Fiction by Jean Wathugu 

This skater at the park just missed my left hip by an inch. The LEDs on the Bluetooth speaker strapped to his head are merging with his hair as he zooms into the mirage. In between cursing him out and skipping a heartbeat, I think I heard our song. He’s playing our song. I thought he was going fast enough to do laps around me, so I could hear it again. Just to make sure. I couldn’t run after us –– I was done doing that. My TikTok spiritual guru said to stop chasing and start attracting; so I walked slow and swung my hips and acted like I didn’t want to know. Like I didn’t want to lose my breath over you. Over us. Again.

I heard our song and wandered off to that stuffy love nest. Four walls so acoustically porous. So bad at keeping our secrets. I caught myself in the middle of my fantasy, about to silently mouth one of your jokes and gush like I was there again. On top of you. Learning to love. This lady walked past me and definitely stared at me like someone she just saw talk to herself. Preoccupied and unbothered, I swung my hips to seduce our memories. I took out my headphones and let the song whisper to me, more intimately, all our secrets.

I think our essence is trapped in the bridge of that song. You once said you like it because the guitar is abdicated and the bass is king. You liked to talk metaphorically. Always avoided the literal. I swore to never date artists again, with their figurative love. Yet I’m looking for you. Symbolically. In a way. At this park. At that concert. At the library. In my chamomile tea.

I heard our song and a familiar feeling frothed to the surface. I shut my eyes, and in a vision, I saw all our breaths of want synced on that 4/4 tempo. I saw ghosts of my laughter haunting a key change. I unearthed the love buried in the arrangements of the rhythm. I found our memories undiluted in the melody.

I want to buzz your phone and regress into the past, but my nostalgia is not to be trusted. I’ve come to know my memories are like chameleons; self-remodelling ad hoc, vivid enough to evoke my affections, limber enough to slip through the cracks. When I called it quits loud enough for all your neighbours to hear it, I too was devastated. Since then, I have been up several nights, staring at my ceiling, overturning stones, counting chameleons, drifting off to sleep.

I build shrines for hypotheticals and worship them in my pastime. Always marching in place, for something that is maybe gonna happen. Waiting for a memory to circle back, run laps around me, just one more time, just to make sure I got it right. If I walk your street, will I bump into you? Naked. Mundane. Doing more of the nothings I loved to watch: buying bread, fidgeting feet, scratching a mosquito bite, breathing. Will you look at me like someone you need, kiss the soil, thank the heavens! ––she is home, we will throw a feast. Tell me, have you ached for me? At a library. At a concert. In your beer. Symbolically. In a way?

I summon you every day. In my mundanity. In my nakedness. On a boring walk. In between a burnt pancake. Fidgeting my hands. Smacking a mosquito. Buying bread. I sit outside like a rain-maker, waiting for the rain to beat my skin. Waiting for the rain to cleanse me. I look up and say: It will come. I can feel it. I can smell it. Prepare your lands. Tomorrow, it will be havoc.

Bio
Jean Wathugu is a Kenyan reader and writer born and bred in Nairobi. You’ll often find her in the literary and arts scene at the heart of the city – jolly and full of wonder. Her work has previously been published in the Brittle Paper, AfroCritik and Kalahari Review. She tweets at @jean_archived