I just recently got my contact lenses and can put away wearing my ancient, scratched, weary Harry-Potter-looking glasses which I only wear at night. It's nice to not have something on my face all the time and I can wear my shades in the sun. Actually, I am wearing Wesley's sun glasses now. I wore them yesterday on the way to a meeting and felt like him. It was a pretty cool feeling.
The contact lenses had a sweet ride all the way from my trusty optician, Tanveer Optics, F-10/4 to London from my mother to my brother. They changed hands twice in London and made their way down to some chale's in Accra (as Karina would say). A friend of a friend picked up the contacts from Karina's friend's mom. They were then dropped off at a friend's mom in Accra who was coming to Monrovia to meet her daughter. My contacts have truly had a global tour. I hope they picked up some good stories along the way. Now they are snuggled on top of my eye balls helping me to see a bit more clearly!
Moving on from goggles, life goes on and I am busy running the company and building a pipeline of clients and projects for the next year. There are daily challenges, disappointments and moments of success however small they may be. I would never have imagined I would end up running Wesley's company and I would take to the role so quickly. I feel organised, determined and, quite lucid about the whole thing. I know it is a matter of time before all this hard work will bear fruit. And what kind of fruit? We are talking but about a sense of completion, continuity and excellence. I derive the greatest joy from seeing his staff demonstrate their skills, knowledge and enthusiasm.
Speaking of lucidity, a friend of mine was asking me how I deal with the blinding pain. I mulled over the nature of this pain and realised that I was never really blinded or weakened by whatever happened. All those movie cliches never happened to me: fainting, vommiting, madness, scene-making, etc. Yes, the grief hits me every night and I weep and talk to the walls but it's all very private. It's my moments alone with Wesley's memories and our beautiful romance and how much we loved each other. Perhaps I went into a robotic state of mine at one point when I had to accomplish so many tasks related to the morgue, police, paperwork, permissions, finance and funeral arrangements. Even then, if I think about from the moment I heard about what happened to now, I was quite lucid and knew what I had to do. I remember taking a shower before all my friends arrived to be with me. I even cooked for all of them the second or third night. I told this to my SOAS counsellor and she said that it was all from Wesley, knowing what to do and, how to do it. I glowed inside when I heard this analysis.
I guess in all of this ordeal, I know what I have to do, how its going to be and what I want to do. That's my lucidity.
'Lucidity' - its definitely a word I picked up from A Hundred Years Of Solitude:
"Ursula … could not conceal a vague feeling of doubt. Throughout the long history of the family the insistent repetition of names had made her draw some conclusions that seemed to be certain. While the Aurelianos were withdrawn, but with lucid minds, the Jose Arcadios were impulsive and enterprising, but they were marked with a tragic sign."
I was reading an interview of the manager of Taj Hotels on the BBC website today. His words touched me deeply and I completely understood them:
"You talk about running away from the place where the tragedy happened, about running away from grief. What do you run away from? You have to conquer your mind. I had to come back to the hotel to do it.And no, self pity was something that never crossed my mind though.There is destiny and there is free will. And we have to deal with it."
Now how often does that actually happen? Really comprehending the meaning and significance of words uttered by someone.
