Simps Will See Dust 08

Was it ever fair to judge a lady by her looks? Did a lady deserve the attention of a man simply because she had a beautiful face or a shapely body? Life had taught us to be materialistic, and to judge things on the basis of how they appeared to be rather than how they really were. When people got married, or had girlfriends, didn’t they mostly do so for the face and forgot all about the soul. But did a beautiful face ever make a lady a good person? We might have taught ourselves to believe it that way, to associate beauty with innocence and elegance with graciousness. Everything I believed in had crumbled, and now, I was certain that beauty could be the most beguiling thing, and to judge a lady by her looks had to be among the most unwise and unfair things to do. A lady was only beautiful because of her mind and her dispositions, because of what she believed in and stood for. And she was beautiful when she was sensible rather than sensual. As long as she carried herself with dignity and honor. But what did that now mean for Brenda’s dignity, or her honor. Would I still respect her as I would?

Brenda had always been the perfect embodiment of beauty at its extreme, prettier than any lady in the world, yet still the sum of the most serene and commendable virtues anyone could think of. She was flawless in every human scale of judgment, and no one would ever have blamed me for falling in love with her. Even my classmates who were in relationships confessed that if they had only suspected they stood a chance with her, they would have jilted their girlfriends. I think I would too. Anyone would.

We had just wrapped up our ObsGyn rotations, and we were getting into Pediatrics. Word had it that it would be the most free styling rotation; without a proper system for follow up of the students, and without a definite authority to answer to, and a standard of performance to press towards, it was a certain thing that the students would mind their own business. By a strange quirk of fate, Brenda and I got assigned as bed mates. That meant that we would clerk our patients together, get to listen to the version of their stories, and draft their history for presentation, together. I had not clerked so many patients in ObsGyn. Though I continually promised myself that I would clerk some more before the end of the rotation, we were soon submitting our logbooks and that was a done deal.

I had not been myself since Brenda confided in me about her state. I had always been a little confused and edgy, but I now knew that I was a mess. I rasped my lab coat trying to straighten the untidy creases hoping that I would not meet a resident pediatrician who would ask me why I didn’t have my name tag. We walked up to the first bed by the door, the child’s eyes warmed up to us, she was smiling quite dazzlingly, and had it not been for the medicine lying on the bedside table, or the line she still had on her left hand, nobody would have thought she was ill. Beside the medicine casing also lay a barely eaten banana and an unopened loaf of bread. Her eyes were teary and seemed to be popping out of their sockets but she still managed a resolute smile.

“Where is mom?” I asked. “I am with my dad, I don’t have a mom” she answered with a palpable struggle in her voice, but with such endurance to relay that information, “He’s gone out to air some of my clothes.” “Okay. How are you feeling today?” Brenda asked, squatting a little to level her face with hers, “what’s your name?” “Tiffany. I have a surgery tomorrow, I know I am going to die, but that will make Papa sad.” I gasped. I never expected a kid, about the age of five speak so macabrely. “No, don’t say that, Tiffany. You won’t die. You will be okay.” Brenda said reassuringly taking her hands. “I want to rest, when I die I will rest. Papa will rest.” “Tiffany!” Brenda interjected softly. I felt broken by every word Tiffany spoke, yet I only stood there silent, as mute as I always was when it was important that I said something. “God is with you, okay?” “Is He?” Young Tiffany asked looking at Brenda, “everyone says that all the time, I don’t believe it anymore.” She had a kind of apathetic and solemn look on her face that seemed to say that she was content with her fate, and that she didn’t want to believe in fairy tales or anything like it anymore. “He certainly is, darling,”

Tears came to my eyes. My heart hollered silently when I regarded the depth with which young Tiffany spoke. She was a mature person trapped in the body of a little girl. Her view towards life was so sublime unlike the frivolity with which most of us had taught ourselves to think with. Brenda knelt down to Tiffany, embraced her, and quickly wiped the tears in her eyes. I was not sure if any lady could do what she did in that moment, they all seemed so invested in themselves, so concerned with their own affairs to be touched by the selfless story of a young girl willing to die if that would end her father’s suffering. What did I really live for? My love for Brenda in that moment had been multiplied by a thousand. I adored her. I loved her for being so different, so motherly, so kind. But what did my love mean now that she carried another man’s child. She was not perfect anymore, and I could not go on loving her anymore, yet I knew it deep within me that if my affections for Brenda could ever change, they would only increase. And in that moment it struck me, I had to convince Brenda to keep the baby.

Simps Will See Dust 07

As I watched Brenda approach me, clad in her white satin lab coat, my heart raced in my chest. Try as I would, I had never quite gotten used to her beauty, her grace, or her mien. My eyes hurt, so did my heart. After the phone call we had had that night, she could not be the same beautiful Brenda I was in love with, not anymore, yet she was. I hoped I could blind myself from taking in the intensity of her womanly features, but I couldn’t. Her beauty was clearly meant to torture everyone of her acquaintances, especially those of us who desired her but clearly, would never have her. I couldn’t help but relish in her beauty, though I now knew that I despised her, or wanted to. When Brenda walked up to me yesterday evening, her requesting to have a phone call with me later that night was not something I would ever have envisioned. Just a few moments before that, I had never in my life asked any lady out, and when I finally did, I had misdirected the question and so asked the wrong lady out. When I told my wife about this incident years later, she said that I had done that to make Brenda jealous, for there was no sane man in the world who could ever, even if accidentally, ask the wrong lady out. But after all, I knew that I hadn’t been sane. You could not be in love as I was, and still be sane.

I wondered whatever it was that she wanted us to speak about on phone, the fact that I could not think about anything the phone call could be about made me shudder, but in its own strange way, also a little excited, only that afterwards I would have more of the former and less of the latter. Maybe my love for her was finally doing its thing; I was finally winning Brenda over bit by bit. But today, while I looked at her, I loathed her. There was something despicable about her beauty. How could she? How did it happen? When? It could not be this Brenda; it could not be the lady I loved, the lady I adored from my first encounter with her in first year, the lady I hoped everyday that one day would be mine. It had to be another Brenda; not this beautiful, kind, quick-witted and principled lady. This one knew what she wanted, she knew what she was working towards. This Brenda could not be pregnant! I could not accept it. I could not believe it.

“You are looking at my belly, Henry” she said pitifully, waking me from my reverie. Tears were welling up in the corners of her eyes, and she was clearly putting up a determined struggle to keep them from flowing down her cheeks. I didn’t know whether it was pity or rage I was supposed to feel at that moment. My life had been so simple until that moment when I came to that horrible awakening. I had lived simply, my life consisted of nothing aside my academics and Christian Union. I was a man in love, occasionally sick because of it. I was principled, or at least I thought I was, and then suddenly, I was an accomplice in a scandal. One I did not want to believe but had to anyway. Where was the world angling to? I knew I would never see any lady in the same light again. I hated that I would now always be suspicious, fearing that they were always up to something. If Brenda could get herself pregnant, every other lady might as well as have had. In that moment, I felt that misogynistic urge to punish every other lady for Brenda’s crime but I made every effort to stifle it.

“Does Ashley know about this?” I asked reaching into my pockets to get my handkerchief. Why was I even crying! I hated myself for all the pity I felt when it should have been rage. “She should never know.” “What!” I gasped, “Ashley is your closest friend, you have no secrets, you told me so yourself.” “Every lady has her secrets, Henry.” She was calm, but her eyes darted in distress. “What’s the meaning of that?” I asked struggling to keep it at a whisper. “I wouldn’t be able to look at her again, she can never know. Please Henry.” “For how long would it remain a secret?” “I don’t know Henry,” she was about to cry. I would have asked what her intentions were, whether she meant to keep the baby or not. Was there any other options other than keeping the baby? I couldn’t bear to think it! But then, soon her belly would start showing. She turned and walked towards the Pediatric wards, her steps were still confident, her strides graceful. No one would have thought she was a devil, that she could be so loose. But was she?

I bit my lower lip and sighed. I was in deep mire, and I couldn’t move lest I made a mess. For how long would I keep the secret? Njoroge would certainly find out, I couldn’t hide it from my roommate for long. I followed her briskly. “Brenda.”

Simps Will See Dust 06

As could be expected, my eremitic tendencies led me to the solitary and farthest corner of the library, where I sank into a seat and sat without moving, suddenly subdued by the torpor of death. Without was the silence of a graveyard, within was the irrepressible din of a football stadium. When I made up my mind to come to the library, it was to do anything but study. I had come to mull over what my standing on the table of love was, and if anything, I knew I was at the precipice of relegation. Speaking of football, it felt as if my misfortunes had something to do with me being surrounded by friends who were Chelsea fans, for Chelsea had, quite clearly, established itself as a dependable source of disappointment and bad luck. As we had a Pharmacology paper in two days time, I got to see some of my classmates struggle to squeeze value out of the slippery evening hours. Even in a bid to salvage the semester, their efforts could be nothing more than the frantic kicks of a dying horse, for they had the innocent determination but clearly unattainable goal to study in a single night what was meant to be studied in a whole semester. 

I was supposed to be worried as well, for I could make no claims of preparedness, and even if I was a little ready for the paper, I could not confess that to anyone since as medical students, we had taken a silent but invariably binding oath to vehemently deny and dispel with any claims whatsoever of having studied, leave alone being ready for an exam. Affirming that you were prepared for a paper was tantamount to submissively walking yourself to the gallows, but we were ready to fight for our freedom with every ounce of energy in us, so no! I wasn’t ready for my Pharmacology test. But the terrifying thought that I had done the unthinkable thing of asking the wrong lady out nagged at my heart and seemed to rack my nerves with such unremitting insistency that left me miserable and wanting to bang the table. In that moment my mind was a simmering hodgepodge of emotional turmoil and academic anxieties that threatened to tip me into madness.

“Huh?” Ashley had asked, surprised at such an unforeseen request. A little unflinchingly, Brenda and Ashley stared at me as I croaked an embarrassing and incoherent string of phrases meant to highlight the error. I quickly tried clearing my throat but some saliva must have gotten into my trachea for I suddenly burst into what might have been the most terrifying fit of coughing. When I came to, the mortifying look of pity on their faces made me rethink the earlier defense I had intended to enact. I opened my mouth but only air proceeded from it. As it were, the universe had conspired to thwart and utterly decimate every iota of hope I had in me, or in the world, of ever winning, or even just getting close to winning the heart of the lady my heart bled for ( I beg clemency from the medical fraternity, for a bleeding heart would certainly be the most worrying case of a hemopericardium, and I am certain if it continued unabated, my love could only continue in a grave ).

“I wouldn’t mind a chat over coffee,” Ashley, deft as she was with any conversation, adroitly picked it up when it became glaringly apparent that I was struggling to reign my thoughts and convert it into a meaningful form of discourse, “Brenda will certainly come along, right?” she went on to ask in the most courteous way that for a moment, felt like salvation from the tormenting nightmare I had been in for the few minutes I had stood before Brenda. It was precisely for that reason that I had intended to leave the Microbiology practical immediately, before Ashley intercepted me and set me up for the most embarrassing moment of my life.

“No, I won’t come.” Brenda had replied in a manner that to me seemed to, strangely, bear the most disarming and breathtaking nonchalance that suddenly made her even prettier, and then with a demure smile that bore in it the potential of grabbing my whole being and tossing it off a cliff into the sea, she added a little emphatically, “it’s you he asked, and…” she continued while looking into my eyes, probably to tease me, “spoiling Henry’s date is the last thing I would want to do.”

“Brenda!” Ashley lamented as Brenda suddenly burst into a hearty but very brief laughter. I had wanted to explain myself, to swear it with my life that I could never take any lady aside from her out, as long as she walked the earth, but my heart had been all over my body, and my voice was on a holiday of sorts.

I was clearly living for a day that would never come, and I thought of what could possibly come from my infatuation. The poignancy that came with facing the reality that however great I thought my love to be, it could never make Brenda adore me if she never did. Brenda was too perfect to have me in her life. It was only years later, when I was happily wedded to L―,  that I would come to what would be the most counterintuitive realization, that I as well, had been too perfect for Brenda to have me. I might have foreseen this forthcoming awakening about a decade later as I sat there, pensive and with a crushed spirit, bemoaning my misfortunes, for I made up my mind to cut-off Brenda from my life. I had been dancing on this show of love with every sap of effort I could master, yet my audience of one had declined to come up the stage and join me. When I got home that evening, I was going to block Brenda, and delete her contact. It was time for me to leave the stage.

“Henry,” 

“Huh!” Startled, I looked up. She stood right beside me, with the most incapacitating smile painted upon her countenance. As you would expect, I was mute, and I believe I wore the most blank and confused look at that moment. Had Brenda followed me to the library?

“Can I give you a call later tonight?” she asked as she bowed her head a little, pressed her lips shut and raised her eyebrows. The cue, meant to confirm my affirmation, made her look glorious.

“Sure!” I snapped.