and don't know what to do with the time at hand. I can't sleep so easily and really really miss Wesley again. I miss having a home and feeling at home with him, safe and secure. I miss our inside jokes. I miss fussing over him and him fussing over me. I miss bugging him and miss him bugging me. I miss cooking for him and eating together. I even miss shouting at Joseph and Wesley getting angry with me. I miss his analysis. I miss his jokes. I miss his infectious laughter. I miss the way he used to fall asleep listening to BBC. I miss his figure working away on his laptop. I miss the way he used to come home from work, overwhelming the place with his bags and demanding a cold drink. I miss calling him dodo. I miss my own voice calling his name.

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