I hate ‘small talk’. I hate leaving things hanging. I hate being misunderstood. I am the person who might answer honestly to a How are you. This is why I hate sitting at my work lunch table. It would take me 80% of my energy a day every day, remembering that I was on the inside but not really an insider; like, if a workmate was unveiling his new house, and the boss was not invited, I would not be invited either and because my answer to Why are you eating dry food? [ a typical Ugandan question] is not silly or funny but a full disclosure of my digestive-acne symbiosis and my inability to eat most of what I like, which might end up in a detailed breakdown of my dairy intolerance. So, instead of tripping on my words, my tongue tied, but hanging inside my mouth, it remains.
I was part of a group all through primary school except my one year as the new girl in a school where, for the first time, where you lived and how your parents earned a living mattered. At breaktime, conversations like, “My dad is your dad’s boss” happened. The teachers tried to maul us, differentiate us, establish an intellectual- social hierarchy. They distinctly told me and a few others who happened to be in the wrong ‘stream’ that we were stupid because we kept our hair and that certainly we would never make it in life, the Rector said. We were 12.
I made it into a group again in Secondary school, and our congregation began mainly because we had a similar background in primary school education. We had gone to the prestigious schools in Kampala unlike most of our classmates who had been in boarding schools since nursery school and for whom being whipped was a casual event in daily life. One of my teachers constantly derided me for having come from an ‘Academy’ while the rest had come from actual ‘Schools’. I’m not sure what he understood by the word Academy but dictionaries were a prized possession those days. We regularly borrowed The Collins English Dictionary from each other to find out meanings and confirm spellings. Spelling too, has gone out of style.
I eventually made groups of loose ‘friendships’ – the higher class roommates and the fellowship girls. However, my first and main group was with a group of three girls within which was the only friendship I had ever intentionally pursued, my closest friend without whom a Sharia Law inspired cane whipping four years would never have been remotely bearable. She was, in my opinion, the most beautiful girl. She had [permanent] duck lips, falling egg eyes and a somewhat wounded back story. We were both short but she was more delicate and small, and as I evened out horizontally, she navigated the higher atmospheric pressures about 4 inches above my head by the time we were 15. She eventually found other ‘high’ rollers, with a less grim stance on the world, and I, dissolved somewhere in the masses, praying and fasting fervently, but as protective and [distantly] immersed as if it were one of those the barbed-wire-fenced friendships you find in girls’ only schools.
Shortly before University, I met a group of girls who became my roommates in the last two years of High school and 10 years later, our friendship can be described in what is known today as a ‘situationship’. We talked, laughed, shrieked in our hostel room like we had just glanced upon The Beetles and abused boys together [one of whom I got married to]. As soon as we stepped out of the gate, it was as if it had all never happened.
Two years out of University, after having become accustomed to treading alone for four years on Dutch influenced county [whose precise orderliness is now fading], struggling to find a place in what I had once viewed, like many other school returnees, as a repugnant potholed boda-boda street-vendor filled grotesque mess, I was added to another group. It was no longer a Do you want to sit with us anymore group. You could simply be added, on WhatsApp. Four years away had distorted a lot of common history we could have shared, there were no recent memories. We did have one thing in common. We had dated boys who shared the same crowd and we all seemed to be at crossroads in our relationships. Some of the girls had been replaced, some of the girls were still not official and others jut did not know where it was that it was all going. [At the time, all our leaves were shedding and we all seemed to be hanging onto either stagnant, dead or changing relationships.] Then, I got engaged, and somehow in the middle of the dust cloud that wedding preparation is, I could see clearly, where the cracks were, and in some places, the utter nothingness.
The best bragging rights go to girls who can post a woman every Woman Crush Wednesday and tag them in Winning or Queening or Killing it or them. It is like a social media album. This is me, this is my friend, this is all of us, and we are all happy at her birthday brunch at this expensive restaurant. Not having a girl squad to go on trips with feels like what it meant to sit alone at home time while waiting for your parent to pick you up- you would have to go sit with the teachers. [Trying to sit with the Indian girls would only more plainly reveal how much more alone you were.]
And then, some days, you realise that you might be that favour friend, the one that is kept, just in case. Some days you realise that you just might be another tick on the checklist for the friend’s wife and sometimes, you wonder why, just like everyone else, you can’t just laugh with careless abandon as you say a lot about nothing in particular. You wonder why it is, that from the moment you meet someone, it is always forever or nothing.
PurplePretoria 