GENERATION Z (SN 1)

“This is it!” I said to myself when she said she has something to talk to me about. You know there is a way someone can say that they want to let out something that gives you a tip about what they want to say.
When she says, “Mjango, can we talk?” I know that I am the problem that is to be talked about. When she says, “Mjango, I would like to talk to you.” I know I am off the problematic equation and so it’s just her own issues she wants to address. But not issues about her. Issues about something else. Maybe asking whether she can get the number of my bodaboda guy for the days she has drunk her weight to the ground and would want a courier. Bet at such a time she is not as different as the crate of booze she nearly bathed in – in the name of partying. I hope I don’t have to say that was a joke.
She would just talk about an issue that is not as weighty. Maybe asking for a favour. You know the kind of favours people ask for nowadays.
Not favours like picking her clothes for her when it’s about to rain. She need not ask for such a favour because it’s in the instinct of a man that if she lives next door and she is not home yet and its about to rain because when it rains it pours, he would pick her clothes not to stick them through her bedroom window. No papa! Not in this generation Z. He’d put them in his house and pretend he forgot he ever did that.
Chances are she’d remember she had clothes outside after she looses herself from her work clothes, jumps into the shower and slides into her sleeping regalia. The sleeping regalia however is not as regalia as it sounds. It is held by a strand of fiber by the shoulders and is made from a material that can easily catch fire. Well, both kinds of fires to be precise. The fire that sets houses on fire and the fire that sets souls on fire.
Just before she catches snippets of sleep, it will be deposited into her conscious mind from her subconscious mind that she had clothes outside. She will say ‘f***’ as she jumps off from bed like a frog from a pot of boiling water. It would be followed by grumbles of how messed up she is because she remembers it rained like it was sent to wash the sins on the face of the earth.
She will stop dead in her tracks that are now bare before the face of the quiet neighborhood. The tracks are definitely bare from the neck of the mountains of her thighs all the way down to her pedicured feet. She starts to feel cold surge through every God made cave. She wants to cry but confusion takes the mic and begins to rap. The chorus after the rap would be, “God! Why now!”
She starts to think about who she can ask about her clothes. And because you have been the good neighbour mjango, yes baba, you are the one she thinks of first. On your door she will be in less than five seconds. You will pretend to take your time to open the door though the animal in you is dying to race to the door. Like a dog told to fetch a stick. But this stick is not just any stick you guy.
You open, “Ah hey. Look who’s here.” Again, sounding like you didn’t expect her.
“Hi. Sasa?”
“Poa sana.” You avoid welcoming her in quick because you had agreed with yourself to sound like you had forgotten that you had been so kind that day to her, her clothes and her sense of fashion that need not suffer from the cruel rain. In real sense, it’s your lust dressed in a sheep’s skin called kindness.
“I hanged my clothes before I left for work today. I was wondering whether someone must have…” She starts and you interrupt her with a facial expression and body gesture that shows you just remembered something relevant to that.
“Oh ghai, sorry I hope you have not been stressed. I forgot to come tell you I picked them for you. Pole ziko huku. Lakini si kuna baridi sana hapo, please ingia as I bring them for you.”
The ancestors will now be high five-ing one another and shouting in their ancestral voices, “Hapo sasa kijana yetu!” – to that wise move.
And now you will have finally reached the semi-finals of the game. The lovely neighbor will be under thy roof, before thy manly countenance and thou shall not take it for granted. The rest is now dependent on the powers passed down to you by your ancestors. Lucky for you if your ancestor is Owang Sino or better, Akuku Danger. But just remember not to fail to mention that you just picked her clothes as you were picking yours. Ladies are blessed with a sense of smell. You bet she will smell a rat if you don’t cover your tracks.
And I bet she will say, “Aki I think I should give you my number so that on days like these I can have someone to call for help.” If I were you mjango, I’d take that as enough win for a first day. Leave the rest of the battle for another day.
“Aki thanks for the favour,” she’d say on her way out.
“Anytime.” You’d reply as you break her back with your eyes while leaning with one hand on the edge of the door and the other held akimbo by your waist.
But in the event she says, “Mjango can I share something with you?” You better stop what you’re doing and give her your attention.
That’s what she told me on a Wednesday a few weeks ago. We had not met in quite a long time and we needed to catch up. Well, the meet up was not prompted by the words above but it fell somewhere after enquiring about where and how she has been. There are people good at ghosting. Some ladies can do that really well. Like they go back to Venus they are said to have come from and they check in after heaven knows how long.
On her back was a guitar zipped in a guitar bag. It is for the times when she just wants to pull her own strings. According to what she wanted to share with me, I take it that the only strings she wants to be attached to lie in that bag. She has had enough strings attached and snapped in the process.
Some of those strings were used to strangle her. They snapped before they could kill her.
“The guy who I really felt for the most is the guy who mishandled me.”
She has suffered violence in the hands of a man. That same man she loved most. But that was not the reasons for her missing in action.
“We all have that kaseason we just want to go far far away where nobody knows us and just let loose as you try to figure yourself out.”
“So to say, you went to figure yourself out?”
“Yes.”
That made me realise that many times we have breakdowns physically that result from mental and emotional saturations because we do not give ourselves breaks. We do not stop to breathe. We run out of air but we still stay in the middle of the track trying to keep up the pace and beat time.
You must have realised, we have not been in session here on The Mjango for weeks now. For the hearts that have showed concerned on my whereabouts and the blog, asante. But even The Mjango takes and needs breaks. Breaks are necessary to redefine purpose or restructure or seek for improvement strategies. Wherever you are, learn to take breaks. Maybe you should take one even now.
She must have been basking by a pool in one of the posh resorts in Kisumu when she began her self discovery season. A pair of sunglasses resting on the bone of her nose and a summer hat on. On the small exquisite gilded rococo stool beside her is a glass of dainty looking cocktail with a watermelon slice sticking by the edge neighbored by a fancy straw. You’d think she is a video vixen. Especially when she slowly and meticulously reaches for the glass, takes a sip and sits the glass back on the stool. She would not have to wipe her upper lip or the sides of her mouth with her tongue because of pushing the glass to much that it’d spill beyond the mouth.
Her tall feet stretched to the ends of the basking chaise lounge. She’d even stretch apart her toes to maximize the basking. Maybe she wanted to have the sun burn through to her valley of thoughts.
Metaphorically, she was sitted before a fire place in an old cabin within the woods in the mountains of North America. Timber burning before her and in her hands is an album of pictures, memories and journals her life documented for her. She’d throw parts of her past in to the fire and she would watch them burn with a gay smile on her face.
She’d contemplate over throwing some part of her personality that she has noted as inevitably creeping up. “To hell with it,” she must have said as she tossed it into the fire. But apprehension coups when she discovers that it’s not burning up. It’s resistant to fire. It cannot be done away with. Even after the fire dies, it lies there. Still. Unperturbed. She picks it up and decides to examine it as she interrogates herself about it. About how it ended up there. And how for a decade, it has neither eroded nor faded away.
She sat up again to intensify her basking session by slowly rubbing sunscreen on her melanin rich skin. Her bikini only covered as much skin as a string would in some places around her curves. Instagrammers love content like those. But too bad for them, she is not on instagram. There is no trace on social media that she was ever there. She took her time to make sure sunscreen reached the edges of her bikini.
Man child, it seems you and the sun shared one thing in common for once. See even he was denied access to shine, light a fire and even burn incense in the sacred chambers.
In fact, from our conversation, no one has been there for what’s coming close to a year now. Not a man and not even the hot sun; that is assuming the hot sun is masculine. But there is a question you’re not asking. Not that there really is a question still hanging. So yes, you’re not asking because normally, you wouldn’t ask. Nobody does ask.
For the longest time especially in Africa, no one has ever asked that question or even thought there should be a question after she says she hasn’t rocked her sensual being with any man for close to a year. You don’t feel like there is room for more questions about who she has been rocking with then. Maybe. For most people. Of which is totally fine mjango. But in Generation Z, there is still more to be asked. Maybe one more. More like, “Who is she – she has been rocking with then? Since it seems it’s definitely not a he.”
Because, needless to say, that is the generation we are in today. The generation that adds a question when there has almost never been any further questions. The generation that has something more to say after all has been said.
Generation Z.
See you next week for the continuation.