whatelse do you call a blacksheep

yeah you know what. i think i am beginning to really like him. i can't just love people who really love me. i feel safer with people whom i know they don't really love me. why is that? but this guy loves me so much and he is patient with me. and i am just going to walk into this fear. yes the fear is just overwhelming. but if i am alive, then i must live. he loves me, i like him, and if i overcome this fear, i can love him too. it is easier said than done though. wish me luck

I love that he always wants to be with me. I know this is contradictory, but though I value my space, I love it that he thinks me worthy of all his time.
I love that he cares a lot. He is caring, trusting, too trusting it’s sometimes scary. As it feels like … I don’t know
I love that he has a huge crush on me. I am the first girl he asked out. He seems to think that’s important. I keep messing up, his friends keep asking him to stop getting himself hurt, and he just doesn’t give up. I love that.
I love that he is 5years older than me
I love that he seems to know the things that matter, and those that do not. He said ‘you’ve known me for three years, if I wanted sex from you, you should know by now’ that’s so true. He doesn’t want sex. F.Y.I: he just said it, I did not ask him
I love that he is interested in the fact that I want to be  writer. He reads novels just to be able to discuss them with me, although he did science. I always wanted a guy like that. He said he would edit my first book, I won’t let him, but I love that he wants to.
I love when he psyches me in Igbo, it just sounds very sweet, and I can’t stop laughing when he does it. And he could be funny in a dry way sometimes.
Finally, I find it so easy to say ‘I love you’ to him, I don’t feel like I am being pressured into anything. Gosh, am I just deceiving myself. What even is ‘I love you’ I am just so confused. Today I tell him I love you, tomorrow I tell him I don’t. it’s just as if I should watch him for a whole life time and see if he would just keep being this good. But I can’t.
This is a risk I have to take, and I am afraid of taking. I need someone to push me. and when I finally take that leap and feel like coming out back, who would help me stay there. Am I just supposed to take all these things for granted and just date. God, it’s been long I had that feeling of letting go. I want to take that leap towards my carrot-stick

Lately I have been wondering. Maybe there really is no right and wrong
Maybe we just define right and wrong according to our conveniences
Maybe We defend our actions, call them right, just because we were forced to do them
Maybe all the rules we make such as ‘nothing would make ever make me steal, nothing would ever make me pose naked for a white guy, nothing would ever make me …’
Are just for our own convenience
I am convinced I would never take another man’s life
But then a man has never pointed a gun at me, and I had an opportunity of pulling the trigger first
Maybe we should stop trying to define good and bad
Maybe we are just indulging our ignorance
Maybe we have not just yet encountered the kind of problems that can make us do that which we call bad
Maybe there is a level to which you get pushed that would make you steal
Should we stop making these rules
And just live our life as it comes. What am I driving at? You may ask
It is about my carrot-stick. He is so nice it is sickening
Is it possible to not just like someone, as if nothing he ever edits in himself would ever make you like him
To not just like someone, even if he has almost everything you dreamt of in a guy and he loves you madly
Isn’t it just naturally wrong to turn this love away. If I am his perfect love and I turn him away, when I find my own perfect love, won’t I be turned away. Talk of karma
Being in a serious relationship is something I must do one day, why do I keep post-poning it
Other girls do it, why do I feel I cannot just afford the energy it takes to be in a serious relationship
Why do serious relationships seem to do nothing but sap my energy?
Am I the strangest girl on earth, or this also happens to some girl somewhere
Am I the only girl in the world who says to someone today ‘I love you’
And tomorrow ‘I don’t love you, I don’t think I can love you’
I wish there was a psychic I knew who knew the future, I would love to ask someone
‘should I really go into this carrot-stick thing, is our future going to be great’?
Right now, I am just really confused, maybe I am still defining myself, maybe I am not ready for all the nonsense involved in dating
Maybe maybe maybe maybe, have you noticed my life is full of maybe
Talk of what might have been. Life is sha beautiful

There are some feelings I get, that make me assume that I am the only person in the world that gets such feelings. Most of them come when I am upset. I wonder if any other person gets these feelings.
When I am making my hair and this hair dresser keeps poking me with a needle and saying ‘sorry’. It gets to a point where I have to stop myself from standing up and killing him with millions of pokes from that long needle.
When someone dressed in a suit roughly pushes past me or steps on me, then murmurs ‘excuse me’. the suit annoys me, then the ‘excuse me’ irritates me. Why did he forget to say it just before he pushed me. I want to drag him back and jump on his shoes until nightfall
When someone sees me, then says to my Dad, you would soon start getting visitors on behalf of this your daughter’. That usually means ‘marriage’. The thought of it is scary. The mention of it pisses me off.
When a twenty-six year old guy I’m dating says ‘is that what you would teach our children?’ it makes me think he sees me as one of those desperate girls who won’t stay until promised marriage, and I like to make him suffer, each time he mentions marriage.
When I tried to jump the big poodle in front of my hostel, and I noticed someone has placed a stone in the middle of it, making it easier for me to cross without jumping. It gladdens my heart that a girl thought to do that, it irritates me that I never thought of that, and one day after crossing that poodle, I actually  murmured an audible ‘thank you’ to the girl whoever she was. That makes me think of soliloquy and how close it is to madness
Finally, I observe stupid things, I seem to notice the tiniest of things, I ponder on issues that do not matter to normal people.
I love to talk to people, advice them by making them answer their own questions, I love to know what lies innermost in people’s hearts. I thrive on pondering.
I think my other name should have been selah, that word you find in the bible which I learnt means ‘stop and ponder’ you find the word a lot in the book of psalms. Davids writes lots of verses, then selah-stop and ponder. My point is, people cannot seem to stop and ponder unless you remind them. But me, pondering is my thing, I think things, examine them, turn them upside-down, inside out, I am just a natural ponderer.
It makes me think of the saying that ‘some people are in this world as just observers’. I wish I did not have to say this, but if there is any body at all in this world who is stupid enough not to do anything but to just observe, that person must be me.
I observe, I wonder and ponder on things. I let most of the things I ponder on to slip away. I do not even let anybody partake in the thought. I cannot trust anybody, I cannot even trust myself. I am too afraid to do anything.
I am no longer the blacksheep, because I understand that I only owe explanations to myself, so having solved the problem of blacksheep, my new name here becomes Selah- the ponderer, that is until I can solve this my pondering problem. But still I represent Christ, the one who healed me. life is beautiful

Recently I have been wondering about luck, fate, and charms
I have a game in my phone where my top score is 5000, most people have never gotten to 3000 playing that game
Most times when I play with the aim of getting a new top score, I end up failing at 3000
But whenever I play absent mindedly, I find myself at 5000
Is that luck, fate, charm, or just the way the cookie crumbles
Anyway I was strolling around my village, and as an observer I began to observe, to stop and ponder.
I watched a mud house, where the woman of the house had 8 children, and had married a man who had over 15 wives, who when he was converted to christianity by the colonialists, drove away 14 wives and kept just one. The man was long dead before I was born, I heard the story from my grandma, and she told me that when the man died, most of the 14wives returned to live in his house. There is much more to the story than I would tell here, but anyway, the mud house belonged to one of the returnee wives
She had 8children, she married the man when she was as young as 13 and when he converted and drove her out, she fended alone for the eight children, some of which she had out of wedlock. She introduced some of them to stealing, some to dancing for money, some to be house boys. It has been over 5years since I lost my grandma, over 9years since I first heard the story and today as I walked past that womans house I stopped to ponder, that none of those 8-children, ever fell into luck or money, ever put himself through school, ever stole enough money, ever did whatever to put the woman out of that mud house, out of suffering, for the rest of her life. Those children are all grown up. Is that her luck, or is it just fate, or is it charm as everyone in my village chooses to believe
I walked past, the second mud house in my village, and I observe a rag adorned husband and wife, and their naked children trying to make palm oil. The husband was young and beautiful, the man very young and handsome, and I stopped to ponder. The woman had married the man knowing he had nothing, knowing he would not be able to fend properly for her, knowing he lived in a mud house. Was it because she loved him, was it because she got pregnant and her parents sent her away (yes they did), was it because in our society it was better to marry the world’s most miserable pauper than to remain unmarried. Was it just her luck, fate, or as she must believe charm.
Everyone in my village believes in charm. How convenient. People bring gifts to my mum, fruits, food, anything to say welcome. She thanks them and when they turn their back she pours it away and mutters ‘wicked people’. isn’t that hypocrisy, a waste of food, why don’t she just make it known that she doesn’t accept food from the villagers.
The most lucrative business in my village would be a prayer house. How they love to hear of some one tying them or keeping them in a bottle under some river. How convenient. How relaxed my life would be if I could really believe someone else held my life, kept it in a bottle under some river keeping me in perpetual unhappiness. How convenient that prophesy would be, if only I would believe.

Recently, someone asked,
What are you thankful for?
And I replied
I am thankful for ASUU strike
Many people would think that is a joke
But really, I have thought about it
All the depression of last semester
The days I spent crying on my bed instead of reading
The lots of night class to make up for the lost days of crying
The days I stared into darkness in night class, and thought I was going crazy
The days my mind wondered off in class…… so off
And above all, how at the end I was so sure I had run a good race, and I did not mind starting second semester immediately
I was channeling all my frustration into school
But taking this long break to think about it all… to ponder my dear
I am thinking ASUU went on strike for a reason
I so needed this break. To figure out myself. To stop all the cover up
Apart from being alone for two months with myself
I have been alone with my parents, UNDER THE SAME ROOF, for two months
And I haven’t gone crazy
Their extreme passive aggressiveness haven’t gotten to me yet. In TWO MONTHS
Gosh my parents are king and queen of passive aggressive club. So so so that it turned all of us into petty queens of it, (I would tell you in my next post)
That is cause to celebrate. And I would like to appreciate my diary
This diary has been good therapy. Making me discover myself. I write it, read it, then get to know who I was, and who I am becoming
I really hate the girl I was. I was this close to letting people push me to self destructing.
I love this girl I am becoming. Both in the real world and in my diary.
I am going somewhere and all I have to get rid of now is this terrifying fear that I am wasting my time
That I am too happy to be real
That one day, I would wake up and fall back from where I have come
Is it true?

just this craze to always be on top. yeah always on top. i doubt if you get that. do you. i mean i am on top. As in, first post. yahhhhhhh, now you get the drift. I am on top of the cyber cafe guy

I am reading 'The man Died' by Wole Soyinka.
I cannot believe i have had that book for over a year and couldn't get beyond the first chapter because of the writers complex language.

anyway, due to ASUU strike, and a terrifying lack of what to read, i finally attacked my copy of the man died. And it turned out to be one of the most interesting books i have read in a very long time. Not only is it the closest i have ever come to knowing the Nigerian-side of the civil war, the author is very objective and funny. And the words, i love the war of words, the plenty beating about the bush, which you get during interrogations. It reminds me of Isidore Okpewho's Last Duty (an equally excellent book) only the man died is non-fiction. About the author's experience in prison

the man dies in all who submit to the daily fear of humiliation. makes me think of the times when i am afraid to do some things i am supposed to do.

previously i saw Micheal Jackson and Professor Wole Soyinka in the same light. "too popular for my liking, and their stuff too complicated for me" But this is the second Soyinka book i am reading and enjoying and i think i am really liking the writer's style. 

i can't go beneath the fourth post. no, i always like to stay on top. i like uo

Staying at home is still fun anyway
I have a brother called Tarzan, because he doesn’t wear a shirt and likes to stamp about
A stubborn kid sister we call Micheal Jackson, cuz she is skinny and doesn’t like to eat
My prophetess mum has started her morning prayers again
Cuz her friend had a dream
Friend: which of your daughters is capable of insulting someone very well
Mum: Bright (me)
I can’t remember the last time I insulted someone, I know I used to, I still do anyway, but lately I have been trying to get a second chance, get them to see me as a new person. Guess that’s impossible anyway
Mama’s friend said she dreamt of me, and some lost blessings and stuff. Why did she have to ask that question before she concluded it was me she saw in her dream. Anyway due to her nonsense dream, we are back to waking up by six for morning prayers.(terrible, terrible, terrible, I tell ya)
I also have a protein diet, cuz someone recently dared to call me ‘getting fat’. Too much staying home, sleeping and eating, thanks to ASUU. So now it’s Dr. Atkins nonsense diet of meat, fish and eggs. Yet I do most of the cooking at home, cooking things I would not have the opportuinity of tasting. The worst is laying off the soft drinks, indomie isn’t even allowed, fruits are not even allowed, beans which I thought was protein, is not allowed too. Thanks to Dr. Atkins, and ASUU, I am now leaving the thankless life of a Nigerian housemaid.
So you get when I say, I have to go away from here. If they let me.

guys say: you must be a lesbian. that is the only reason you behave this way

girls say: if only i could look like you. guys would suffer

i say: i hate this stupid world. not the whole world, just my own little stagnated world.
it's stagnant. Carrot stick no longer calls me. i have driven him off with my hostility and really i dont care now

whatever. i want to publish a novel, that should be it.

or maybe i want to date a lot of guys, about ten at a time, have sex with them, why do i want to have sex with them, i dont know

i can barely let them touch me

i feel so far away from God

i believe in him, but i just can't talk to him

i don't know
but i am not depressed

i just feel like i am in a dream

i feel like this happiness i feel is fake

i dont know, dont mind me. i am kinda just,  what

Last night there was a terrifying banging on the gate.
It was a neighbor ‘put off your generator, we heard gun shots’ he said
Mum called her houseboys to put it off
In the silence, we could hear the gunshots
Dad was not home yet. We were scared for him
Everywhere was still open, so I started to lock everywhere with my sister, springmoon
Micheal Jackson (my kid sister) moved about asking us to ‘lets go and hide’
We ignored her and kept securing the doors
Tarzan (my brother) went to bed, claiming ‘big boy, not scared’
After securing doors, we went to dad’s room where mom had started praying
We started to answer dad’s phone which he left at home, see if we could get anything of him
My crazy dogs which won’t allow me a good night’s rest were as silent as a grave when they heard the gun shots
The house boys were at the backyard gate. Waiting to elope at the nearest gunshot
( I thought boys are supposed to claim ‘not scared’, like my brother Tarzan)
Anyway, Micheal Jackson was so scared she started running temperature
I relaxed when I started laughing at her
Dad called to tell us it was nothing serious
Mum begged him to come home, but he insisted it was nothing serious
He came back hours later and mum refused to talk to him
He asked her questions and I answered for her
He did not need the answers, he just needed her to talk to him
But I knew she was too angry to talk to him so I answered the questions for her.
Later dad went to bed
Mom sat in the sitting room with tarzan and Micheal
I went to bed with springmoon. There was more shooting around midnight
But dad had said it was nothing
So I was not scared

I started writing this short story a long time ago. something seems to be missing, and i just can't fix it. pray for me. read it. i can't blog it, until i know what's missing.

‘Solo, my name is Solomon, my friends call me Solo’

You say this to me, with your nose turned up like the buttocks of a sick chicken. As though, I am not your friend.

I know your name, even though you do not remember your own name otherwise you pretend as if you do not remember me. I am your friend. If you permit me, I would yet say I am your sister.

Brother, you lived just next to me, fourteen long years in the big man’s boys’ quarters. You lived with your father, next to the room where I lived with my father. Thin walls separated us. We used to rub our hands hard against the walls, to see whose hands was first to produce blood. Plastered walls, no paints, chipped plaster.

Brother, we did everything together. Sometimes we ate together, the children of your family and the children of my family, we dipped our hands into the same pots, even though our hands would often get stuck in the little pots, and the fish would always disappear.
We visited the communal taps together, old saclux paints buckets balanced on cloths on our head, and whenever mine would fall off my head, because the weight was too much for my frail neck, you would walk all the way back to the tap with me and fill it up again.

We fetched firewood, we stole firewood together, because our fathers had no farmlands. And the day the villagers caught my mother, in another woman’s farm. We watched together, as the village woman stripped her, and flogged her all around the village, as they do to a firewood thief. We watched together, the night my mother died because she could not recover from the beating.
We played in the moon light together.

You played oga with me. A game for little girls, were we clapped our hands and moved our legs trying to make the same movement with our partner. And I played the Biafran war with you, a game for boys, were we fashioned guns from sticks and tried to take the life our partner.
It was together, we realized, as children must one-day do, that the world is made of two deeply opposite shades.

Shades as extremely opposite as white and black. We had to walk with our bare foot, all the 8-miles to our school, while our fathers drove the big man’s children to school.
We were motherless and we cooked for ourselves but the rich man’s children were motherless, and our fathers cooked for them.
Together we grew very envious of the big man’s children, together we decided we would grow up to be rich, richer than the big man, the richest in the world.


The villagers called us ‘husband and wife’. When we were not together, they would ask me ‘where is your husband’, they would ask you ‘where is your wife’. Do you remember ?
Then one day when we played Biafran war, and you found me hiding inside the mmagha leaf, the leaf we boiled and drank when we had malaria, the day you found me hiding behind the leaves, and the flower was falling on my head, you said, without even bothering to shoot me dead
‘You look like somebody doing wedding, I would put this flower on your head, on our wedding day’
You said you would marry me.


At nights when we were not together, when we had gone to our rooms, I would listen, listen for every sound you made from your room. I heard the loud kpoi kpoi when you pounded your mother’s crooked mortar, helping your mother prepare dinner. I heard the swish swish from your tongue, when you licked the soup that ran down your fingers. I heard creaking on the bed when you and your mama went to bed, then I would wait to hear your papa’s heavy footsteps across the varenda, and his heavy hands on your mother’s back.
All the time, you would creep soundlessly to our window, and tap so lightly so as not to wake my father. But you always did wake him, but he always allowed me to slink out and comfort you

‘Tomorrow I would hit him back’ you would say to me.
Every day, you planned to beat him back tomorrow. But tomorrow never came. Because she left him, left you. You came to my window and you said
‘She has gone, I know she has gone’ and I watched tears run down your face. And I said in my mind
‘Don’t worry, I would be your mother’ I said it in my mind, but I know you heard me. I was a child without a mother, I knew how to be a mother. I was a mother to my four siblings, a wife to my father


And from then I kept my promise, you would pound the thin mortar, and my little hands prepared the soup. An even when the oil rose and the water lay low, and the achara danced around the water like frustrated children masquerades, you ate it. You ate it, I ate it and your papa ate it.
You do not remember the days you starved? You and your seven siblings.

You were very troubled, you wanted to take care of your younger ones, to be their father, but you had no money.  I told you not to worry, because I was your mother, I would provide for you.
‘Where do you get it’ you would ask, only after you had eaten to your fill
‘I steal from my father’ I would say
‘I wish I could steal from my father too’ your eyes would say ‘but he does not have any money’
Then I would make another silent promise, to take care of you. And I always took care of you, because you are my brother my big brother. The one I loved…
You would call me to the window at night, and touch my body, caress my sprouting breasts and lie on top of me. I used to like it.
Until the day, your papa saw us
That was the day he began to love me too.
I loved your papa, everyday. He loved me, and he gave me money and I took care of you. That was where I got the money. I got the money by loving men. I did not steal from my papa, my papa had no money.
Your papa’s love for me was vile. It was a hundred bees stinging a person around the eye. The fear of his love was worse than the fear of death. But I answered him, I loved him, for you and for the fear of my papa.
I loved your papa, until the day you saw us. Can you remember the day you saw us. I am sure you cannot. It is easier to fail to remember, even though the memories lie deep down within us. Even for me, it is easier to say to myself ‘I have forgotten’.
Your muscles were bulging, the day you saw us. You hit your papa with that crooked pestle. As you had always longed to do. You hit your papa until he fell. You hit him, and hit him, and hit him.
We called my papa, we took your papa to the hospital. We lied together. We said we knew nothing, that he had come home drunk as always, and he had come home beaten.


No doctor would treat him; your papa had no money for the doctor. We brought him home and you watched him die. You were asleep beside him, the night he died, and you crept to my window and said
‘He is stiff nwanne, he is not moving’ you said it and you cried. You were big now but you cried like you did the night your mother left. You hung on my shoulder and cried. And in my mind I made you a promise
‘Everything would be alright’ I said in my mind and I knew you heard.
But everything broke apart after we had buried your father. My belly started to swell.
You were the first person I told. I still remember the fear in your eyes and the question on your mind. ‘Nwanne, you are still a child, we are still children’
‘I am not a child’ I said to you. ‘I am fourteen and you seventeen, we are not children’
But deep within, I know the reason for your fear. You were afraid of being a father. Maybe I should have told you then, that there was no reason to be afraid, that the child could belong to anybody
It could have been your own
Or your father’s
It could have belonged to the man of the big house whom our fathers served
It could have even been my own sister, if one night of drunken love, could make a baby.
But I never got the chance to tell you. Because the next morning, I could not find you. I searched everywhere, and I could not find, and I searched everywhere, and I could not find you.
But I really wanted to see you. To cry by your window as you always cried by mine. To tell you how afraid I was. For the wrath of my father, for what people would say, for myself, I was so afraid, I searched for you, and you could not be found.
I told myself it was for your good.  That you would come back for me when things were good. You had run away for your good, nothing good could ever happen within our thin, platered, paintless walls, so you had run away for your good. I was happy for you, but still I searched for you
And years later, this is you, sitting across a fancy table in this fancy hotel.
I call you Chukwudi and your face abruptly acquires this folded look, like the buttocks of a sick chicken and you say to me
‘My name is Solo’
Are you certain you do not remember me? Because there are many things I have waited these twelve long years just to tell you
I want to tell you that I still take care of your younger ones, I have always been and I still am a mother to them. And even though you have made enough money to look after them, I still do it for you, because it is a promise I made. And now I know I would do it forever,  now I know you would never come back, now I know you would see any of them, any of your siblings and say to them with your nose turned up like that  ‘My name is Solo’ as if you do not remember
I want to tell you that my father never lifted a hand on me, after he found out about my swollen belly. Maybe he remembered his drunken night with me. That is what I tell myself up till today, that he remembered his drunken night with me. But then I tell myself a lot of things
I tell myself, that though the wall between our rooms was so thin that I could hear the swish swish when you licked your fingers, my father must have been too old to hear my painful encounters with your papa
I tell myself that on that drunken night with my father, he must have been too drunk to know it was I.
I tell myself that my papa was often too hungry to ask where I got the money for our meals
I tell myself a lot of things these days. That is the only way I survive.
I even told myself that if I could find you, remember these things together with you, then I can breathe them out, let them go.
Because sometimes my mind tries to play tricks on me, to make me wonder if all these truly happened.
I do not still know the father of my first child.
On the days when my mind seems like it wants to break forth in madness of thoughts, I would often find peace, by going to the cemetery. The place where you Papa was buried, where my papa is buried now            . I find my peace in that place. In the silence of the dead.
I live in that big house now. I married the big man. New people live inside our thin walls, and I would often like to stare at them and imagine they are us. Me, and you, all grown up with children, I always thought that was how it would all end.
But years later, I have found you, in your fancy suits, and fine cars, and you tell me
‘My name is Solo’


I have money now, my English is as fine tuned as your own. It is a life anyone would want. Why do I think it wise to re-open the past? Why do I think talking to you would take this twelve year weight off my chest? Why do I want to be like a coffin maker, praying for a customer, a professional mourner?
Why do I want us to play Biafra again, just me and you, and why do I want you this time to shoot me dead with a real gun. Yes I dream of it, I think of it, I want it.
Why do I want for a great wind to blow, and blow open the bottom of this sick chicken on your face.
There is no need going there afterall my dear. You must have realized that earlier, much earlier than me. I do realize it now. That we are new people.
If feels like we are playing oga, and try as I may, I cannot repeat the same pattern as you.
We have gone two different ways, ways that never meet. And now I know we would never meet again
Nevertheless my brother, don’t tell me your name is Solo, it is too much betrayal, for me your nwanne, your sister, your mother, don’t tell me your name is Solo please, biko, I beg you. Tell me you remember me, your sister, allow me to call you Chukwudi just one more time, and call me nwanne just one more time.
And I shall go home, and live in the peace of a graveyard

Why is it that the most disturbing things are the easiest to forget
And easiest to resurface from time to time
As a kid, my parents would often shave my head cuz I could not endure the pain of plaiting it
And from time to time, I would look like a boy
And one day, this friend of my dad’s came visiting
And I was playing nearby
And he came to me and said ‘cute boy’
And my parents laughed and said ‘she is a girl’
And he said ‘no, that’s impossible’
And my aunties and uncles all said ‘she is a girl’
And he said ‘all of you, stop kidding me’
And I said ‘I am girl’
And he said ‘come here’
And I went to him, and he lifted my dress, pulled down my panties to check if I was a girl
(right in front of my amused parents, and relatives).
Is it right for him to do that. Because I must have been about five or six years old then and I still remember it today.
There was this little boy in secondary school, our teachers son, we used to pull down his shorts every time to see how an uncircumcised penis looks like. Was that right?
They must have thought ‘she is just a child’
Then the other day I called a little boy to dance for me, and if he danced well, I let him sip from my ‘horse power’ and when I left the place, my cousin let him sip from his ‘Guiness stout’ till the little bloke was drunk.
Sometimes we do things like that and think the kids would grow up and forget.
It is just that there are some childhood incidents that just refuse to leave your mind
And when I remember this incident, I just always shiver.
Now they say my dad would be hosting him soon
And I have not seen him for over twelve years now, yet somehow I remember it was him.
And I am stupidly wondering if he remembers it too
But he won’t remember, it was just an innocent thing he did to an innocent child
Really no big deal, it is just my memories that refuse to fade.
I hope the memories of that little Muslim boy fades. I am sorry

Am I lazy? That is a topic for a later post
Right now, I want to talk about toughening up
The world can sometimes be a dangerous, wicked place
And the people who live in it, have learnt to toughen up
When we say the world is a wicked place, it reminds me of the song ‘we are the world’
Are we wicked people? Or we are just ‘unconsciously wicked while trying to toughen up’
Children sometimes let themselves be pushed about. Adults do not. Adults have toughened up.
Some kids have even toughened up. But lets check this toughening.
The toughening of most people too tired of being pushed around
It goes straight from inferiority to superiority complex
They are like so sensitive, always, always on the offensive
I see through people and most toughened up people I see just makes me say a silent prayer
‘God, I never want to be this girl’
We wrestle not against flesh and blood…
While toughening up, get tough with the devil, proclaim the good things God has said about you
Always correct people whom the devil uses to say negative things to you
Never be afraid of anything cuz you are born of love and a sound mind
That is my own idea of toughening up
Not being so uptight, with your nose permanently up in the air
And scaring fellow human beings and even little children
And breaking hearts. Every day outside, I observe people who have toughened up both consciously or unconsciously. Yeah some people just unconsciously toughen up.
I do not like these people, everything about these toughened up people.
I was at a hair salon the other day and this woman walked in, and started from the door to complain
About her hair, about how she was sure they would not know how to loosen her hair, and then how they won’t know how to wash it or how to fix it
She complained so much, I wished I were the salon owner so I could throw her out
Some girls you meet at the salon ‘Jesus’. Loosen this again, make this again, I knew this was a nonsense shop, start from the beginning. Gawd.
And the worst is, most of these girls that complain like this, there is absolutely nothing wrong with their hair.
I like to think there are girls who just love to hear their own voices, and by that I mean ‘ever complaining girls’
I have an ignore button, whenever someone complains to me like that, I just press ‘ignore’
I think hair dressers do the same

Have you ever been anywhere that just inspires you to write?
Or have you ever met anybody that just inspires you to write?
Turns you on, in a writing way?
I have.
My village makes me write. There is peace, the rest of the world is far away and there is so much grass, just as I always dreamed.
I also have a new PBD (permanent blind date) who turns on my imagination. Each day I talk to him, he says something that makes a story
He is a Sagittarius. I have always found that quality in them.
Sagittarians are sweet people. And he read one of my stories so much that he has some of the lines on his head. Just like two days after meeting me.
Sagittarians have a way of being interested in you, in a way that does not smother you. I love that.
I have broken up with carrot-stick. Did I tell ya
He went to camp. He was always calling me like everyday 30 minutes
And some days when I just did not want to pick, he called over hundred times
It was like slowly being squeezed to death
And people started to ask him ‘what kind of girl is this who doesn’t seem interested’
And he started to ask me what people were asking him, and I wasn’t interested
We talked long. ‘Why can’t you just love me’ he asked
I wished I had a love button, so I could just turn it on, and love him
‘Who said I don’t love you’ I said, that is always my reply, not ‘I love you’
We sha stopped calling. I called the next morning to apologize cuz he could be a nice guy and I had said a lot of terrible things. He still hasn’t called
Maybe he is waiting for me to call again and really say where I stand.
I know he would call again and when he does, I would tell you
But for me, I am grateful for this time to think
I do not love carrot-stick. And one of the most important highlights of going out with someone you do not love is that the break up just brings nothing but relief.
So good bye to carrot-stick era.
Dear carrot-stick, I really tried to love you.