walk the line II: the white dress

‘You will meet many men, and they will promise you many things’, Atsango recalled, as she finished her business with the mama mboga. Her mother put a special emphasis on this. ‘I don’t want you to turn out like me’…
‘W-w-would you like a cup of… Tea?’, he offered, as he saw a small, austere shack, blackened by soot, surrounded by a mismatched collection of tables and chairs and whose sign offered ‘Chai Moto Kila Wakati’. A sign, he thought to himself. But a sign of what exactly? He was feeling particularly vulnerable. Unfamiliar environment, strange people, and now her, Atsango.
So they sat in silence for a couple of minutes, unsure of where to start. Attempts at talking should not be such hard work, he thought. But why was it so hard to talk to her?
As she looked at this stranger, the honesty in his eyes, coupled with a strange pain that she could sense under the facade of blankness. No wonder she gave him her name so easily, especially after the spectacle with the potatoes. That was where she saw who he really was. Vulnerable and hurting.
‘Let me get that’, she added, making a motion to wipe away a spot of mud on his face. She saw the scars, and they were fresh. He tried to hide them, but her questioning eyes made him realize she had seen them.
‘I fell’, he offered, but she didn’t buy it. She had seen far too many scars on her brothers to take his word for it.
‘You certainly fall a lot’, she pointed out. The potato incident, that would not be forgotten any time soon.
‘What is her name?’, she asked. Men, she had come to learn, did not fight for just anything. It was either women or money.
‘Who?’, he asked, hoping she would not notice his attempt at evasion. But she did.
‘I hope she was worth it’, she added.
‘Love does that to you’, he responded, looking away.
But was it really love? He certainly loved her, he was sure of that. She was certainly interested in him.
Wait, was she interested in him or what he had? He had always ignored this feeling that was now looming and provoking such strange thoughts.
Of course she loved him. She had to love him.
The fights, the note, the sinking feeling after she left, how easily he was now talking to this girl he barely knew about this person he had given so much of himself to… Was he so blind that he could not see what was right in front of him?
‘What have I done?’
As the tea was poured into chipped mugs, and a large chapati was put between them, he realized this was not a fight he would win any time soon. While she pursed her lips to cool the tea, he started fidgeting with the note. He wanted to show her, but then that would scare her off. Who wants to be the target of some stranger’s emotional baggage? Who wants to know what lies in the recesses of the mind of someone they barely even know?
Then again, a sponge, he reckoned, can only soak up so much before it starts leaking…
So he started laughing uncontrollably, much to her shock. ‘Funny how we spend so much time hiding who we really are’, he started, ‘only for some accident or another to shatter everything we spent time trying to hide…’
As he sat there, laughing and making a scene, she could see just how much pain he was in. But hers was a much darker pain.

walk the line

Maybe it was the taste of yesterday’s party lingering on his tongue, maybe it was the smell on the clothes he still had on, but something was pushing him to take a long walk. Not just any walk, the kind that leads to no good. he smiled inwardly, not sure why, but it just felt right. And at that precise moment, the idea hit him. The railway. he could walk along it and get somewhere. Anywhere. He was not particularly drawn to anything at the end.
“Just follow it and get somewhere”, he thought. “It’s daytime, nobody cares who you are. They’ll all be too hot and bothered to pay any attention to me.”
So he dressed down, put on something he thought people wore when they made potentially bad decisions. Long discarded flip flops and t-shirts with faded print. And track pants. Yes, the track pants he used to wear when he still went for basketball practice, before they ruined his knee, before everything really.
Satisfied that he looked quite ordinary, he set out to leave the house when his phone started ringing. It was the boys. They wanted to know (or rather their girlfriends had made them ask) if he’d gotten home ok, that the previous night was wild and they should do it again soon. He said he was fine, though it didn’t sound particularly honest, being as they were the same clowns who put him in trouble in the first place.
Feeling through his pockets as he walked, he found a slip of paper. Folded neatly and then crumpled up. It had been in the wash, so some of the ink was faded, but the pain he felt was not. Even though it was torn in half, he remembered all it said.

…don’t like the way things are going.
I am sorry about everything, about leading you on.
But you weren’t what I expected. I know guys have issues, but sheesh.
Get over yourself. Lose my number. Sorry it had to end like this.

As soon as he got to the tracks, he had a sense of purpose. Not sure how or why, but he knew he had to get to the end as a matter of urgency.
Walking, past the cheap plastic sandals and the stacks of tomatoes, the men high on busaa and the repair shops that promised to fix everything, even broken eggs…
It didn’t help that he stuck out, despite his best efforts. Or maybe that was just in his head. They were all looking at him, wondering why he left his perfectly good, loving home, walk all this way when he most likely had a car to play around with for the week, wreck and get a new one just like that.
But that was when he realized, he was thinking for them. They were going about their things, oblivious of his intrusion, oblivious of the fact that the pain from the scars on his wrist was starting to ease, even though they had healed a long time ago. Oblivious of the fact that he had, at some point the night before, gotten into a fight and bruised his fist over some girl whose name he couldn’t remember.
He turned around every so often, but nobody was staring. Nobody would remember he was there. Nobody would mark his passing. It was a feeling he craved. To be anonymous, to be unrecognized. To be ‘one of those people’…
And then he saw her. She literally filled his field of view, plain white dress billowing in the slight breeze. She was buying vegetables, tucking her purchases into an old supermarket bag. He had forgotten he was still walking, and the moment he realized he was still moving, he tripped on a rail and fell at her feet, sending a debe of potatoes rolling away.
Shamefaced, he got up, made a motion of collecting the potatoes to the sharp rebuke of the mama mboga, and turned to go away and forget everything, but at that precise moment, he asked her what her name was. This was completely out of character, he explained to her, but he just had to have her name.
‘Atsango’, she replied, showing an ever so slight gap in her front teeth.