It was him

It didn’t sit well with her that she had fallen in love with a man three years younger than she; she had done the arithmetic in her mind a million times already; 2003 minus 2000. Was he even a man or just a boy? She did not understand herself, neither did she understand her waving affections. Just like other principled ladies in the field of medicine, even though she never put it out explicitly, she had desires and ambitions of being anything but a wife; she was a career woman before she was a family woman. Maybe she would get married, maybe even fall in love, but it was not something that nagged at her heart the way she was drawn to creating her space in the professional world of health care. She was well respected, probably feared a little by her peers who thought her such a resolute and stern lady to indulge trifles. Yet her kindness and amicability was known to everyone of her acquaintances. Her smile had a bright glint in it and a warmth that made it easy to engage her in conversation. Her attention was so pleasurable and her lady friends and male alike always seemed to revel in it. The only passion that had seemed to greater than her desire to succeed in the medicine was her love for God and an unquenchable desire to be a vessel of his using. Her dedication was to eternity and her life had very little to do with the vile things of the day. That’s why romance had been out of the question until he got to meet the young man who had strangely taken the reins of her heart and stole her peace.

That morning, it was unusually cold and she had covered herself in a blue fluffy shawl. Her steps seemed heavy and measured, and in the depths of her smile she was miserable and shaken. The whole of her knew she was clutching at sin but her heart had been really stubborn in letting the thought go. Just the thought of the idea had something despicable and unseemly about it, and after a few minutes of analysis seemed obviously repugnant and unrealistic, but as the consciousness of its clandestineness grew so did the vehemence of her affection. The ongoing realization that such a kind of affection was not only unacceptable but impossible caused the roots of her desire to grow deeper and more obdurate. It was not something she could openly confess to her peers and so she concealed it in the depths of her heart that was clearly growing more desperate and forlorn. Maybe she had allowed her heart to grow so cold and she was becoming a little carnal. Had she forgotten all the lessons she had learnt about purity and reasonableness. It was not that her desires for her colleague had anything to do with a sexual underpinning, it was the kind of fondness that made her to pine for him when he was absent from fellowship and prayer meetings. It was always delightful to have a conversation with him. She loved how he looked into her eyes when he spoke to her about anything. She might have wanted to be shy but she never was, instead, his kind gaze only warmed her heart and made her hope the moment would last forever.

She soon understood that her feelings were clearly an infatuation that needed to be nipped at the bud, and surmised that she only needed to set her priorities right again. Her love for him meant nothing, if it was love at all. And so it was that she gave her time to reading a few books on love, dating, and marriage. None of them made any mention or gave any illustration of how a lady would handle the reality of falling in love with a man younger than she. How she would handle her fate was therefore left to her conscience and the scriptures. As she lifted her hands in worship, tears flowed from her eyes, her knees wobbled a little bit and she almost lost her balance. She gracefully went on her knees and a cry rose up in the depth of her soul. ‘Lord, take this vile thing away from me. I can’t bear to sin against you in this way!’ She sobbed herself away. Those around her admired how ardently she prayed, and hated themselves for their self-consciousness that made it impossible for them to raise their hands and call on God with such passion. She would have laid prostate on the floor was it not that the worship session had just wound up and the praise session was beginning; she might also have soiled her dress for the floor of the hall where they held their Sunday services wasn’t as clean and as pristine as her hostel room; besides, she had trained herself to keep a guard over her religious passions that might have been seen as excess and unseemly zeal. She managed to gather herself up in the same graceful way she had gotten on her knees, then she reached for her purse to get her handkerchief and dry her teary eyes. All of it did not matter anymore, it was now time to praise the Lord. Someone came in to occupy the seat beside her. She didn’t look, she knew she looked awful, and she didn’t want to show it to her neighbor. So she didn’t turn to say hi to the person as she would normally do.

‘Turn to your neighbor and give them a high five!’ came an imploration from the stage. She managed a smile and turned to the neighbor she had hitherto been avoiding. It was him.

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.”