food/love/life/film

Saturday, May 16, 2015

Saying goodbye

There's never really a right time or a right way to say...
I've moved to a website.
So...posts here are going to be super sporadic and probably copy pasted.
So what I am saying is move your views, lol, so that riches and fame follow me.
I'm good with just riches. Hehe.

I have been thinking of how to say it.
For some reason - probably because this was my second home but felt more homey than my first one, on Wordpress - it's been hard for me to write this post. I've been distracted and lacking words to say how deeply attached I am to this tiny bit of a universe that exists only in a space dominated by binary digits and things I don't understand because I never cared for programming...but the part I understood is that this meant something important to me.

I feel hesitant to leave it behind. This place, and the new one, means growth, I suppose, and progress, as movement is supposed to - but I've never been good with change and moving on. You know that phrase that says everything I have ever let go of has claw marks on it? This post...my claw marks.

Change scares me. And is me at the same time. Survival scares me more. Because the 'fittest' is so very relative and I always feel like I fall short - I am too lazy to be fit and exercise is almost never fun. Adulthood is a lie perpetuated by people who enjoy the company i.e. misery - much like the myth of a biological clock and parts of religion, but unfortunately, an unfortunate reality. Progress. Growth. Change. Survival. I keep telling it to myself to see if my mind will accept it - my heart may never.

I'm anxious for this to work out. I'm anxious to hold on to this and wondering if I can let go - pained, because I've let go of so much already.

Let's see how this works out.
Till next time,

tSN
akello.co.ke

Monday, April 13, 2015

Want.

She said:
When you want something badly enough, you forget its flaws. In fact, the deceit of desire lies in its ability to make you think that nothing else matters and nothing else exists. By the time you open up your legs to be its whore, you're not using protection.


By the time he got to me, neither was I.


I wanted him. I wanted him bad. I wanted him to complete the holes I thought I couldn't fill inside my soul, so there were no barricades whatsoever when he knocked on the door of my heart, laughing, and entered with no resistance. No guards to stop him. No alarm to warn me. No 911 that I felt the need to call.


I thought he was breathtaking blue sky and the flight of an eagle's wing on a thermal rolled into one. I thought his kisses tasted like a soury-sweet lemon flavoured gummy bear, because when he would kiss me, he would bite my lip; then pull, gently first then harder, the line just before it crossed into pain, and I would dance with him on that edge when my pulse was racing and he held me teetering over the abyss of him.


But that was an abyss I did not know or see or understand - an abyss I romanticized for the sake of my preconceived notions and motions of relationships and what I thought heartspeak should be but wasn't. A darkness I chose without knowing its blackness and its all-consuming need.


I did not know. And because I didn't bother to fully examine the whys and hows of what I craved with abandon, desire desired me - and had me.

tSN

Monday, April 6, 2015

I hate work emails.

How much do I hate work emails? Let me count the ways.
I hate that little notification
That tells me it's time to man the work station
and all that that little beep entails.
I hate that I have to keep looking at it and refreshing it all day
Sitting in fear and consternation
Side by side with my impostor syndrome situation
That whispers to me 'What's your boss gonna say
When he finds out the truth - that you're a fake?
That you have no idea what you're doing most of the time?
Do you have any idea what's at stake??'
You try and quiet these voices, all the while
Trying to figure out rent, follow your dream and take
a fancy pants vacation to a far away isle...
Man that sounds sublime.
Man I hate that chime.

tSN

adapted loosely from this poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Friday, April 3, 2015

Truth

When I people watch, I'm usually trying to decide if people are happy. No making up elaborate stories about their inheritances or sex lives, unless they have a super obvious pointer to either, but whether they have contentment. Whether the chubby mother running after her chubby baby really wanted said baby, or if in the still of the night, sometimes, quietly, in words she never speaks and thoughts she never finishes - whether she wishes she could let him run out into the street and be a coroner's problem. But only because she's so.

Very.

Tired.

It wouldn't even be her f- but she won't complete that sentence to the ending of the story in her mind. Because she loves her child. Of course. All mothers do. Her mother told her, not showed her, but what her mother SAYS must be true.



My mother told me otherwise.



Now I'm watching the girl in braids with a shifty look who looks like she's trying to look excited about being at Junction with her prettier friend. Where are they going? To watch a movie with boys from school who tried to touch them last week. Tell the teacher for what? So that he tries to too? Not that it mattered. Because they don't try to touch her nearly as much as they try with CC. CC is popular and pretty. Pretty means has boobs and will let the guys do stuff. At the movies, they're going to do stuff. She's going to sit - uncomfortable. Waiting for the inevitable inching of his hand to her arse. She'll pretend to like it. She won't.



She's not happy either.



The smell of his Fanta Passion is making me slightly nauseous and nostalgic at the same time. Remember Fanta Pineapple? I used to love that soda. It was too sweet and too tangy. It used to cut my tongue and I would willingly let it. The sugar would seep into summer days and colour them with what I think now is perfection. Perfection and simplicity. Not like now. Though I guess the past is like Fanta Passion. It makes you want to gag and wish you were there at the same time.



If I were there, I wouldn't be...here. Where I am now. Watching other people's faces to try and understand my own...to try and understand whether I'm the post-partum partially depressed mom or the desperately unhappy teenager craving real affection - trying to see what we have in common other than our sadnesses and the children growing within us who we don't want - which is what we were, when sugar seeped into our summer days and then turned into the dry dust of the lonely summer nights.


tSN

Sunday, March 22, 2015

The first time

You never want to admit to a spark. Sometimes because it's always scary to admit to feeling to anything that makes you vulnerable. But also because sometimes you shouldn't be admitting it.

You shouldn't feel the way you feel...even if you haven't fully described it. Or maybe that's what everyone says.

And everyone knows sparks turn into flames and flames burn.

There's a flame between your thighs when he pushes you up against the wall and the more he kisses you, the less you're trying to douse it. The night sky is watching and no one else. No one else exists except for the beast of satiation, and gratification, and just the sheer disbelief that it is finally, finally, happening, happening hungrily and fast and you are devouring each other like it is the last time.

Nothing will ever be the same again.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Variant

She said:

Is it not agony, knowing that you will never, ever be the perfect child your mother had hoped; hoped that after carrying you for 9 months you would be the angel she'd always wanted?

You will never make her choices, even though she desperately wishes you would. You'll never love her God, her ways. You'll parody a pseudo-virginal lifestyle because by Jove the slut shaming you would have to endure otherwise isn't worth all the money in the world. And you've had a taste. It was quite enough. You'll never have the birds and the bees talk because good girls don't have sex. And you'll have to brush her off every time something is too short or too tight or too prostitute; sometimes it'll blow up in your face but like all of your flaws, you'll pretend the (internal and external) explosions never happened.

You'll never have babies, because you don't want to do to them what your mother did to you; a damage so deeply worn that you think it's a part of you, like a fat bloody artery that pumps life away from your blackened heart. And the man who is supposed to be in the picture is looking shaky as well; someone to slave over and fawn over and a whole ego of a grown adult to mollycoddle and read books about how better to deal with the child - sorry,  husband - and what you're doing wrong and how to get him and when to get him and what to do when you do and how to keep him and what you did wrong when he leaves your suffocation that isn't even really you but what you thought you ought to be.

You'll never have a straight, neat looking white girl perm where your hair flips at the end, trying to be natural. You'll never burn your hair at the salon and waste endless scorching hours in rollers again, or sit at a stall as a woman pulls your hair and five other women braid it and two other women roll it on their thighs that have imprints of braid from doing this for so long which by now have been mixed in with dirt and their skin cells and the last girl's skin cells and they're braiding it into your hair like a memento of your experience that you didn't know you bought. Not because you're an artist. But because you don't care enough and have stopped wanting to. In fact, you'll dye it red.

You'll never get a job they want. Art doesn't count. Art is a hobby until you're discovered by someone or something your parents want you to be. Something more respectable to tell their friends about their daughter with dreads. Therefore, the look of disappointment in their eyes when they look at you is pretty much permanent.  May as well get used to it.

You will start to wonder if your version of ok is ever going to be ok for anyone other than you.

Your life is a lie so smooth it chokes you with its fluidity every time you see her.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

When people are always super nice to you before they like wax your vagina hoping their words will be the balm for your roaring coin purse and they're SO not - but worse.

*sigh*

I mean, I haven't really felt like doing much today. Much in the way of constructive, adult stuff, anyway. Like, I totally want to go meet John at Sierra and talk about all the wonderfully useless shit in each other's lives that we've missed, for some reason, because, life, or whatever. And at Sierra we'll see the Queen, who's meeting up with Inferno (who I only recognize at the very end, who doesn't recognize me either because it's been years and he hadn't seen the dreads). And I'll remember that years ago, when Twitter was Twitter, I was SUPER crushing on her (skinny) (ex?) boyfriend, and the steamy DMs gave me life for a quick minute, that ended rapidly when I met the Queen. Fortunately she seems to be a benevolent ruler.

I didn't feel like working either. I mean, not that I am ever ati suuuuper enthusiastic about it, but, today was a big day for us at jobo, and the episode was coming out, so that was exciting...but something was just like...meh. I ignored it...it's been like that for a while...so I didn't pay it much attention. As usual. And as usual, I had to give myself a pep talk to even get out of bed to do said work.

It isn't that I've been fighting with Slevin either. I mean, people fight, right? It happens. It's bloody fucking awful, but...it happens. And the point of two people being together is that they try...right? I mean, in spite of the ugliness. You push past it. That's what you're supposed to do. Regardless of the fact that you want to murder someone. And not the nice Seyi Shay 'Murda'. The one for weaponry and praying to Jesus for your soul and the strength in your hands.

So I got home and called SecondPresident - I was supposed to go over to his and watch the episode - but he isn't home, which fucks up my dinner plans. I open up my email -

And there it is.

The email.


The one I've been waiting for from December.

Planning my entire life around it, too. Like if I go, what happens to me? And SB? And Slevin? My apartment? My racism, you know? What happens to my large amount of debt?

The email said:
Dear ***,

This email is to inform you that a decision has been made regarding your application to ***, which is now available to you on your activity page. Please log in using your account credentials. Please note that *** will never email you your decision directly.

My heart started beating faster than Jason Statham when he knows he has to act next to James Franco in Homefront, because, oh shit, he actually has to act.
Like oh shit, the letter is here (at least I've paid my rent...)

I go to the portal.

Dear ***,
(so many dears. Are they setting me up for something?)

I regret to inform you that *** program did not approve your application for admission to *** for Fall 2015.




(Oh.




Well then.


I guess they were.)

Admission decisions are made on a comparative basis and are the result of a careful evaluation of each candidate's application, taking into account academic achievement (Oh Lord. Guys. KCSE DOESN'T COUNT FOR SHIT! CAMAAAAAAAAAAANNNN!!!), preparation for advanced study (oh God. I've never been prepared a day in my life. They knew. They could see it in my personal statement.), and other supporting materials. (like what? Nudes?)

The majority of those who apply to the Graduate School have strong qualifications and demonstrate an ability to do advanced academic work (ayayayayayayayayayayaya. WHO HAVE THEY BEEN TALKING TO? *sigh*). We regret that we have to disappoint many bright and talented students. (YOU regret it? *wails* Am I bright and talented, mommy?)

Thank you for your interest in ***. I wish you the best in your academic endeavors.
Sincerely,
***

*sighs again*
I got to the end of the letter and then had to immediately go back to work and kind of try to ignore the adrenalin that was coursing through my fingers and making them shake. Then I read the letter about 14 more times. Then I started thinking about this blog post. Then I started thinking about who I should tell first. Fuck, I shouldn't have told people I'm applying. I should have just not. And said 'I have no future plans whatsoever' anytime anyone asked me. Now I have to tak about it. Because I dreamed about it. Now my dad will be like...get a real job...and Drumsticks will be like...well there goes 75 dollars...ok she won't...but...as in.

So now?
So now I have to act like the email never happened and go back to the life I had plan for if the answer was no (because you always plan for both answers, right?)...
Or something like that.
Or just sleep.
Meh. I feel so meh. I suck at rejection drafted on fancy letterheads.

tSN