Unbanked Grief
A long drag through the bushes of life leaves your skin on the thorns. How expensive a sick body is.
Money is the lesser currency. The real cost is paid in the wreckage of lying down, staring across leaking roofs, for all the remorse I never get assuaged because my pulse is gone. Meals I no longer enjoy. Laughter that now creaks in; a cough tearing my chest. Matatus I board with a riddled body. A child I cannot lift.
My body gives me warnings. It starts small and clever, almost polite. A pressure behind my left eye that doesn’t go away. A slight tremor in my hand when shelling beans. Strangely, my chest tightens when the cows come home late and I bend to pick the jerrycan.
I am from a rigorous past. A bat and a man. I’ve known harder days. I convince yourself it’s the sun. Or salt. Or aging.
I ignore it. I normalize the heaviness and stretch it out into old elastic blada.
“Si ni kawaida.”
I take strong tea with too much ginger, sit longer on the stool and listen to KBC sundowner crooning. I mask the ache with work. Silence sits on my mouth speaking loudly. No one notices. Men here have died quietly for centuries.
My body is not a fool though.
One morning it sends the bill. It does not accept lip service or pesa ya kutoa in installments. It does not care that I have plans for planting season. It does not care that my daughter is coming to visit from Sweden in two weeks. I haven’t yet finished fixing the extra room. Or graded last semester’s papers.
“Now. Pay me now.”
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Suddenly the walk to the pit latrine is a pilgrimage. I have skinned the okita nearby. It weeps naked. My ass is raw. Red with soil. My urine turns the colour of regret. Amber and nightly.
I sit, naked on a stool in the old study where no one can see me and sob. It thickens my throat and blinds my eyes and makes me whisper my dead grandfather’s name.
“What would you have me do, Frankie?”
I no longer remember what it means to be well. The neighbours start guessing.
“Labda malaria.”
“Maybe pressure.”
“Or that thing returned. Osechandore gi tuo.”
Someone brings nyoyo. They know I love it. Someone else brings hot porridge. A cousin sends a prayer. No one knows that what I am grieving the version of myself that could still walk to the river barefoot.
Joy remembers me too. My daughter running across the compound with wet feet. Boiling sweet potatoes in the big pot outside. Lying under the weepy jacaranda tree after a bath, my chest still warm with soap and sun. The taste of fresh lemon grass on orungi. A woman’s touch on my back as she rubs me with warm towel after a fever.
What it felt like to be alive. And aching. From remembering that my body, too, was once a place of joy, my body is now a room with cracked walls and peeling paints and thuth milling the wooden frames. Rich memories have a calloused texture. I cannot bank grief.
A brief moment, just before the cock crows, I allow myself to feel it all; the grievous body, aching body, beloved body and the ruin and the bloom.
That, too, is prayer.
