​I HATE YOU VALENTINE

“Listen! I don’t care whether you are at work or in the toilet. Just tell me whether you really love me and I will sure as hell leave you in peace!” She said.
“You know…” He began.
“You know what my ass! Tell me Eli! To my face, do you love me?”
                              ****
At Maisha Mart, in Maraba in Kakamega County, Jolene and Katutu are window shopping. Well, these are among the many instances that window shopping doesn’t turn into actual shopping. 
“What’s the next hairstyle you’re plaiting girl?” Jolene asks.
“Crotchets, maybe. I haven’t made up my mind. But I’d like to see how I’d look in a weave.” Kat says. 
“Uuuwii girl you gon be killing them.” Jolene says and slightly slaps Kat’s back. 
Kat gets hold of a Darling weave on the shelf. “So damn expensive.” Kat says. 
“You won’t be ashamed to look at the most expensive things in the mall when you get a man who spoils his lover.” 
“Jolene give it a break!” Kat moves from the hair shelf to the makeup shelf. She thinks and says to herself that the makeup there is fake.
“Kat come on. You have never had a serious relationship with a man ever since I knew you eight years ago. All you’ve had are men drooling over the treasure that lies underneath you.”
“That’s no man’s treasure.” 
“But it can soon be one man’s treasure. One that will treat you right and own up to the possession of that ‘cat’ down there. Just like my Jaymo.”
“Really Jolene?” Rolling her eyes. “You think that’s all I want?” 
Kat walks off to the furniture section. Her mind is boggled by what she’s hearing. It’s the feeling you get whenever peer pressure is getting too strong. 
                                ****
You see drugs are bad yea. They make you see things that aren’t there. But relatively, peer pressure is bad. It makes you believe a lie as the truth or twists facts to make sense in a different angle, in fact a wrong angle. Peer pressure many times doesn’t occur by word of mouth. In other words, it only takes you to see what your friends are up to – to be convinced that you have to be like them. They don’t need to literally tell you. 
For instance, I have a beard. Mjangos who find leisure in talking about me have now commented saying that I have officially joined the beard gang. But my housemate doesn’t have these precious facial expressions called beards. Through his association with me, he behaves like he wants to have them. When I’m combing my hair, say we are just about to leave for some place, I’d comb my beard and guess what, hehe, he’d comb the strand hanging on his chin. But he knows he wouldn’t look good with a beard. That reminds me that one of my girl friends just started dating a guy with an impressive beard. Girl, if it’s the beard that you fell for, my beard has been here all along. Hey I’m just messing around, hehe.
How about this, everyone in your mjango gang is dating but you? You’re as single as the strand on my housemate’s chin. Before long, if you’re a dude, you start to feel like you can go on your knees for any girl and if you’re a chic, whoa, you start to feel like you can go on your knees too before your crush. Whenever your mjango gang meets up to club, they show up with arms locked to each other as you lock your hands in your pockets so they may not throw tantrums of jealousy surging up inside. You seat at the VIP lounge with leather seats in the club and the conversation takes a hike to cloud nine. 
They start to talk about how they left before class was over only to finish the class behind a closed door in the washroom. Or how she lied to her supervisor on the first month of her internship that she was going to go to hospital after lunch break but the hospital was inside the car in the basement parking in Lifestyle Building in town. Or last weekend after a friend’s bash, the entire gang decided to spend the night in one of the members’ houses because it was nearby. You know those one bedroomed houses that feel like bedsitters? The ghost of libido must have been in town on that day, because the entire gang got down to it and the rest sure is history for you. Why? Because you were not there. You left the bash too early because you’re not the type that goes to bashes. You just go because your friends are going and in fact, your mama warned you against such things. 
Maybe you also don’t want to read yourself in the next blog on The Mjango Series after some chic slapped you when the booze that you’ve never drank past half a mzinga incited you that you can kiss her and she’d like it. It tells you that she’d like it since your ex girlfriend told you that you’re the best kisser. That she has never felt electricity while kissing a guy like the way she does when you two kissed. What you do not know is that she was glad she left because anyway, she has never liked the way you cannot tame your teeth while kissing. You also release too much saliva. Now you think you’re a good kisser, good enough to randomly kiss girls in bashes. Or young lady, you don’t want to read yourself in the next blog on the Mjango Series for having a little too much to drink that every guy, even the nerds in the bash went home thanking their lucky boxers for the opportunity they had to lay hands on the flesh of all fleshes. You’re now the newest member in the whore rumors in campus. But then, you didn’t go. 
However, maybe had you gone, you would have found him or her there. You know, the mjango peer pressure has been on your neck about? Saying that you need to be dating as soon possible. That you need a woman to make you feel like a King or a man who will make you feel like a Queen. That one that will make you find a reason to cease your affair with the shower head in your bathroom you young lady. Or that one that will make you cease your toxic affair with Vaseline under the blanket you young man! The two of you, drunk in love at first sight, would have probably accompanied the mjango gang to your friend’s house that feels like a bedsitter but ain’t a bedsitter. Only then, would they not tether their tongues to blabber in reminiscence of the events of that night in your gang member’s house. You swallow something hard because now you feel like an outcast. 
Now you feel like leaving and coming back with the hottest chic in the club or the most masculine guy in the club. No, something better. You feel like applying for a slot on perfect match on Ebru TV. You really want a perfect match for yourself now more than ever. You miss or rather you long for someone, a sweet mjango who will be telling you that everything’s going to be okay even when it’s clear that that shit is too deep to get out of. Lady, there is some coldness along your waist that can only be made warm by the arms of a man wrapped around you. You long to have that hand wrapped up in such a way that it operates along the borders of your waist and your curvaceous bum. He may not notice, but your brain keeps recording every movement of his arm like a computer recording log files. The log files in your brain are coded in form of the change of your heart’s pulse rate, fluctuation of blood flow to certain areas of your body, amount of sweat released, the level of acidity in your tummy, the speed of adrenaline flowing to and fro your spine and the bandwidth size of hormones leaving your brainstem. 
Your lips are suffering from a rare disease that can only be called dryness. Not even lip balm has managed to cure that. Your mjangos tell you that a certain enzyme is the cure. The enzyme that is released somewhere from the mouth. But your own enzymes alone cannot cure. A reaction, say chemical reaction by merging your enzyme by a foreign enzyme from a mouth of a human being of the opposite gender that you have feelings for; is what will cure your lips. 
You long to dress not just for the purposes of privatizing your nakedness from those who do not deserve to see it, but so as to impress that special mjango. Okay, impress is such a word. Let’s just say with an aim of getting a compliment from him at the back of your mind. And come to think of it again, to impress him too. There has to be that dress, those shoes, that leather jacket he bought you that he likes to see you in. Sometimes, you would just want to play with his triggers. You’d wear a see through crop top but barricade the bare necessities with his favorite bra. Or you’d put on that short flare dress that loves to dare the wind to blow harder and harder past you. That way you’d see how protective he can be of any mjango who would dare ogle at you while taking advantage of the innocence of the wind. 
You long to have someone special who will comment on your new haircut as if it’s their own. If you’re a man and you haven’t realized that a haircut is an essential part of handsomeness, maybe that explains why you’re still single. Or why when the ladies gossip about you, of which gossip is an essential part of their health – they say you’re immature. Serious and mature men get haircuts. They don’t leave their hair all raggedy like the thicket in savannah. Or you think that makes you look like a bad boy? The bad boy that you hear girls like? Well, think again if they want bad boys for husbands. Just in the same way you go for church girls when the ‘when will you get a wife’ topic gains momentum in your family get-togethers, with your aunty chairing that conversation and your mum being like that kind of lawyer that thinks you’re too guilty to be defended. If you have a beard like mine, you long to have a ‘she’ that will be rubbing it back and forth whenever you guys cuddle. 
Speaking of cuddling, that is among the top items in the list when you are under pressure from peer pressure that you should be dating. Everybody grabs their own to cuddle with when the cold season strikes. You long to cuddle with someone when you’re watching a movie. Maybe a repeat of Wakanda (I still haven’t watched Black Panther by the way) or a blue movie. Blue because you two think it will spice up your experience. You think you will learn something new that will heat up your connection. You think you will expand the boundaries of your wildness and craziness together. You also think it’s okay since you’re watching it together. It’s not cheating, you think. Like when he cheats and you also cheat, it cancels and it’s like none of you has cheated. Anyway you long to cuddle with someone and the rest that follows after that too, maybe.
                                ****
“Kat!” Jolene calls out. She walks quickly towards the clothes section. Had she been keen, she would have noticed that Kat had hang around babies’ clothes for a longer duration than any spot she stood at in the supermarket.  
Kat turns.
“Let’s go. Jaymo has just called. They are here already.” 
“Who is ‘they’?” Kat asks while adamant to move. 
Pulling Kat by the arm, “Let’s just go aki!”
                 Continues next week!
(This edition is timing Valentine’s week. That’s why the actual story for today had to be pushed.)