‘Alilo’ Trust.

Trust

trəst/

noun: trust

    firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.

    "relations have to be built on trust"

I suck at swimming. It doesn’t bother me much because after all man was not meant to live inside water by any means. The holy book says God created the first man, Adam, and put him in the garden of Eden and not inside some pond behind the garden of Eden. That’s my succour whenever I sulk for not having a day that falls short of ‘fantastic, tremendous, the best, terrific, big league’. You’d think I put in a lot of effort to learn this rather amazing art of swimming having publicly admitted that I suck by alas, I don’t. My efforts only go as far as letting my friends try to hold me afloat like a log and watch me fail for the millionth time. Its normally a short-lived win before I sink. 

“Umecheki hio?”, I’ll ask Goddy, a colleague of mine that has a bias in ‘duff mpararo’. 

“Nini hio?”, 

“Naeza float sasa”. Sassy laugh. 

“Uko na umama sana”, he’ll jibe. He’s a hater.

“But at least nimeimprove”, I’ll say and go sunbathe the win for the entire afternoon.

Actually, when I say I’m going for a swimming session it means more like going for a ten minutes walking in the water, five minutes’ underwater swim and a two-hour juice-feted rest on the pool lounge chairs. 

I once considered hiring an instructor but then what’s ego and what’s too hard for a man to fix by himself? Floating? Tiny issue. Or so I thought. 

Why can’t I float? My umpteenth epiphany on this came at Utalii Hotel. They have a fabulous pool and good chicken wings but the salad needs salvation. And Samawati band plays there, alilo too close to the pool the guitarist can actually trip and end up in the water – akichezea chini ya maji. You see the kind of thing wamunyotas call moment of clarity between bottles of beer? I had that but I don’t think mine qualifies to be called a moment of clarity since there was no beer and no ‘shaking of tombo’. I had it in the pool’s deep end. Sitting on the pool-ladder I dared my butt to do a mini dive into the overly clear water and to let the water do the rest and boy wasn’t that a very stupid idea. Fun but stupid. I did not drown because duh…I can hold my breath for kedo 4 mins and swim like a motorboat in that span of time from here to Timbuktu. But still it was nerve wrecking. A spot between scary and sweet. I made it across to the opposite pool ladder but man, I was exhausted for days. That’s beside the point though because what I’m driving at here is that I lack the slightest bit of trust in water. 

They told me if a hippo could float I surely could float in a bid to build my confidence but then hippos have their thing going which perhaps its ancestral for them whist for me, I don’t ever remember my old man talking about swimming in any of his ‘siku zetu’ tales. Also, this was said, 

“Look Wesh, just pretend you are on your bed and let go, breath slow and be still”. 

Good thinking but dumb to me because, one, my bed is not made of water, and two, it would take a ritual, a meal prepared by that salt bae guy, a good bank balance and mutura motivation for me to let go knowing I’m supposed to lie on water. It’s just impossible. 

Some years ago, in Kisumu, under the scorching sun plaguing the city I exercised the easy way of finding if I could trust big water, which of course would be to lay my very lack of trust aside and give it a go. I was a Dunga beach, a popular place if you know your way around the lakeside. This was one of those random college plots that are drafted over the Saturday morning’s black tea and mandazis. I remember we visited a children’s home, they had one of the best swings I have ever tried. Bless them. Then off to the beach where a boat ride is 70 bob to and from a place I’d call middle of nowhere. 

Now here is the thing, the boat people, akina Otis, won’t take you to the middle of nowhere just to watch you and your college girlfriend’s play with water and not charge you. They charge for the wait and so being the broke college fellas we were, we told them to go back and come back after two hours. That immediately entered the book of dumb things I’ve done over my early life. With no swimming skills and water rising to the chest, we simply waded about like baby ducks in circles for two hours. Two freaking hours! While at it I thought why not try float like a pot. Another dumb thing if you’re counting. I drank enough water to last me a year without thirst even in the sweltering sun. When kina Otis came back for us we were all sulky and tired. They’re actually nice people because they never forgot to come back for us. Imagine the headlines had Otis decided he had made enough for the day and headed to the Dunga bar and lounge to drown away his frustrations? We’d have drowned along with his frustrations.

I know people abhor the idea of trust. I am one of them. Much that they cannot trust their own shadows at times. An African saying goes that ‘trust not a naked man who offers you a shirt’ and in all truth that is logical. 

'Me I say trust'.

With all my science knowledge, not a lot actually but enough, hours of NatGeo water documentaries, hours of YouTube swimming Olympics fails, and heck even live sessions of people swimming I can’t still find a way to believe water can hold me up like my bed does. My little cave of thought is that water is never to be trusted. Ever. A truth I manufactured to keep me safe from the scary alternatives. 

Quite the opposite I have learnt to trust people first, until they give me a reason not to trust them later. 

The whole reason I penned this down is because of everyone in my circle that behaves like everyone else is how I see water; not to be trusted. It makes more sense to not trust because less trust less disappointment. A little princess opened her hurt to a charming prince and he broke her hurt, he trampled on her trust and now all she does is update ‘men are trash’ on twitter and ‘MKZ’ (Mukuru kwa Zuckerberg or Facebook if you like 😊). A senior bachelor bet everything on a lady in red, she stole his heart but then she turned out to be into night running and now he calls all ladies witches. A guy building his fortune met an investment analyst who promised that a shilling today will be a hundred shillings tomorrow if tied to a piece of ‘buroti maguta maguta’ somewhere in Ruiru only to find the land is owned by him and forty other Kenyans. A streak of ills. Dark and gloomy paths of trust.

But wait.

Imagine the possibilities of trusting again. I might dive in the deep end and sink again or end up with a medal on my neck. Intriguing much, yeah?

It can’t be that hard to trust again, can it?

Me as a Lifeist

I turned 25 on 21^st of January.

****

I threw a great party. Hit all the right spots for a millennial’s heated night. Weed. Alcohol. Women. A hired ‘DJ’ who’s actually a friend that is trying out DJ-ing as a career. He’s a self-appointed music connoisseur but his taste is still very rusty for a DJ. Everyone knows it but we don’t tell. At his age his ego is higher than a kite. The party was pretty wild. A tapestry of music, dancing and emotional outbursts. People wigged and jigged their bodies most of the night. We tasted the peak of zonked-out the whole of the week to follow. 

Party kicked off at about 10.00 pm. Dj Lee on the laptop playing every popular song he knows from Mugithi to EDM. The first hour was slow as low-slung chit chat bought time for intoxication to kick in. This only lasted until a quarter past 11.00 pm when it all span into a full-fledged house party. (When you hear someone break into a long ‘woo-hoo’ its normally the cue that its ‘bout’ to go down. A long ‘ye-aaaah’ also does the trick). It was music and booze all the way. 

Then came the frequent breaks where half-drunk friends signaled the DJ to turn the music because they had something ‘important’ to say. Of course, they had nothing important besides emotional reminiscence of pasts they barely remembered, saying “aki tumetoka mbali bro” and using the words “birthday boy” and “Yolo” in every second sentence. They swore a lot too. And there was a bit too much hugging. (I wonder how I got into bed with a lot of emotional drinkers). You all know the lads that are teary and all when they get to the third bottle.

The night grew older and we got turnt. 

My mans Kevo came in at around 1.00 pm and boy didn’t he bring life to the house. Kevo is the guy that always saves the day with a mzinga or its equivalents. He never fails the “changeni tushike mzinga” plots. That night he worked a night shift. He works a call centre in town and they have this crazy supervisor that shoves them into different shifts at will. I imagine he is the kind of boss that barks and employee fracas to a corner in terror.  I know you’re wondering how Kevo brought life to our already turnt night. Well, he brought weed. And not any weed but The Weed. 

You’ve got to know that in Nairobi, there different types of weed. There is normal joint and then there the stone stuff. One has stem and seeds in it and then one has plain cannabis leaves. Kevo knows the difference and the dealers like the back of his hand. Maybe even where it is grown. This makes him instrumental to the how high that we often get at parties. Better still he knows how to cure hangovers. A plus for every after-party recovery. I bet he could make a career out of it. So, he showed up with the ‘devils smoke’, as we since call the weed he brought. It took a few puffs passed around through kisses (weed people understand what I mean) and rolled up joints to get from in-door-sweaty-bodies-hands-in-the-air partying to rooftop-screaming-wailing-wriggling and passing out partying.

Over the calm night with warm winds you could hear us wail in the darkness. Miley Cyrus’ ‘We Don’t Stop’ blared from the house which now had all doors and windows open and we chanted along, like an anthem. 

“So la da di da di, we like to party, dancing with Maggy (actually its molly) …” 

We all shouted “Hell no!” in unison at the “…if you’re not ready to go home can I get a hell no..” part. 

I felt like a god. We all did. I mean who cares if we were making noise for the neighbors? That was least of our worries. We just wanted to go on forever. Lost in a daze of exciting insanity. The last thing I recall is pointing and counting lights afar off at what I think was about 2.30 pm. They sang a blurry happy birthday song to me and we wailed along to Nyash’s Mungu Pekee. The chorus mostly. After that, I’d be lying if I say I had any recollections. A mystery how I woke up from the bed on Sunday noon. Although Kevo keeps bragging of how he saved me from a night in the cold by dragging me all the way to the house as I kept yelling at him about why people need to fear God. I don’t believe his story.

My house got trashed. Houses get trashed after wild parties, right? Wrong! They get disorganised. You wake up to find things in shamble. Plates on couches, disposable cups all over the place, one broken glass beneath the bathroom sink, a wig on the carpet and maybe a soda stains of the carpet. That’s shambles. But trashed is different. I know this because that is what I woke up to on the noon of Sunday 22^nd January. 

Let’s start with the painful one, my smart TV was shattered. Moh, the ex-girlfriend to Dan, Kevo’s cousin, and I think current girlfriend to Chudex (there’s a guy we call that because it’s all he does), apparently was fighting another chic that came with Kate, a former gym colleague (I quit because gyms are lame), because the chic spilled Vodka on her. She threw a bottle at her and it missed and hit my baby. I have been watching movies on my laptop since Jan. 

The spilled Vodka ended up on my couch too and guess whose house has been smelling of Vodka ever since. I will avoid mentioning the number of vomit spots that I counted all over the place. Then there is the shoe in my fridge. A fucking shoe in the fridge! Nobody knows how it got there but Kate swears I put it there while trying to hold open the fridge’s door as my innovative solution to cooling down the house. 

“But si I have a fan for that!”, I told her.

“Ulisema fan iachwe ilale”. I could only respond with a “hmm”. 

Worse still the fan was on and the fridge open, ledged with a broom, the entire night till I woke up.

Perhaps at this point I should tell you the crew that slept over. Biggest number I have hosted yet. Lexi and her chics all slept in the sitting room. She tagged along three of her friends and since nobody was there to drive them home and they were too drunk to be passengers for an Uber leave alone to find their way home, Kevo insisted they stay till morning and by morning I mean noon because we somehow partied till 3.30 pm and woke up at noonish. There is Kate, Mike, Mose, Kach, Miguel (real name being Mbogo), Nyash (not the musician but short for Onyango), Stano, Caro (I have a thing for her), Moreen and Lydia (despite the fact that she lives one floor below me). A big crew you can tell. They made a mess trying to fix breakfast and made sure everything in the kitchen was dirty. Everything. 

Only the door was locked when I woke up and I could feel my throat being tormented by the cold air. Actually, I never knew if it was the cold or the alcohol or both. The toilet’s flush system was broken and I was out of toilet paper. The air inside there was worse than the ten bob public restrooms in town. I couldn’t find the air freshener although I later saw it on the rooftop cut in half. I had nothing edible in the house by the time the sleepover crew were done with breakfast at lunch. An empty food shelf and water as the only drink is a sign of a crowded party. The trashing bit is completed by the hole in the long couch which Stano made to hide weed when a neighbour threatened to call the police over the noise. How ingenious of him!

****

I know my friends reading this story are palming their faces and wondering where I lost it in life. Well, deep breathes everyone, I have not turned into a party animal or anything the story above professes. That’s creative writing. Of course, I turned 25 but that’s it. Okay and maybe I am a tad irresponsible than most of you but it has always been like that. And those that disagree to this it’s cool too. I am the good person you know. 

I creatively wrote this inspired by my neighbors that throw such parties, I turn in bed at 3 am and I can hear young women wail and shout over loud music from afar. Does that bother me? Only if it disturbs my sleep. Typical millennial birthdays go down like this. I have seen someone who got too drunk that they had to lay in the sun shirtless to detox their body. Or just for the fear of dying, I am not sure. Do I differ from my generation? No. Would I do the same stuff for a party? Nyet. (I have standards, a faith and morals and don’t do drugs). 

Actually, I wouldn’t want a party. I never had a party because 25 came as a reminder that I have very few years left to be irresponsible. I can chase girls around, decide to do nothing all day and complain that I am tired at the end of it, eat one type of meal until I feel my body begging for something else, waste my money better than the government wastes our taxes, refuse to listen to people, stay out late and suffer the consequences in delight but only for so long.

In the meantime, I have decided to be a lifeist. How? I am making a to do list of scary things. Imma do those things and well see where I land next. 

This journey has to be worthwhile.