January is like a high maintenance girlfriend you can’t dump

By BILL ODUNGA

KENYA: Januarys are like Mondays. Nobody likes them. Students, just like everyone else, abhor Januarys with a passion. Reason being, they are hanged over from the festive season, yet they still have to go back to school.

You will always know January is here because it is vain. It announces its arrival everywhere. That is because it is like a woman. The kind that changes her Facebook profile pictures every five minutes, and likes own updates.

When you walk around town, watch TV or grab a newspaper, January is written all over. And nothing proclaims the arrival of January better than back-to-school offers. 

In campus, January is that girlfriend who renders you destitute. She sends you many ‘please-call-me’ and asks for dates at joints that offer Chutneys for a kidney’s worth. Well, Chutney is just a fancy word for the good old kachumbari.

January insists on overpriced coffee, and she would rather hang from an electric cable than be seen at the campus mess.

She has style, she says. She cannot wear the same clothing for two semesters in a row — lest people begin to think she is on the breadline. She wants her nails done, and a change of hair, never mind that she had changed it last week. A woman has needs, and if you do not meet them, she will nag and pout and shift sitting positions in class. Later on that night, she will sleep in her jeans and face the wall.

Because most campus guys have the emotional IQ smaller than a pig’s dignity, they will hang on to this lady, regardless of the costs. So to maintain their image and her profligate standard of living, they end up borrowing money to keep her happy. They promise that by the end of the month, they’ll have made good the debt…but that’s a lie, and they know it.

January is the girlfriend everyone cannot wait to be done with. You pretend to be happy when you are really choking inside. She suffocates you, but when anyone asks, you fake a smile and pretend that everything is okay. Like a clown, you put on a show.

But January never leaves. She takes her time, nibbling every debt you borrowed in her name. If need be, she will make you take a student loan advance from Equity, and that, too, will disappear somewhere inside her bra. She clings to you, and you spend every day wishing you had known better.

This girl January is a reminder of mistakes and choices you shouldn’t have made. When you finally break up with January, when you leave her, you are like a miner lifted out of a collapsed shaft: deprived, exhausted, oxygen-starved, but still alive. Happy New Year comrades.