Been always thinking about a statement I once read in a book that went like “…The closest thing to freedom would still involve escape.” Honestly, nothing ever makes sense to me like this statement. I would spend nights wondering if I am just about to run away from something, myself, my past, a future I don’t want to wind up into, a community I can longer Identify with, or something more I am yet to discover. Life as it is truly lived would still prove persistently that escape is important as a way to freedom but I am not sure if the escape I want for myself, is the exact path to the freedom that will justify the effort to flee in the first place.
It is now about three years after leaving college and I have no idea what I will eventually do with my life, leave alone settling. And so one morning when a friend called and asked something about my social life and if by any chance I could be seeing a girl or something…I would quickly find an excuse not to get any further in that conversation and flatter him with everything that makes him feel good and forget why he had called. I suspect by these, someone would think I don’t exactly appreciate company, or friendship in its purest context. I do. It is only that I am so used to my solitude and with faith that that is the safest place I can be. A place where I can put my stakes and test my commitments. A place where no one is readily judging my motives and believing an opposite version of any good intention on my part.
While I still believe in the sincerity I heard in the voices of many people who would wish I would consider settling down soonest, I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion to various versions of resolves I would make purely because someone almost convinced me. And I would eventually feel it seeing Sadik and many others we had graduated in the same year proceed forward by settling down right after college as if everything has fallen into place all too soon. Sure it can. I remember walking down the streets of DA ,on a day that I was particularly low and strolling was the best thing on my mind that evening , I would say to myself maybe I will meet someone who would tell me something that will make me feel just okay. A little white boy passed by me riding a bike a little too fast almost knocking a young couple headed in the opposite direction, the boy would fall by the roadside unconscious and lifeless. This is all that distracted that strain of thoughts in my head as I rushed to check him out. I would later find out that I was both distant and also attached to the community I lived in but of course not in a way of marrying a daughter brought up by it but because it is in this place that I first started to seriously think about my life, and weaved a different pattern of my life one that would suit the kind of things I would feel really mattered.
And so, for the days that followed I would keep thinking about that bad evening. I would imagine the little boy as a brother, with a future, and a place in the world, and what his life would have brought in terms of change. I for the first time felt I had lost something, something that reminds me of pain, in many ways, the pain I would suffer when, Betty asked me to stop calling her, the pain I would feel when I had to drop a course I loved because of eye popping fee structure. I imagined the pain of Jerry, an Italian, denied residence because of his race, and, language. I would see the pain of my other family in Kenya, butchered because they were from the other tribe, the pain of Akinyi, failing an interview because she couldn’t score it to have come from central or western. The pain of Shaban denied visa to US because he was Muslim. The pain of brothers and sisters in Syria butchered because they were Christian. And for the briefest moment I would begin understanding what it meant to belong. I would think of the shootings in Baltimore and wondered why there had to be pain everywhere globally. All of this was in my solitude.
The weekend after that found me still alone but with plans to head to the next city to see Jeff. I had met him in college, a tall black, African descent with a keen interest in coding and hacking. Its during this time that I first heard of the term hacking and that was just okay because anyway I was still growing up and I would later come into my own trying to relate to the harsh realities of life as it is truly lived. I would find Jeff extremely gifted and knowledgeable. But even so I was careful not to open up so much room that he would access my life and find out about who I truly am and stand for and even for the many ladies I would date whenever I could, I would insist with nerve and strength, to stay in their world and not mine and that was me those days.
And so Jeff calling was a pleasant surprise. I still wanted someone to share with about the pain I felt in my heart and as you would expect, maybe, not a member of the opposite sex, though I wasn’t sure it was real, or if it was formed by the events I would experience up to the day the little boy died, there was need. Yes.
Jeff was a really funny guy. We had faced hard days, and our shares of both success and failure in coding and projects, but no matter how great the challenges were or how difficult the projects, we had believed that everything was possible if you were willing to work at it and above all believe in it. Well, this doesn’t mean he was everyone’s’ favorite , he happened to be too short tempered and one day almost slapped the college principal but all the same I have always preferred a gentler portrait of my friend , Jeff. For everything we went through as friends I would remember today to put down something in my poetry book ( I was writing very bad poetry and generally sad journal that time) about Jeff.
And so as it is with life, we miss people who impacted us. On Tuesday, 24th April 2015 I packed my back bag and filled personal stuff, wired Angie at the bus station, exchanged a few things and bought her some chewing gum thanking her for helping me book a seat on the bus. It was 11:54:53pm the bus started, I put the ear phones in, tapped on the “play” Button and off I left for GA. I was alone again.
