Simps will See Dust 02

I squirmed uneasily in my seat as I struggled to bring my breathing to a calm rhythm. The incessant perspiration made my skin clammy and my apparel― the blue AMSUN t-shirt that every time I wore I would bump into the same people, which almost made me want to explain that it wasn’t the only clothe I had, even though that wasn’t entirely false― uncomfortable. With such poor ventilation the Examination Hall wasn’t so forgiving and I wondered why my colleagues who sat by the windows had not deigned to open them. But who had the liberty to worry about windows when the fear of unpreparedness and the likelihood of failure threatened to draw a holler of desperation from you. The promise to study at home was one easily reneged on except if you were Njoroge Maina, who from the look of his calmness and composure seemed prepared and ready for this exact moment of his life, I envied him. I looked up like a luckless idiot and irredeemable fool to the invigilator who was just handing me the list to sign my name, and as I was yet to recover from the traumatizing reality of almost missing my paper, I was unable to find the words to explain why I neither had my student examination ID nor my school ID.

“Write.” She instructed a little pensively but still firmly and in a peevish tone so unlike her beautiful and kind countenance that seemed to go ahead of her nasty and foul attitude excellently deluding single, desperate and miserable male comrades who for their apparent knack at mistaking kindness and courtesy from lady colleagues to be love, had been very disappointed and heartbroken in that particular frontier. I wondered why doctors had to be so irascible, or probably a beautiful face didn’t necessarily mean a beautiful heart. The moment she laid the paper before me, a drop of sweat broke from my chin and soiled it. Once again, I abashedly looked to her face, prepared to meet the most irritated and basilisk glare, but when she saw the expression of bewilderment and suffering that was painted all over me, she smiled; a piquant and reassuring smile that made me retract my irrational censure a few seconds ago. She handed me her pen when she realized that even my stationery seemed to have ganged up on me at that humiliating moment. With her stay extended at my desk, I could feel the piercing and questioning glances of my colleagues towards me. It was impossible to know what they were making of it.

When she finally walked away, I heaved a sigh and shut my eyes as I rehashed the events of the dream that had so risen my hopes only to dash them down again. I felt broken and cheated to be denied something that I had desperately yearned for eons now. I had thought myself an alexithymic and the most apathetic and socially awkward yet contented person who had no need for love, believing Medical School to be engaging and demanding enough, and to have myself pining and simping after someone was not something that seemed prudent to me to do. However, I knew it in myself that this was a disposition inspired by timidity rather than priggishness, and afraid even of the opportunity to fail, I wittily avoided such miasmic musings regarding romance. That was until I met Brenda. No. Until it became impossible not to love her because I know I hated her first. But did I, really? Her graciousness had infected and soaked every atom of my life. She had broken into the parts of me I had been embarrassed to face and admit; that everyone needed love in one way or the other. Even those people that had been hurt and disappointed, those who had been betrayed and repugned, who were used and abused, they needed love to heal and be whole again.

“When I feel like not studying, or this or that, I stop thinking about it and sit down and study.” I overheard her explain to Kelsi one day as we were coming in for our Histology Practical. Since that time when it had turned out to be insufferably difficult to rid myself of the thought of her, I had always hovered around her like a hungry vulture around the carcass of a buffalo, only that I never came down to have a taste of the meat. So, even though I never told my love vocally, if looks had language, even the merest idiot would have surmised that I was head over heels; and I have occasionally been tempted to think that behind her bedazzling and incapacitating smiles, she understood me― but I would always shrink icily into myself, like a snail, and tear away my glance from her eyes that seemed endless and intense in their depth in a manner that was so hypnotizing. Even though it hadn’t been real, the thought that she had accepted my proposal made me want to see her desperately.

“You have half an hour to go!” boomed a stentorian voice from the other end of the hall.

What! I gasped as I looked at the Pathology essay paper I had barely begun, and it slowly dawned on me that my infatuation would be my nemesis; aside a broken heart, I would be carrying a failed grade back home.