Clambering Over Elephants and Other Life Threatening Preoccupations

I suppose it would be better, for both our sakes, to start in the middle, flowing where the narrative takes us. We begin our tale a longish time ago, in a land where giants are occasionally eaten by minnows. Our hero (it's not conceited of me, styling myself the hero; it’s my story and I will tell it however I like) is going through a transition period. ‘Awakening’ may have been a better word to use, except for the implication that before this crucial span of time, our hero’s life had been nothing but a prolonged siesta. It’s disrespectful and degrading - shame on you for thinking that!

Negative sentiments aside, our hero was close to achieving her goal - a complete transformation of character. Already she could feel herself changing, the layers of her former self sliding off to reveal the tender new skin underneath, soft as a babe’s behind, and full of promise. Our hero had tried for years, in vain, to discover the secret that would be central to her metamorphosis. After hours of couch surfing and occasional research to stave away boredom, she found the word she had been looking for: conformity. It was so simple it was cruel. Why try to pinpoint one area where you are lacking (and is it ever just one?) and fix that, then have to do it all over again when a different issue arises, instead of moulding yourself to the factory standard - as close as one could get to perfection - so you never have to change again? As soon as she understood what needed to be done, our hero approached the problem with the ruthless efficiency of an army general, unfazed by the dedication required to overhaul nearly twenty years of damage. Sometimes she caught herself smiling. Things were heading along nicely on the path to happiness. 

Something had to come along and ruin it. It did not even have to walk in through the front door (No…Don’t get mad. I swear on my granny’s grave I didn’t mean to objectify you, it just leaked out, all right? I’ll change it. Promise you’ll forgive me? Great. I feel better already) - she, not it - waltzed into our hero’s life, shattering our warrior’s ironclad will without having to bat an eyelash. Before you chide me for being a cliché, I would like to point out that this is not your typical hero-falls-madly in-love-with-mysterious-passerby penny dreadful. It is neither cheap nor full of lewd material. Everything in this love story is 100% authentic. I would tell you to ask our hero’s mother, who was present for much of the falling, but there are things, to this day, she refuses to talk about for reasons clear only to herself. 

Our hero’s mother may agree with the insinuations about the extended siesta. Her sofa bed has a hero-size dent in it, adorned with the crumbs of a thousand and one midnight snacks devoured with careless abandon. By far the most startlingly painful experience for her - surpassing even the casual handover of empty Tupperware containers in the mornings, often licked clean (Judge me. I dare you. Go on. I’m not going anywhere, and neither are you) - was the loss of her ajua board. It’s hard to remember exactly how the hostile takeover of the living room was executed, but our hero emerged victorious, the board being part of the spoils of war. And what a glorious battle it was! Composed of a plethora of sights and sounds that threatened to baffle the senses: the whacks of wooden chair legs reverberating through the posh estate, opponents poised in amateurish stances on their noble wooden steeds, the intensity of the duel waxed and waned for several days before reaching its pinnacle. To celebrate her triumph, our brave conqueror played ajua fervently against herself many times, losing almost as often as she won.

(I’m aware I have strayed a little from the epic Bildungsroman I promised you; as you know, my sweet potato, my mind wanders over the wonders of everyday existence. I’ll try to stick to relevant anecdotes from now on. Do not concern yourself with the trivialities I have just shared; they have no bearing on the proper meat of the story.)

In the days now long departed, our hero was a shy, nubile young debutante, having finally emerged from her self-imposed exile after conquering arrested development. Let me stop you before you drive yourself into a befuddled state. You are probably thinking, “That’s a metaphor for something deeper. If I deconstruct that sentence and analyse it word for word, I will find a hidden message.” You are wrong. I mean all of it literally. (Denials are worthless - I know how your mind works. Don’t insult my intelligence.) Anyway, since all that happened in the past before there was a past, there’s no use dwelling on it too much. A lot of it is sad and does not show our hero in the best light. A quick run through, perhaps, then we can move on to the top shelf of whiskey.

In the beginning, our hero was in a state of transition. She had shed her living room-lounging, midnight-snacking self, but had not yet developed the skills required to survive in the ‘real’ world. Our hero had not been like the other children. The difference was not startling enough to make her an exotic danger, but striking enough to leave her on the fringes, spared by the existence of others more peculiar than herself: those from mothers from Korea or vitiligo or sharp intelligence, the kind that created slashes of envy so deep even a pantomime of harmlessness could not staunch the blood. What complicated the matter further was that although our hero knew that there was something wrong with her, she did not know what it was. At first she was too young for it to matter. As she grew, however - or rather, did not grow - the conundrum’s importance increased accordingly.

In her mind, the problem took the shape of an elephant. Not the calves in the city orphanage with their tough, wrinkled skins and beady eyes that sometimes let you stroke their trunks. It was one of those fully grown adults with deceptively soft, curved tusks that glow in the darkness; yet when they raise their pillar-like legs and trumpet, the sound echoes in your ears for days afterwards, rattling your teeth and giving you dreadful nightmares. She imagined herself standing on one side of the elephant - she could never tell whether it was left or right - trying to claw her way over it. She could not say why it was so important that she get to the other side, but somehow she knew that once she did, she would be content.

Before you think our hero a complete dunce, let me explain why she did not go around the elephant, or better yet, wish it away (You know it can’t be that simple. There must be cosmic laws preventing such a thing; all seemingly straightforward solutions are actually based on oversimplifications of complex issues…look, there’s no time for me to explain this perfectly plausible hypothesis). The problem with ignoring the elephant in the room (or in this case, your mind) is simple: it’s a freaking elephant! They stick out. The harder our hero tried to push it out of her mind, to fill the space (her ‘room’) with different thoughts - positive, negative, ambivalent, it did not really matter - the larger the elephant grew, looming over her, demanding her attention. It is almost as if it fed off her desperation. The greater her desire to get to the other side, the harder it was to scale the monstrosity in her head.

Nothing lasts forever, thankfully, because it is plausible our warrior was close to snapping. The elephant gave her some leeway; such games are only fun for a short while, then they become an exercise that continuously creates boredom. Or perhaps our hero outgrew him, as she outgrew couch surfing and midnight snacking and tabletop duelling. I dare say the elephant is still walking around in her skull; the echoes of its footsteps sometimes cause her to shudder violently. It would also explain the migraines, and the occasional trumpeting sound that involuntarily escapes her throat in times of peril. In fact, I think her head is aching at the moment. It might be a coincidence, but so is mine. (Fine, fine, I’ll stop it. Yes, I’m aware that it may not be healthy to refer to myself in the third person. But first-person narration is so limiting! Besides, it’s just the two of us. Nobody else needs to know...)

EPILOGUE

Three days later, our hero writes a note to her fiancée, the faithful listener, and mails it to the clinic where she works. Our hero will wait one week. If they return the letter back to sender, unopened, with an apology indicating that no such person is an employee of the clinic, then the elephant has won. If her fiancée drops by to reassure her (or check her into a psych ward), then she has won, and can finally silence the elephant permanently. It will be a nail biter, but our hero does not lack patience or courage. She has been afraid for so long, terror is a familiar guest; just white noise in the background, slightly irritating, but nothing to be concerned about.

My greatest fear is that none of this is real. It’s happened before - remember the epic duel for the living room? I asked my mother about it recently, and she told me a slightly different version of events. I was screaming and shouting, making unreasonable demands and imitating mediaeval war cries. She was so distraught, so unsure of how to help me, that she conceded wordlessly and left the room so I could not see her tears. I was never a conqueror; I was just a black hole of narcissism, secure in my delusion because it was easier than admitting that I was hurting, that being different scared me so much, ostracising myself was the easier option. Maybe I never fixed the glaring flaw in my personality. Maybe it can never be fixed, because some things just work better while broken. Yet every day I worry that maybe you are not real. You, who has saved me from myself repeatedly without even knowing it. You, who I love almost as much as I love myself. You, who turned out to be better than my wildest dreams, and then some - how could I have possibly imagined someone as amazing as you? If are but a figment of my imagination - why didn’t I conjure you up sooner? 

Utterly, irrevocably yours,

Wangechi.