You Can Still Capture your Dreams

You have ideally struggled all your life, even your birth was a struggle. Those days, there were no proper maternity facilities, there were no day cares and parents didn’t really see the need to have a house help. So, let’s say you roamed all over the house, you ate things including soil, you cried while your little older siblings played and would occasionally carry you in very dangerous and precarious positions – a couple of times they dropped you on the floor and your mum beat them and then you were silenced by breast milk.

Well, now you have grown, you have a degree or a diploma or a certificate. They told you education is the key – you grew up and realized the rich guys changed the padlock; but you still struggle. It’s about ten years since you graduated; you have a kid, two or more. They dress, they eat and they go to school. The youngest just crawls or walks in countable steps like a zombie holding onto everything and mumbling things that it only understands. You feel proud when you look at the little things shouting and darting all over the house like sodium cast on water. Your house has turned into a factory, you can never have the couches clean enough like you used to. They play and play – then at some point they will inform you they want to go to the toilet – and you wonder why they have to inform anyway. They make your world. You help with their home work and fight with them to have a meal – as if they eat while it fills your stomach by osmosis and not theirs.

You want to go to bed early because you have an early morning. Now you don’t even need the TV set you once loved; it now watches you as your tired frame rests on the couch every evening. You hardly turn on the home theater that you almost asked your neighbors to shut their small radios to pave way for the king of sound the day you bought it. You just drag yourself to bed after struggling to brush your teeth. When in bed you enter into your thinking flight. You think about so many things. You wonder why things are not moving. You wonder why you have no plot in Ruai like every other young person in office, you wonder why you have no mortgage commitment so far, you wonder why you are still plying matatus to work, and you wonder why you can’t go home every weekend like everyone else does in office because you know the cost implication. You wonder about everything else around your life. They say money speaks; the only word you hear yours speak is, “Goodbye”. Your eyes really want to close but sleep isn’t anywhere near you, you can peer through the dark and see it dangling on the veils of your sheers, you can see it open the bedroom window and fly away like a jinni, you want to cling to its tail but sleep slips out of your arms.

The alarm goes off. At some point you think it’s your neighbor’s alarm and then it rings incessantly and you remember it’s time to get up and start another day. You do everything in a rush until the time you leave the house you are feeling hot in the cold of the morning. You are stuck in early morning traffic in a matatu full of market women going to get fresh vegetables from Marikiti. You listen to Maina and King’ang’i not because you like them but because they will still talk whether you like them or not – it’s only the driver that has the power to shut them up. You go through your phone, you ignore the hundreds of texts from the whatsapp groups people admitted you to even without your consent – you even notice a new group created overnight – you don’t even know anyone in that group. You are now through with Twitter and walk in to Facebook. You read a few things and get a video with the tag, “Must watch” and you decide to watch. It is indeed funny. It ends and you can see many more funny videos so you decide to ‘jibamba’ until you get that text: Your bundle is running low…Blah…blah…blah and this reminds you that your relationship with Safaricom is purely business. Meanwhile, the matatu is just approaching the stage you are to disembark at, you alert the conductor but it’s too late. The matatu will pull aside a couple of meters from your stage. You are pissed. You just alight and walk to the office.

This is the place you have been for the last 3, 5 or 10 years: Nothing is new here. Everything feels and sounds useless like vocables. You have applied for internal vacancies – jobs that even your toddler knows you qualify but ‘Regrets’ have known you by name. You sit on that desk and the thoughts you had last night pick up from where they stopped. You wonder where you went wrong.

You haven’t gone wrong. It is just a period you are going through. And this period is calling on you to make some decisions – decisions that will change your future. Tough decisions that will call you off from the comfort zone; open a new window for you to transform knowledge to action and place a price tag on yourself - know thyself. Where I come from they say you don’t wait to dry from where you showered.

Alenga Torosterdt.