A. M. K

They say self-soothing starts in the womb. As if, bouncing around in a sac of fluid is the most frightening thing that can happen to you. As a child, the soothing repertoire was much wider; – sucking fingers, making up songs, imagining alternate realities, making promises of who we would be when we grew up and who we would not be, and imaginary ghost friends whom you talked to when sad and forgot when happy.

But growing older, brought less self sufficiency and more dependence- on others, on three times distilled ethanol and other self-indulgent pleasures of the body or soul to soothe a distempered mind, a distempered world.

Borrowing books, drawing and colouring white swans with red bricks on still waters, yellow ducks and P.E on Thursdays was an absolutely essential tool now that I look back on it. Maybe these can still do, because rocking around crying just would not do especially if you were pregnant and everything you liked before, you hated in equal measure and especially if your antennae kept picking up on the hushed degrees of snobbery, charades, egos and power games that you were even less equipped to handle then. One clerkship student, who was then already working at the biggest creditor in town once remarked, If I don’t need you, what do I need you for? I look back at that statement, astonished at how aptly he had summarised his cryptic life view.

If I remember correctly, the most difficult thing about labour is that there are no cushions to the pain. Your disintegrate to allow another life to pass through you, intact. Most medical observers can’t handle it, so they give you a few hours to howl, inject you with Oxytocin and quietly wait in their offices for the ‘baby to get tired.’ When the timer runs out- they wheel you out to a more familiar, more controlled scene and slice you right through the epidermis to the subcutaneous fat and across the uterus and stop the pain.

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.

Author: A. M. K

Life Skills

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