Always

Two

Two

           I yawn then lift my legs and carefully place them under me so they can stay warm. I take out my phone then try to read something to distract my mind. I still feel haywire. I doubt I’ll ever stop feeling this way when I’m in the same region as my Uncle.
           “What are you doing?” Nikolai asks because he’s still looking at me. He’s been looking at me this entire time. I mean I started it when he smiled at that time but I gave up the moment our eyes met.
           Looking at him feels really strange. I don’t want to psychoanalyze it.  
           I turn my phone around to show him then add “Just reading,”
           “Do you like to read?”
           I nod, then I assume that the conversation and go back to reading “What’s your favorite book?”
           I give him a look, I can’t help it but I’m not the most talkative girl in the world and I especially don’t like striking conversations when I’m trying to read.
“A conversation is small price to pay for my hospitality, no?” He’s wearing that sheepish smile again so I can’t help but smile back at him. My heart can’t help but start racing again.
“Yeah, okay. My favorite book is Mabala the Farmer.” I can’t even say that sentence with a straight face but obviously he doesn’t get the joke. That book is like a children book and even though it was one of my first English books to read, it just highlights that you’ve never read a book outside the classroom. I would meet guys who seeing that I liked to read would say that they did too and whenever I asked them their favorite books would be Mabala the Farmer which was pretty bad because that meant they didn’t remember the books they read in form 3 and 4.
“Is it a funny book?”
“You should look it up, it’s a typical Tanzanian story.” I say and then “But it’s also not my favorite book. Bad joke? I think Love Rosie is my favorite,”
“I think I saw the movie to that one,”
“The book is just much more…real,” it’s also kind of depressing but so is life and that’s what I loved about it.
“Your English is impeccable, have you lived abroad?”
I shake my head no, “I just watched a lot of movies growing up.” Mama had this neighbor who was really good at English, I loved it and she would encourage me to speak it, watch movies and translate them for me. Then when I got to secondary I had a really good English teacher and that’s just it.
“So what else do you like?”
I don’t know why this question makes me look at him weirdly but it does, this is the question guys who try to court me ask.
“Uh, music,”
“What kind of music?”
“Do you read?” I ask, because I should have asked this when he asked me but I’m self-centered that way. I forget that asking about the other person is how you get to know the other person as well. Not that I’ll see this guy once I leave here.
“I think my parents made me hate it, they made me read too many classics,”
“I tried that once, but the English was so complicated and well, classics just don’t relate to my life you know? I’ve read African Classics, but European ones are just meh to me.”
He laughs, it’s a silent laugh with no sound just lip movement “It’s the same for me.”
He’s sitting across from me but somehow it feels like he’s closer now.
“So what do you like,” I ask putting my phone away.
“I like mountain climbing,”
“And?”
“Hiking,”
“And?”
“I’m not sure, I never get enough time to just – have fun?” I don’t know why he phrases it as a question, as if he’s asking for my opinion.
“Yeah, but you have to know what you like,”
“I’ve mostly been told what to like,”
“How old are you?” I ask, my voice getting elated now.
“25, what of you?”
“19, but how can you be 25 and not know what you truly like?” there is laughter in my voice, cause I’m laughing at him.
“You’re younger than I thought,” he says “And I do know what I like I just never did have the freedom to find it for myself, I’ve been told what I should enjoy and for the most part I do enjoy it but it’s more out of habit than anything,”
“Okay, I won’t judge.”
“Thank you,” he says uncrossing his legs and spanning them out. They are very long. “So what kind of music do you like?”
“That’s a tough question,”
He raises one perfect eyebrow asking me to explain.
“I like all sorts of music, it just depends on what I’m feeling right now,”
“Feeling?”
“What I’m into?”
“What are you into right now?”
I smile, because the kind of music I’m listening to right now was completely perfect the day before yesterday, before whatever happened, happened “Well, I got the album of this artist I was into for a while whose first album I couldn’t download. So I’ve just been listening to it on replay.”
“You seem pretty excited,”
“I am, I get very excited about music but most of the people around me don’t like the kind of songs I like.”
“So who is this artist?”
“James Bay, he’s British I think, have you heard of him?”
“I doubt it,”
“You have to,” I say rummaging through my bag to find my ear phones.
When he sees them he tells me to just connect my phone to the Bluetooth speaker in the room. I do.
“First you have to listen to Let it Go, this is the song that made me fall madly in love with him,” I play the song, I sway with it as it plays singing under my breath.
“What do you think?” I ask when it’s over.
“Not my usual cup of tea, but…” he waves his hand in the air as he tries to find the words.
“Not bad, yeah?” the way I say it it’s obvious that he has to agree with me.
He laughs at my enthusiasm “Yes, not bad.”
I play his album Electric Light, it starts with that intro where there’s a guy (James, I assume) and a girl talking.  
He stands then walks around the room as if he’s contemplating something. I listen because this album has weird soothing powers for me.
After a while Nikolai sits next to me. I smile at him. It’s almost as if he only stood and pretended to walk about the room so he could sit next to me. My favorite tract, Wild Love starts playing; I tell him it’s my favorite. We listen silently, I lay my head on the arm of the couch, he sits with his back straight and his head facing up.   
When the album ends I ask him what he likes.
“I doubt it’s your cup of tea,” but he connects to the speakers and plays an instrumental song, it’s nice and I actually recognize it as Beethoven but I can’t remember anything past that when I tell him this I can tell that he’s surprised.
“You listen to classical songs?”
“Not at all, I play Piano Tiles,” I can tell that he’s clueless so I add “It’s a game.” I proceed to open the app in my phone to show it to him, we then play in turns. He’s pretty good from the get go; I mean he succeeds in getting all three crowns. He credits it to his piano lessons, to which I say it’s not fair when my turn ends so I play 2 rounds.
It feels nice to just talk and laugh with someone after the month I’ve been through. Tomorrow is mama’s arobaini; the fortieth day since her death. We were supposed to meet and discuss how to distribute her wealth but the only thing mama had that can be distributed are her hundreds of pairs of khangas.
I can feel the little solace that I’ve found ebb away as it dawns on me that I won’t be able to get even a single pair. Every time mama bought one, she would tell me that I couldn’t use her good khangas, she would always tell me the time would come when they will all be mine, she always insisted that when she did die they would all be mine anyway. And now that she’s gone none of them will be mine. Not her gold set of jewelry; nothing.
Nikolai jolts me from my reverie with his hand on my cheek. He’s looking at me with worry in his eyes; another emotion to color his stoic face. He looks at me as if he truly cares for me.  
“Sorry,” I tell him “It’s just been a very long day and it just hit me that it’s going to be an even lon-” my voice catches and in an instant there are tears in my eyes already spilling, I quickly wipe them away ashamed to be seen this way “Sorry,” I say again.
He wraps his hands around me enveloping me until my cheek is on his chest and then he says “It’s alright to cry,”
Perhaps it’s because the tears were always present, I had the largest lump in my throat. I hadn’t cried since before mama passed. I didn’t cry at her funeral, I mean not really cry, I just had a few tears fall but the kind of crying I’m doing right now? I haven’t done that since mama first got sick. She used to be the one to hold me this way. She would place my head on her thighs and softly whisper “Shhh” even though she never meant to make me stop crying until I was done. She used to believe in letting the floods come out.
I can’t keep them in anymore so I let them come out. It’s hard not to when every bad memory comes to the fore of my brain. Their remnants flashing by like pictures in a motion movie. The morning I woke up next to a lifeless body of mama, the day we buried her and I was the only one who was saddened, everyone else seemed to relax, their demeanors saying good riddance. I’d known that they were tired of taking care of her. I’d come back from more than once to find her with her own vomit even though she was in a house full of people. The day it sunk in that I was truly alone, the same day that Uncle started asking for his money back, the money he’d used for mama’s hospital bills. Yesterday afternoon after my life was threatened at her grave site, the mound of soil that I will never be able to cement, the terror I felt coming over here. All of it seems to squeeze more and more tears out of me.
The words why me lord want to pass through my mind like a mantra but I won’t let them. I remind myself that everything has a reason.
I might go mad if I don’t believe that.