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Normally I save my firepower for my seventh floor cold water flat neighbour, Itindi Wanga. Every Saturday after her leisurely weekly shower, she will send the water cascading down to my washing hanging on the fifth floor balcony, dirty Beryl-coloured water which I am sure contains the chemical element beryllium (look up your period table, and no, it does not occur once every thirty days).
Beryllium, when exposed through skin (my hanging line clothes), can cause a life-threatening chronic condition called berylliosis, which causes shortness of breath (which is why Beryl thinks she leaves most men breathless). On the upside, beryllium is a relatively rare element in the universe – like Wanga.
But today I want to turn my guns on my man, Silas Nyanchwani, who fancies himself a bad boy and who like a helium balloon, has made the journey from Nyamarambe in Nyaribari, Nyamira, to Nairobi to New York, in a few short years.
Now the ‘bad lad’ fancies he can lecture Kenyan women last week ati they are Miss Mediocres who can ‘be dated on a man’s terms’ before heaping praise on the Women Humans of New York. Said Silas: ‘These empowered women all know what they want from life. From the onset, they tell you if they want a relationship, don’t want you or are just DTF!’ (Down To ****).
Clearly, Nyanchwani is enamoured of this white and Western ‘In Your Face’ approach to life, lust and love, including the acronyms – WTF is DTF? – going so far as to say, “It makes me regret being Kenyan.”
Wait a minute, right there, boyo. Kemboi is still doing the Kemboi dance 20 years after Beijing, in Beijing, and Vivian Cheruiyot has gone straight from new motherhood to winning 10,000m gold as a 32-year-old woman, and you regret being Kenyan because of a few foreign women you have run into who have either rejected you straight to the face, or agreed to a quick ONS?
Honestly, this calls for an Omogusii Banyamulenge intervention, a mail box to bring you the spirit you left in Kenya, when you left. True story: Buried deep in a back bottom drawer of my study table is a picture I keep, not because I treasure it but because it reminds me, as a warning, of the treacherous ways of the white woman.
In the picture, I am staring contentedly at the camera with a glass of port wine in front of me. Draped around my shoulder, like a silk shawl, is the white arm of this 33-year-old blonde who in the photo looks very smitten.
Her name was Constance Bachelor, and I met her on one of the travels to the Western hemisphere. She was from California, and we had an instant connection. What some folks call Chemistry. Of the beryllium kind! For a week, Saturday to Saturday, on that memorable summer mid-week in June, we were inseparable.
We went for poetry workshop classes together. We ate lunch and dinner and had in-between drinks together. We visited a convent by the seaside (Cathos know how to ‘snatch’ great prime property), had dinner at the Ritz’s restaurant, a fabulous time at the Four Seasons, and on the dawn she left, ostensibly to ‘go sort some real estate issue back in California,’ I even got the bedside note that said ‘you’ll always be the tsar of my heart.’ Besides it was a gift – a brand new original costly Chelsea watch.
I pined the parting of my lady Constance ... until a week later when I saw pics of her across the border in Spain, drinking champagne with a handsome young man by the sea. O, the pain.
I wondered if a week later he would wake up to a dawn-lit bedside note that said: ‘Miguel, you’ll always be the prince of my heart,’ complete with a watch with Messi’s round face on the clock face.
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