Love – Page 9 – PurplePretoria

“Smile, you’re on candid camera.”

Lying around, a cozy room with big heavy glass windows on the 16th floor overlooking an empty street and an apartment block, I watched for the second time, YouTube couple, J & N’s wedding video. They had become my favourite thing to watch on the internet- a tall dark-black beautiful Sudanese woman and a white good looking Australian photographer and videographer and their family. I had followed their vlog since the one about the birth of her first child. I had seen them eating at restaurants, visiting friends, attending a wedding. I had seen her cleaning (a lot), putting on her makeup, moving into their dream house, choosing the perfect tiles and kitchen lighting (Industrial lights – in black, not gold), drive their dream cars and have their second child.

Why can’t we just get married? I thought. With my back to his face, the screen in front of mine.

“What are you watching?” He asked, leaning over my shoulder. “Those guys again,” he sighed.

“What’s wrong with them?”

“They are giving you such high expectations.”

“Of what?” I retorted.

“Just, everything. You know. That’s not how things are.”

It had taken me from 6:00 p.m the evening before, snailing through the Jinja highway, wading through Jinja Town, dosing off as we drove towards the border, to 11: 00 am, the next day. At the border we had come out, surrounded by guns as the border police showed us the way out of the bus and with heavy boots inspected the interior. Away from the wet bushy shrubs on the left, we had walked, half-running to the migration building as the winding line piled on with more people. The Ugandan line was twice as long as the other one and our passports were being stamped with no sense of urgency or consideration for time, and with more stamps than if we had just arrived at the border of Netherlands. Finally, we were back inside the bus, in the dead of night, on a high way that carried on for hours, now racing past trees and an open landscape.

When we finally entered the city in the breezy morning hours- cars squeezing up against each other, slums, rubbish on the other side of a river-like water channel sweeping through, under a bridge. The morning rush hour made it two more hours before we could reach the bus park. By the time, the uber came to pick me, I was doubting my sanity. I had began crucifying myself a few hours into my journey with strangers on my first inter-country journey on a bus to a country I had never been to. If we all perished, no one would know my name.

The Arab man in the seat opposite mine was being interviewed by the man who sat and slept in the bus corridor throughout the entire journey. I had supposed that he was the conductor but he got out before the official bus stop.

“What were you doing in Uganda?” he had asked the Arab man.

“I have a woman friend I had…”

“Haaaaa!” the man excitedly interjected excitedly. “And how are Ugandan women, eh? Nice, eh? “

The Arab laughed shyly.

I shifted in my seat. Their conversation continued until it finally died down. The bus trudged on.

Westlands, Nairobi-

J & N, I had watched religiously until months before my own wedding. After I got married, I weaned off their marriage. Eventually, I was pregnant and eventually too exhausted to believe the happily balanced mum-hood that both she and another Nigerian and German couple projected. It had been about 6 months since I had seen J & N’ videos and when I checked again, it seemed that they had stopped filming. A few weeks later, they announced their separation. I was shocked.

What about, what about… everything?!

When the other half of J & N put out a video saying that, Nobody had really known what was happening behind the scenes. She gave us as much an explanation as she could, referencing something that looked so beautiful that was so rotten on the inside. I shuddered.

It confirmed my suspicion that most social media broadcasts were highly edited versions of the truth. I wondered too, about children whose every waking moment is behind a screen. What now unknown psychological impact lurks in the background waiting to leap out in their adulthood. What about us, the digital migrant millennial, for whom no moment exists unless it is captured on the [social media] for the world? What superficiality is filling the vacuum inside?

It’s amazing to see the shared world of broadcast- enjoying videos of other families, recaps of friends and strangers’ lives- they sometimes show you the kind of world you would want to create. But if every moment is captured, when do we get time to stop smiling. To argue, to disagree, to compromise, to apologize, to forgive, to make up. And when do we get time to know ourselves – not as the world sees us, but who were really are, without the camera effect.

I’m certain that holding a camera to my face constantly would prevent me from approaching the woman underneath- the one who some mornings walks around the house, sleepily, routinely, before the inner lights go on. And that would mean, I would miss the humble moments in between, the ones not captured, the mundane, the small, the true.

” I don’t want to have fun [only]on camera. I want to have fun in real life”

Simply Niki

Candid Camera was a popular and long running American hidden camera reality television series. Versions of the show appeared on television from 1948 until 2014. The show involved concealed cameras filming ordinary people being confronted with unusual situations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candid_Camera

The Start of every apocalyptic movie sounds like this.

If I was to tell you at the beginning of 2020, as multiple sparkling colours pierced the cold quiet night of Kabale, that sometime in March, a pandemic would take over the world, travelling with its hosts, country by country, shutting down almost all operations, economic and social, putting air travel to a screeching halt and effectively sending the entire world on holiday, you would not believe me.

That governments would race to manage and decrease potentially catastrophic numbers of patients with a respiratory illness that could be caught just by the level of proximity, having the ability to do serious damage to some lungs while barely infecting others with the old common flu and that there would be as yet no known cure.

Two weeks before, I had come home during my work lunch break. I was showing my cousin what she could do to keep busy when baby went to sleep.

“So when he sleeps,… come in here. I have books. What books do you like? “

“Any.”

“Okay, so just check in here, I have …this one is political. This one is about race. I mean its good but it’s too much. But there this one. A novel.” I looked up.

And she just smiled at me, the rosy smile of a 17 year old in S.6 vacation. Completely young, naive and ultimately more interested in a romance novel than in the Biafran war or Racism in the American South.

As I stood between the yellow walls of the room, it dawned on me just how little time we actually spent in this house. Nothing but boxed up books in here. We came in at night, with weak but committed smiles and asked each other how life had been that day.

The first days after WE were ALL indoors, he woke up speaking about the end. We were in the last days.

“And where did you hear that?”

“Just know, it is.”

And I walked away, angry. Sometimes I caught myself as I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, wondering why it had all gone quiet. The rapture, I thought. But when I looked for him, I found him by the kitchen sink. So we were still here.

“You have to get into a routine. Wake up early. Work out. You can’t just sleep, “I said.

You can’t just be distant.

“And if you keep talking about end times, especially at night. You are going to get me depressed.”

“I didn’t know he would talk about that. He was just singing and praying …”

“It was 9:00 p.m!”

If you ask the woman who lives downstairs how long ‘quarantine’ was, she will have a different answer. She’s from Central Africa (but I play more dombolo than she does). She speaks French in a deep coarse voice, a little too loud and in a monotone as if it were an African language . She has five sons and they are usually enough to distract her from her husband’s long absences. It took her two months, and then she began to sing. It was Stuck on You by Lionel Richie that she sang some evening, playing it over and over again. It was difficult not to hear the longing in her voice.

Eventually she became angry. Sometimes when we had just put baby to sleep, she held a bonfire near his window, roasted meat and sang as loudly as she could in her worst voice. During day, I never saw her or heard her. The enthusiasm she had at first, taking videos (for her husband, I suppose) while jogging waned. Eventually, as the borders remained closed, she began to pray. One night at 3:00 a.m she was casting out demons through her bedroom window which is directly beneath ours. I could not tell whether she was drunk or filled with the Holy Spirit but I suspected that she could not sleep and did not want me to sleep either.

As for me, I had altered the thread of confusion. I had wanted more time with my family. I wanted to know what it felt like to live in the home we had curated. And every day I woke up, there was nowhere else to go, no where else that either of us had to be. Peace came in tidbits and finally engulfed me.

And then the world began to open up again.

1st June 2020. Appropriately. The first day of the month, on the first day of the week that I went back to work. I received a message.

Hello.

Hi.

Wow. We are back to communicating through the phone.

I felt shaky.

That first Friday, we went to the Cinema. It was empty. It was one of those shooting movies he likes. And I closed my eyes and wondered, when does a boy begin to love the gun shooting nerve bursting narrative and how things had changed since our post teenage days. Here we were, all alone, and he was holding just my hand.

On my phone, I wrote ‘Single-handedly Reviving The Movie Industry.” I tried to take a picture of the empty chairs. He asked me what I was doing and I showed him my phone. He laughed. I deleted the status and switched off my phone. The next week, the empty cinema was closed in order to adhere to COVID guidelines.

The next week on Tuesday, I had held paper money for the first time in months. And the next day, I stared at the shiny silver coins I had received as balance. I wanted to write the dates somewhere but the world had changed. It was a fast track world again, I got lost for hours, got stuck in jam, reached home tired. Too tired to write dates about the first time I used money again. Tired enough to get annoyed when baby wanted to extend his play time instead of sleep.

Sometimes I come back home and ‘baby’ looks at me with a deep sad look in his beautiful dark eyes and says ,

BAD!

I think he means, I’m bad for leaving him alone, for coming home too tired to play.

Memories of what ‘quarantine’ felt like are fast fading. It feels like it was a parallel universe. But I remember, lying down on the carpet, spinning, not just from gulping a glass of wine. That night, the 21 days had passed and the glaring light of the television flickered as we waited on the President to announce what would happen next.

Tag: Love

…And I Had The Best Time