Whilst you judged us for the sins of our youth, important that you know It’s the truth…
Jane, at the age of 30 years, is not actually as old as she looks. Her naturally black hair that is ever unkempt sluggishly falls down her shoulders like a weed left to grow where it’s not wanted. Like a rose at its withering stage, she is a story of withering beauty; beauty fading under the scorching heat of reality.
She quietly sits in her favorite corner under the dim lights in James’s dirty liquor shop and sips her beer, getting a word from her is like squeezing water out of the sun. She minds her business, but I’m that other drunkard who does not mind his own. We only talked once, and ever since then I have been trying in vain to force a conversation with her. Is it just me or it is the drink?
What exactly do you want to know about me? Is it your business? Well if you should know, ask anyone at James’s bar. They will tell you that more than thrice I have won a drinking tournament, tanking dozen of beers and waking up in a hospital. They will tell you that I am never late for the bar, and that I never leave before the bar attendant.
I wake up and take the leftover of yesterday’s gin as breakfast. I stagger outside and walk without a sense of direction. I don’t lay my bed. I don’t bath or wash my clothes. That’s why my white t-shirt has turned black. If you keenly look at me, you will notice my wrinkled face. You will find hardships distinguishing between flesh and bones. At 28 I still tell myself I will change at the right time. But truth is I am fading away.
For a long time now I and Jane have been common faces here. But it was not always like this. We lived decent lives; went to university and acquired education. But what did education benefit us? Do we look any different from those who never went to school? After graduation we thought we had finally made it, only to be added to the number of our countries unemployed youth. We were not born drunkards, we only sought for refuge from reality and thought we could only find solace and comfort in alcohol. We were respected in the community. We were our parent’s hope of salvation from poverty and we were as well their only pride. But that was long before we buried our dreams in bottles. Jane has been in one marriage after another. She has been used and dumped, used again and dumped. Don’t blame her. She’s not cheap, but men have their ways through desperate women. When she couldn’t find a job after graduation, she decided to be employed as a house wife so she could at least eat and have a roof on top. She did not get married for love nor was she married for the same. Then she became a punching bag to her man. He would punch her at will. When she threatened to leave, the man helped her pack her bags. She now lives in a small apartment on William Street.
She detests men and anything called love. But don’t misunderstand her, back in the days she was not like this. Like most young and naïve girls, she loved desperately, when she fell in love, she didn’t only surrender her heart but her soul. And every time she thought she had found true love, the worst would happen. Her heart has been repeatedly broken. When she realized, or rather thought it was unfixable, she embraced the ugly truth.
I use to think I had the best love. Then I found myself struggling to keep one girl after another. They all left with no reason. Sometimes people just leave.
It’s not their leaving me without cause that landed them in great misery, I was not the best for them and I wished them the best. Just that there is always that lousy guy not worth of love finding it and wasting it. I gave up trying and resorted to reading my books, hoping that someday I would graduate and make some money. For money avails one anything, even a woman of his dreams. Then I struggled for six years with a course of four years, not failing, but ever being kicked out of the final examinations room because I had not paid tuition fees. And when I finally finished, I remained as poor as before, no job, no house to go back to, save for my father’s one bed roomed apartment.
What do you know about my family? Is it your business anyway? Well if you should know, my dad left my mother when I was 16. He left her with a family of five boys and one girl. When I last saw her, I was only a kid. I doubt if I can recognize her if I saw her now.
With no job and education, my mother toiled day and night to at least keep our bodies and souls together. Before he left, he would beat up mum at will. If it wasn’t them fighting, it would be me with one of my brothers. Though we had peaceful moments and happy days when we sat together as family, chatted and laughed, they were few and can barely fill a page. When things got worse, we all got lost in the world, we have never seen each other again.
Isn’t all these too much for a soul to bare? Why would you blame me if I sip my beer?
“Waiter, bring me more beer.”
“Go home I want to close.”
What’s wrong with this ordinary bar attendant? “Stupid woman. That’s why you will die poor.”
“I would rather die poor than be wasted on alcohol.”
Wait! Did she just say that?
“It’s because of drunkards like us that you’re able to survive. Half of my hard earned money is spent here.”
“From which work? At least my children didn’t waste their degrees in liquor shops”
“What do they have to show for all those years in university? All they gave you is a penny paying job in a tiny dirty bar that accommodates broken lives.”
“Like yours. Will you leave or should I force you people out?”
she’s furiously shouting at me.
“Is there no place that one can find a little rest in this world?”
“May be you should try heaven. Get out!” She’s shouting like a mad woman, it’s her who appears broken, not me. Jane won’t say a thing.
“Jane are you just going to sit there and keep quiet? There you are walking out. Won’t you join hands with a fellow drunkard and fight against this oppression by bar owners against poor drunkards?”
I am not in the mood of fighting today. I will just leave. Nothing hurts than a fellow broken and wasted person calling you broken and wasted. I would have not taken this from that bitch. But I guess I am now used to insults, and most times I don’t even complain, just that sometimes I get tired of being reminded of the useless and worthless person I have become, for I know well. But that’s how sorrow plays its pleasant games of making sure its victims never rest.
With my bottle in my hands I stagger out and wander in the streets under the street lights. There seems many lives wasted here, here in this side of the world, cold and Godforsaken. I by pass many of them, children sleeping on the verandahs of closed shops, women dressed half naked displaying their bodies like some merchandise in some super market, without shame. The smell of marijuana and liquor fills the atmosphere. Jackson is at his usual place, in a corner of one dirty and stinking corridor. He has been living here for years now. Those who know him well say he studied medicine from Makerere University. After graduating with a first class honors degree he sought for a job and found none. In quest for a peace of mind, he resorted to drinking and smoking. Then gradually his body started changing shape, loosing flesh, his eyes sunk inside their sockets that you can hardly see them. He stopped bothering whether he was smartly dressed or not, neither did he wash his clothes any more. They say his parents really tried to fix him. That more than thrice he was taken for rehabilitation. But whenever he was out; back into the world, he would find reality waiting for him. He would merely start from where he had stopped. It was obvious he was gone, gone for good. Even if I had the power to give him back his sanity I would not. For the poor lad seems happier in this states. He believes he is living his dreams. He believes he is practicing medicine. He is ever in a dirty stained white doctor’s gown, I don’t know what name it is called. Don’t blame me, it's not the alcohol, I didn’t study medicine. Ask me a bout constitutional Law, criminal Law, or jurisprudence; anything in law but not medicine.
His friends call him Dr. He is ever discussing prevention and diagnosis, bacterial infections, viral infections, and many other terms that only those who went to medical school can understand. All these knowledge, wasted and wasted.
I will not say hi to him today, not with my last drink in my hands. I am not prepared to sacrifice even a drop. I know if I do say hi to him he will see it and automatically ask for some. Sorry Dr. Goodnight.
I haven’t got lost today, I haven’t gone around knocking on some neighbors door thinking it’s my own, as if I even life live with anyone to open for me. I am back, back to my little castle. I leave some liquor for breakfast, just in case, you never know tomorrow may come.
Word around town today is that Jane has been found dangling on a rope dead in her small apartment. Those who went to the suicide scene say she left a note on the table next to an empty beer bottle reading: " May be its better in heaven as they say."
To me she died on the very day she lost her way trying to find herself. Poor girl, many will rush to condemn and judge her, but I won’t. Though we have not been so close, her death is going to be so hard for me to deal with. It was better having her a round, just to remind me that in the world of broken people I am not alone.
I would have wished to attend Jane’s burial and bid farewell to a fellow soldier, but I’ve just learnt from a letter that mum is going to be buried today. It says she died of heart break, a disease that most doctors are still trying to find a diagnosis for. I was not there for her when she needed me, I wasn’t even there to at least tell her goodbye. I have been here, here in the city dealing with my own frustration leaving her to deal with her own pains and my own. May be if I had been there, maybe she wouldn’t have died.
Sometimes it’s only when we find ourselves in a thick darkness that we learn to notice even the slightest spike of light. Listening to father Patrick preach today at mums funeral is like traveling on a train to the past. It reminds me of who I was; that boy who seldom missed church, that young man whose faith would never be shut down by any kind of affliction.
“Today we gather here to celebrate the life of a woman who never stumbled on Gods promise, but was faithful and gave God glory even in her hardest times.”
But what did she benefit from all that? God should have rewarded her, but instead he let her die a poor and broken woman.
“ She didn’t see the Promised Land, but acknowledged it from a far, and thus confessed that she was a pilgrim on this earth, and as such, she a waited for a heavenly city, a city in which its ever day and there is no night there; a heavenly city. When she was deserted by her own family and friends, she confided in God and since then she has never been lonely.”
Why do I have this feeling that father Patrick is indirectly blaming me for my mother’s death. What was I supposed to do? After her selling all she had to pay my tuition, I graduated and gave back nothing in return. I walked the streets looking for a job and found none. So I decided to go to the city and try my luck. But sometimes when you fail and fail again, you get tired of trying; the phase that never give up only helped me waste my youth trying to fly. But then when I realized that God wasn’t stupid when he created me with legs other than wings, I embraced reality; that I was created to walk.
“God’s ways are not for us to understand. Sometimes when we find salvation, we expect a smooth road, sadly, the road gets rougher. But ever when you find yourself on crossroads, wondering whether to move on or fall back, ask yourself, are you the seed that fell in thorns, that thrived in grace but whose blossom was choked by the afflictions and pleasures of this life, or the one that feel in fertile land and thus bore fruits? Life needs persistence, you have to keep getting up when you fall. I know sometimes, it’s easier said than done…”
Inside myself I whisper, “in fact it’s possible to say it but impossible to do It.”
father Patrick is still preaching, only that he doesn’t know we are conversing.
“But those who make it through are the ones who dare the-seem-to be impossible. There are no shortcuts in life. The strength of a man is not measured by how he lives in soft times, but by his courage in hard times. This woman lying here, although now dead, has taught us how to live. May she be the fertile land upon which new seedlings will sprout and blossom fruits. Dust to dust.”
The sky is starts Darkening, the clouds are gathering, It’s not a good sign on a burial ceremony.
Further Patrick gets up, I thought he was done talking. He says;
“It was the dead woman wish that her children attended her burial, that at least on her day of departure, they gather to bid her farewell….” A sound of a siren of an ambulance can be hard from a not so far distance. Where is it coming from where is it going. it parks . is the driver mad or lost. There is a body of a dead woman being pulled out of it, its Jane’s. What’s her body doing here?
It’s obvious, another burial is about to begin. I am still trying to clear my mind to understand all these unfolding. Why didn’t Jane at least talk to me that day at the bar, why is it that she always never talked to me? What was that force that was always pushing me to her? May be if I had thought of these questions while sober, by then, I would have found some answers. It has taken me to long and now here they are; I have not only come to burry my mother but my sister too .Over the years in the city, we only identified as two broken people, broken together. Yet even then, I always felt that there was more that we shared a like. But Jane and I only talked once, even then, we never spoke of our roots.
How does one deal with the pain of burying a mother and his sister at the same time? How does one live with the quilt of unforgivable sins. For some time now I have been pondering on the words father Patrick spoke at the funeral and I’ve been searching for a way out in the scriptures, my only hope of Glory.