BLACK EYE PLEASE

Last time I wrote here about checking up on your friends if you haven’t heard from them in a long time. Some of them might be in relationships that restrict them from keeping in touch with other people. They are in prisons they call relationships and they’ve fallen in love with the prison warden. They are happy to be not just in any prison, but that particular shenanigan’s prison. But they also don’t realise that that’s not the true meaning of happiness. When someone has made it their life’s job to drain the meaning of respect from you, you will think all they are offering you is the best you will ever get. They make your world revolve around them, as you praise them with your time, attention, body and privacy. They prey on your weaknesses and your few grains of esteem just like it happened to Valentine last year. 

Valentine is my good friend from about two years ago. The pillar of our friendship is my blog which she loves to the grave and back. I had classified her as my favourite reader because screenshots of the lines she loved on my blog would follow after every new post. Well, today she stands on the other side of the table to serve us with her whereabouts since 10th March 2020, the beginning of the events that would see her disappear from the radar and make her friends, like me, worried sick. 

I couldn’t believe the last time Valentine and I met was in 2019 after she graduated. Maybe it’s because 2020 felt like a cryosleep and it all just seems like the other day. It all officially began for her in March when she finally gave the audience to a guy I feel like dubbing Pal for this story. Matters Pal had their genesis in 2017 when she was in second year. Val’s classmate and friend lost a family member and a couple of other classmates and herself, tagged along for the funeral. Her bereaved friend took pictures and posted on her status as the trend is for social media to be the wall to hang our good and bad. 

She was marketing her friends unawares and the bidder in focus here, bid for Val and got her number. His name? Pal. Unfortunately enough, Val’s guts rejected Pal from the very start. Mjango had blueticks for breakfast, lunch and supper for more than two years. It takes one hell of a girl’s heart to keep a man parking for that long even when he persistently keeps driving by. Maybe less effort is needed to do so if you’re a girl and you just like fellow girls. But for the girls who manage to staunchly reject a man not for two days or two weeks, but two years, I want to salute you. 

But before I do that, I will first salute the type of men that persist. Maybe rejecting is as easy as dunking a paper in the trash can. Being the paper that is always dumped in the bin, and still showing up again just to be thrown back? Man you’ve got balls in your balls. Being rejected is not easy. However, I may withhold my salute to men like that because the lack of an ego may not be as sexy. Well, I stand corrected because a guy has to show that you can order a mountain to sit on him and he will still want you. Women are won over, with persistence, right? I am still not quick to salute because from the Netflix series, You, some type of persistence is purely psycho. 

“I think I just fell for the persistence. I started responding to his messages and a while later, I said yes to him.” 

“By a while later you mean, months later, right?” 

“No.”

“Wow. Okay. So we can say you barely knew him?” 

“Please don’t make it sound like that because telling this story already makes it clear that I am guilty of a lot of naivety.”

I began to question just how persistent I have been with ladies who have come my way. I started to question whether I’m normal because I’m usually done after strike two. I respond to the vibe. When the smell of vibe is in the air, then it’s worth dispatching my tier one assault team. Otherwise, if we really have to persist without a visible vibe, we send in the rookies to cook some activity for as long as they can. If they’re massacred in the process, God rest their souls but at least those were not our best men. We can recover from that and train new ones. Because once your best men die in the battle field of unrewarding persistence, your ego, esteem and manhood has gone with them. But not for Pal. His persistence is based on the toxic belief that no girl ever says no to him. 

(So imagine after posting this blog, I came across this snippet over lunch.)

Enters Val into the dating arena with a man, something she had done but not with a man in a long while. He was 25, two years older than her. 

“He always seemed to have a lot of money. I used to see him post himself with lots of money but I swear I didn’t say yes to him because of his money. I’ve always wondered where he gets that amount of money although not in a way to be so disturbed about it.”

At the time, lockdown was in play but not really for areas in the Western Region. Soon, because technically, they were dating, it was okay for them to meet. She loved it. The whole idea of him fascinated her especially when she came face to face with the personality of the man who was her new peng ting. Peng ting because they blended like juice and water? They became their own sweet savour although one of them didn’t ever imagine the water would be more than the juice. Now all she would be having everyday, every hour and every minute is a tank of tasteless juice she will have to bear with for six months. 

****

So there’s this day I went for a sleepover. Well, you do not expect it not to happen, do you? It’s the coveted trip when you’re seated in the singles waiting lounge. Now that we had found favour in the eyes of the goddess of love, why not bow to a night of splendour? Or two. Because, don’t ask me how long I was supposed to stay and how long I did stay. Just don’t. I told my mum I was going to a friend’s. Technically not a lie but explicitly, not the truth either. 

We had a great time. He lives in Mumias, just about one and half hours from home. Wuh! I had a good time mjango. The devil is in the details I know, but we don’t want to talk about the devil today. Or maybe I had been sleeping over with the devil himself. After sometime I needed to go home but he pleaded for me to stay. At the beginning it was all sweet. Like, damn this guy doesn’t want me to part from his sight. I’m the apple of his eye that he dies to take a bite on every morning. I have never imagined loving a man would be this blissful. 

Until it was not! 

I’d stay around a bit longer and when I talked about going home, he’d become harsh. At some point he told me he’d kill me if I ever talked about leaving again. 

(Sema walai!)

Why lie! I even have a scar on my leg because of that. I had to involve my mum. Mjango you can imagine I didn’t tell my mum I was going to a guy’s place and there I was, crying to her to help me. The embarrassment. He would take my phone, lock me in the house and leave. Thankfully I had given mum his number. She had to make some calls to get help. 

I left his house cursing and vowing I’d never ever go back to him. But who is a toxic guy? He unleashed the apologetic ace card. It nullifies all the faults you have on him. 

“Babe I’m sorry. I just couldn’t stay without you.”

That was the knockout and I was back to worshipping him. Yes, that’s the word. We’d video call, text and all and he’d keep tabs on me like NSA. Even when I add a new number, he’d know. So I had to cut off most guys in my contact list. 

I became a habitual liar, lying my way to visit him. My mum was totally not okay with Pal but I was already all in. Not even the helm of my skirt was sticking out. All in. All in even when he beat me up. If I get back to whatsapp I’ll send you a pic of me with a black eye. It was bad Mjango. 

Sometimes he was all caring and sweet and other times he was a total prick. And I earned the first black eye of my life when I made it clear to him that he was actually a prick. To be specific, I called him a fraud. If you want a black eye, dare to also call your toxic guy a fake. He’ll proudly punch the beauty from your face. 

I remember it was a Saturday night. I mentioned earlier that he’d run his affairs that earned him money but I wasn’t interested. There is this particular time I overheard his phone call. I was just in bed minding my business on my phone. Normally, when he received certain phone calls he’d go out and talk for so long. I guess he got sloppy this time or something, he thought I wouldn’t hear. I began to understand how he was making his money. 

So he used to call me cheap, and mock me because of a number of things including my laptop, that he used to call cheap. You know it reaches a point you just get fed up, annoyed and you revolt. I told him it’s called being real. Being yourself, accepting your level as you look to grow at the right pace is called being real. 

“Unlike you, you’re a fraud!” 

That was it. I had pinched the ass of a sleeping demon. Mjango I was beaten up. Like you would a pig for eating your baby. I didn’t cry but I thought I was going to die. I kept thinking of my mum as he pummeled me and just how she’d be so upset with me for lying to her. Now, I died through an overdose of the very poison she had warned me about. 

I was beaten for slapping him with the truth. I mean, nigga already had two baby mamas and he kept on saying from day one, that he was going to wife me. He had recently mentioned his talks with his father about my dowry. To be honest, I am laughing as I talk about this, because wow I fell for all that. The salt in this injury is he was done with law school. I guess. He had connections with politicians and big people. But from what I heard, eti he had a ‘Travel Agency.’ He was also into real estate. He’d con people lots of money and I just don’t know how he managed to do that. That one? A big fraud! And I got a black eye for it. 

His black eye was given by a Karma known as Kilimani Mums. Dude was hanged there as a fraud and he was trending. My friend, the one who linked me up with him, is the one who spilled the beans from Facebook to me. Now hear why she shared that with me. Pal had also been sporting for her and his long time persistence was beginning to shake her walls of Jericho. Thank God for Kilimani Mums. 

But funny story, I forgave him. Just after pinning me to the ground, he said sorry. And I kissed his ass one more time. 

****

“I understand or may not fully understand what goes on through someone’s mind when in a toxic relationship. However, what I know is that there is usually just one sticky reason why you’re glued to them. It always just has to do with a belief system. Others, for instance, are all about the socioeconomic stability they get from being with the man. What was yours?” 

Sigh. 

“I wanted to prove to my mum and everyone else back at home that I can date a man and keep him. They found out about my orientation. So I badly wanted it to work. I was convinced that it would work.”

“Up until you were not, I guess?” 

“Well yes. And what began to wake me up from the chains of bondage, ignorance and foolish bliss was a bite from his baby mama.”

“A bite?”

“Yes.”

“Yaani alikuuma?”