Chocolate fudge and Vanilla ice cream. That is what I ate the first time he left. I went straight from the bus park – the human-car-bodaboda-bicycle-wheelbarrow-vendor-bus wild misalignment that is downtown Old Kampala to the neat crowds of Café J that was now almost empty as they prepared to close.
I had paid the parking ticket at the bus park on the way out, too expensive for the twelve minutes I had spent there. I left him in his seat, on the fifth row on the right on a cushion with peeping brown foam out of its tattered red covers. It was coming to 8:00 p.m., on the usual heady Kampala night- especially in this part of the city where everyone was always sweating and moving, where the whistles from the mugged men wrestling heavy cargo on their shoulders reached you two seconds before they swiped by you, almost taking your head with them. He was on his way, on an overnight bus to Kenya- indefinitely.
Indefinitely– a vague word that was always used in the same sentence as suspension. The first time I had heard the word was on a Monday assembly as I stood in a uniformed column of children listening to the authorities speak. They were reading a list of names of students who had been indefinitely suspended. “What did it mean?,” we whispered. “How long would they be sent home? “
Now, I knew what it meant. It meant that there was no period of time to wait for. There were no time limits – an undefined amount of time.
As I maneuvered out of the park, I had narrowly missed being flattened by a heavy towering bus swinging from one side of the road to another. The driver, completely unaware of the small white car underneath him, had rolled his small black steering wheel strenuously from the left and then to the right, attempting a pinpoint turn on a one lane road as he entered the same ragged sky-blue metallic gate I was just driving out of.
I rarely ate cake, then; and certainly not cake and ice cream! My four years away had included a vow of loneliness and food restrictions to cater for a derailed sense of identity. Looking out of my window, within those four walls, I silently chose the company back home over the overbearing alone-ness in this new world.
There was a feeling of emptiness only the rush of sweetness could suspend. In the cool neon lights reflecting on the black marble table, sugar quickly filled the spaces in my heart. I had done this before. I could do it again.
PurplePretoria 