Trigger Warning: Self-harm; Suicide.
***
Strange girls in strange bathrooms always size her up in the mirror and comment on her looks. They tell her how pretty her eyes are. The more brazen or drunk ones touch her hair. ‘Why don’t you wear your hair down?’ They suggest. Powder and perfume hang in the air, music thrumming against the door, the air rife with something else; freedom, illicitness, flirtation, abandonment, progesterone. Jerky conversations swirl in this confined space. What’s your name? Mehr*, she’d say. Oh, what a nice name, where are you from Mehr?
Where was she from? When you are the half of many halves like she is you can’t remain whole and so you really aren’t from anywhere. You are a fragment of people, of places, who are a fragment of other people and other places and so you are always unconsciously and fruitlessly looking for a place from which to draw your identity, from which you can be made whole again. Are you Arab? They ask her. She nods, not bothering to correct them. Her mom is part German, part Kikuyu and part Ismaili, Indian. Her dad is half Somali, half Yemeni. What she really is is just a girl with luscious hair and flushed cheeks and big saucers for eyes. A girl who is searching for a coin in the sea. Someone is throwing a party on a different side of town, another girl says. We have a car. Let’s go. They say drunkenly as they brush and powder and pout and run strings of darkness against the rim of their eyes in the mirror.
Sometimes these girls offer her drugs depending on where she is. It could be Molly or LSD or, if it’s a nice address, cocaine. The bathroom is always very bright and brimming with possibilities.
“The most unlikeliest girls do drugs,” she sniffs over her coffee. She’s wearing an open front cardigan and black jeans. She’s the size of a fruit. “And they are mostly generous. I have taken drugs with such random girls in bathrooms, girls so put together you would never imagine them doing drugs.”
She sniffs again and looks away. She does that a lot; averts her gaze to the side, as if recalling something, or looking at something. She’s 22.
It’s 11 am and we are at Barista and Co in Sarit Centre. She keeps dabbing her face with a ball of old napkin.
“You have a cold?” I ask about all the sniffing.
“I’m menstruating.” She removes a strand of hair from her face. “I feel so tired. I feel so moody. It’s not easy being a woman. I also sweat a lot on my hands, they get moist.” She chuckles, looking at her palms. Scattered on our small table are three notebooks, some with a fancy cover. She had arrived before I did. I found her hunched over, writing in one of the notebooks. I ask if I can read what she had been writing.
“My legs ache when I pedal too long, the whiplash I get against the wind is worth it. It flows through the spaces between my eyelashes. It’s funny to me how I feared loss.”
Another page. 03.07.2020. 3:06 am.
“Despite the fact that I’m generally smart, strong and mature, I too hurt. And fall. And crumble. I know everyone is burdened and busy. I know that. But if I can call you and tell you, ‘It’s too hard, I’m scared, can you come?’ If I tell you that, I know that I love you. And if you say, ‘I’m on my way and rush to me and hug me and don’t ask any questions, I’ll know that you love me too. Right now though, while there are so many people that I love I’m afraid to find out how many of them love me back. If any at all. Is it because I’m so unlovable or is it because they have never thought they’d need to love me this way? I’m always so sparkly and happy. Maybe they think loving me is always about having a good time.”
Another random page. This one doesn’t have a date.
“If you’re housed with an angry man in your house, there will always be an angry man in your house. You will find him even when he is not there. Some things grow no less with time, some things were absolutes. Some things could not be gotten over, gotten around, forgotten, forgiven, made peace with, released. If we forgive our fathers, what is left?”
She grew up on 7th Street in Eastleigh. Her mom married young—at 16—her father a few years older. “We lived in a big plot with extended family. My grandfather built a mosque in Eastleigh. We lived down from a shop called Snack Attack. I loved their chips. We bought our things from a shop owned by an Ethiopian shopkeeper called Gigi. Milk and bread.” Sniffs. She wears a faraway nostalgic look. She had been smiling but now she pauses and the smile falls from her face. “We were broke. My dad was an artist, he painted those signboards. He also did a lot of drugs. I think. He chewed a lot of miraa. He was very violent towards my mom. Very. Physically and verbally. We lived in a store. My mom was never accepted by my dad’s parents. They were so hostile towards her.” She dabs her nose and then switches gears. The smile comes back on, her face brightening like a big dark house that is finally lit.
“I grew up as a Muslim girl, wore hijab and prayed five times a day. I hated school. My big sister was so smart though. Very smart. She was a huge reader, she’d read anything she got her hands on, from the Ramtons manual to the old books our father inherited from his father. She was too smart to play Barbie dolls with me and made it her mission to get me to read too. She handed me the first Harry Potter book, ‘but we can just watch the movie,’ I protested. She frowned at me. ‘The book has more, the film doesn’t even cover half of it,’ she’d say. One day though, the smart little shit brought One For The Money by Janet Evanovich. My sister whispered, handing me the book, ‘It has curse words in it, I wouldn’t tell mum.’ I was ten years old, one of the characters in the book had a bad encounter and the chapter began with the sentence ‘Fuck God,’ and that’s all it took for me to stay up all night reading it.”
She sniffs into the napkin. A white guy seated on the next table suddenly emits a loud laugh. He’s on a video call with a black girl with a silver stud on her nose. The tables at Barista and Co are wedged so close, I could lean over slightly and say hello to the girl with the silver stud on her nose. However the food is great. I’m having avocado on toast. That’s all I ever have there. People spend too much time on menus.
“I read less in my teens and when I did it was mostly philosophy.” She continues. “I was trying to dilute my existentialism.” That’s the word she uses, existentialism. She uses words like that a lot, casually sprinkles them in her conversations like you would black pepper. Some I write down to Google later because I can’t bear to ask her what they mean. I’m shy. “I read more of Evanovich’s work which is crime fiction with a dash of romance. I read Charles Bukowski’s Women and all the poetry I could find online. Have you read Bukowski?”
“Yeah. I read Love Is A Dog From Hell.”
She grins and looks away. She seems to sigh but with a smile. A secret smile.
“How long have you used recreational drugs?” I ask her, feeling like a phoney for using the word recreational. As if that question could mean pharmaceuticals.
“My whole teenage years.” She gets her elbows from the table, her hands go under the table on her laps. “I still use them—sometimes. I smoke weed. Quite a bit. I was clean for a bit but then recently, two weeks ago, I went on a bender.”
“I could never smoke weed. I tried. It makes me so sleepy.”
“Maybe it’s the strain you smoked.”
“I tried many strains. They just make me so sleepy. I could sleep on the floor right there. Or on the counter. Like, literally, I can sleep anywhere. Even against that pillar.”
She chuckles. Strands of hair fall on her face.
“Tell me about the house you lived in, in Eastleigh.”
“It was very small, so small it reduced us, literally. My dad didn’t let us play outside. He was paranoid. I think my mom was depressed. I remember that I used to have the most fun when my dad went to work because when he was around he hated to hear us talk. He wanted us to be seen, not heard. We never ate together as a family. I suspect that my dad never liked having daughters. He was very strict with us. I knew my father had a problem, as young as I was. I could tell. I was 7, I’d always been too inquisitive. I’d find his cigarettes and pretend I was smoking them, I found his miraa sticks and moved my jaw like I’d see him do. He shouted a lot, all the time, but he’d give me and my elder sister 100 bob every Friday before school to buy lunch and that’s when I would think he was the kindest. We never spoke. Not like how a Father and daughter do. He treated my mum poorly, and deep down I think he was afraid we’d get treated just as worse by our spouses. I still love him.” She pauses briefly then ploughs on. “He hit mom a lot. My big sis had gone to boarding school so I saw a lot of his violence. The breaking point was this day he was shouting at her about a shirt that had not been ironed. He hit her so hard, she was flung against the kitchen.” She pauses and plays with the ball of serviette. She then smiles, as if the smile will obliterate the memory. “It was horrible.” She’s still smiling. “I told my mom, he is going to kill you. You can’t live like this. He will kill you. So we moved out to Pangani, Ngara. I didn’t see my mom often, she was always working and trying to heal from the marriage. Can you imagine her life, getting married at 16, being beaten by her husband, then having to feed and clothe and school three girls on your own?” High school had been a nightmare. She had attended an all-Indian school and ‘stood out like a fish out of water.’ “I didn’t look like anybody.”
She first started her drug journey when the girl in the apartment upstairs invited her over and offered her weed. She was 14 years old and searching for something to contain the angst that was churning in her. They’d often sit at the benches at the cemetery in the evening and share a blunt, talking and laughing and hearing cars pass by on the main road. It was euphoric. Weed made her laugh with her ‘heart and soul.’ She didn’t know she had that kind of laughter in her. She hadn’t experienced such freedom and escape from living with relatives who didn’t want her mother and a father who constantly wrought violence upon them. The weed seemed to quiet the loudness of life. It made her calm and happy. “I think eventually I started doing drugs because I wanted to feel something else, different from what I was accustomed to feeling.” She says. She also started cutting herself to “feel something different.” She was also dating. “I was very vain; I dated cute but shallow boys. We spent house hours texting all night. After five months I was insanely bored. My early 20s gifted me with contempt. I was done yearning. The bar for men was way below the belt. I guess the less you want something, the more you attract it. I’d put it on the table on first dates and I could see how men’s faces fell. “I’m not looking for anything serious, or labels. I don’t text past 10pm. I sleep early.” I’d tell them, and one thing about men; their ego is consistent because they’d say, “Yeah, this will be different.” As if they could change me. She rolls her eyes.
Meanwhile, her mom was dating, or trying to date. “There was a man from Jeddah, my mom’s first man. He wore blinding white kanzus and smelled rich. Spoke little English. He had a wife back in Jeddah and wanted my mom to join him as a second wife. He moved downstairs from where we lived to be closer to my mom. It didn’t last.” He sniffs. Then there was another man with one glass eye.
Her mother moved in with a man and then another man in 2016. He was a drinker, drunk a hell lot. “You always gravitate to what you know,” she shakes her head. “Her boyfriend had yanked my hair like a barbie doll and tossed me on the floor and told my mum she was next. I ran to the bedroom and locked myself in and waited. I held my breath till morning rolled over and he left for work.” She holds her head in her hand. “I couldn’t stand looking at my mother without feeling physically sick. I put Max— that’s my dog that my mom had given me to help me deal with my life—on a leash and walked him while smoking a cigarette. We’re leaving, boy. Max strangely bobbed his head.”
She called her dad and told him what had happened and I asked him if I could stay with him. He said I should go live with my grandmother, his mom, in Kariokor so off I went to stay in Kariokor. She chewed a lot of weed and was constantly paranoid. She’d say, “Someone is at the door, go check,” and I’d go check but there would be nobody at the door.” She giggles and suddenly she becomes very vulnerable in that giggle, very fragile, it’s almost like a shutter has opened and suddenly we get a glimpse of her authentic self. The moment is fleeting; the shutters slowly close again.
“We were both damaged by our past, by my father and in a way we kept looking for that angry man everywhere. I saw my mom’s search for that man in some of the men she dated.” She taps her pen on the table. “I started doing other drugs. I was introduced to them by this guy, a digital artist. We went to Karura and it was an out-of-body experience. It was a Sunday and the drug made me very introspective. Acid makes your ego die. It completely kills your ego. The meaning of life is suddenly very vivid, crystal clear. I was looking around at nature and inhaling its pureness. The very act of breathing…I could feel every breath that came in and left my body. The drug limited my desires. Desires only root us to places of pain and dissatisfaction. I was free from desire. I looked at my hands and I could see the blood coursing through my veins. I could smell the air in my brain. It was very peaceful. If you could choose a moment to die, I would have chosen that moment.” She then graduated to other drugs; coke, ecstasy, molly, weed, lexatonia, mirtazapine, valium, benzodiazepine, just opioids of all types. “I was so on edge all the time, reality felt so unreal. I was still sending out resumes; I had dropped out of culinary school but man, could I cook, industrial cooking around men who were so surprised by my small frame and fair skin,” more tapping of the pen on the notebook. “I was doing 12-hour shifts in kitchens and it wasn’t easy. Ask a chef, they work you to the bone like dogs and feed you garbage, treat you like a thief around food. I delivered. I’d quit a few weeks in after a measly salary. I always wanted more.” She stops suddenly. “I hope this is not boring.”
“Not at all.” I say. “How does one get these drugs?”
“Dealers. But they won’t sell to you if they don’t know you. Some of these drugs you can also get on Telegram. But mostly, over the counter in pharmacies. I forge prescriptions and they never check. Everybody is doing these drugs. Everybody. I battled addiction all my teenage years and even now it’s ever so present. I have done drugs so much that I get complete gaps in my memory, months when I don’t recall a thing. Months! There are people I’ve known my whole life, yet I don’t recognise their faces. People who come up to me in cafes very happily and say, hey Mehr how have you been and I swear I have never met them in my life. When you are high you do things; I have lit cigarettes at a petrol station in Highridge at odd hours, bought triple espresso and wandered about. I have sat with watchmen in their booths and spoken to them till near dawn. Taking six rectangular pills and washing them down with Smirnoff Ice, giggling and playing an air guitar. Drugs do things to you. Fragments of memories, you know. ..” She looks away, far away this time and giggles. “My then-boyfriend throwing out my Bromazepam pills out his car window as we drove from a pharmacy in Siwaka after he realised I had lied to the pharmacist to get them, and me going back to the same spot, kilometres away, to rummage through a drainage to look for the drugs.”
She talks about the paranoia and dreams that come with drug addiction. “The nausea, the lucid dreams and the panic attacks I get in the shower everytime I close my eyes to the running water, I see the most gruesome images.”
I had been meaning to ask about the scars on both of her wrists and her tattoos. On her wrist is the landscape from the book, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupèry. She twists like a ballerina and places her right leg on the edge of the chair and shows me another tattoo on her ankle: an eye in a triangle with three teardrops.
“What about the scars?” I ask.
“I tried killing myself.” Her nonchalance is jarring. “I have tried four times. I wanted to be close to death to feel the love of God.” The first time she was fifteen, she took pills. She slept for days. “Mum thought I was only tired.” Second time she locked herself in the bathroom and sliced her wrist. “Then I lay against the wall and waited for death. I was at peace. I was ready. Then my mom’s boyfriend kicked in the door. I remember crying and pleading with them to let me die.” The third time a guy she was dating had screwed with her heart, she came home and cut her wrist. The last time was 2019, July. “I was seeing a therapist and all but I decided to end it with pills…July is generally the worst month for me.” She pauses and stares at her scars, almost admiringly, like they are art.
“What does your mom say about these episodes?”
“I always tell her that it’s just the chemical imbalance, that I’m manic. That it’s just my mind, not her.” There has been therapy and therapists at Avenue Hospital and Kenyatta hospital. A lot of crying and hoping for death.
“My mom is 44. She works so hard. As I grow older I see them as people, I don’t judge them as I used to. Mum makes sure that I’m fed. She asks me how I’m doing. When I start seeing a boy she might tell me, stay away from that one, I don’t like him. Sometimes I sleep with her in her bed. She is really strong given what she has gone through herself. She always makes me fresh fruit in the morning. She hugs me. Especially recently when I was arrested with a boy I was sitting with in the car outside Sarit. The plainclothes thought we were terrorists but my boyfriend didn’t make it any easier when he started cussing them and telling them that we know our rights. We spent the night in a cell. It’s a horrifying experience.”
She turned 23 yesterday. Her mom woke her up and kissed her 23 times and sang happy birthday. Her dad texted her a happy birthday, reminding her not to forget to toa sadaqah. “I smiled at the text.” She then spent an hour in the bathroom. “I scrubbed my body raw in hopes of washing the past off me.”
“What do you look forward to now?”I ask her, “Why do you get out of bed now? What are you waiting for?”
She says she’s waiting for Rihanna’s new album. Waiting to discover a new shade of lipstick. She dreams of having children and having coconut water like they did as kids. She discovers new recipes and cooks up new storms. [She intends to go back to her Instagram food page @zebrasdine] She waits for the “Impending doom of participating in the absurdities of this world.” She buys her mom flowers every month and tells her, “Sorry, ma. I was a dumb kid. I won’t be able to do any of this without you.” She walks her dog. She smokes her cigarettes. She admires her little sister’s love of art and painting. Lately she listens to the Quran before she sleeps. “It makes me feel protected.” She wants to be free from the embrace of addiction.
Nowadays when she feels the mania coming, the pulsing urge of self-destruction, she cycles in Karura forest with headphones blasting Milky Chance. Or she wears her running shoes and she runs up hills, down hills, through small streets she has never ventured in and old streets she knows by heart. “I run and run until I have nothing else left in me, then I shower and get to bed then I’m taken over by exhaustion.” She stopped listening to music. She has alienated her friends because she realised that they only see her in one light; fun loving, lively. They don’t know her battles. She particularly loves cooking. She hopes to get something, a cooking job, to do. She has four years experience in that, but she feels like she did it in her former life and she was good at it.
“I love the madness of the hot kitchen,” her smile is large and wide and brave, “how noisy and rowdy it is. I like making pastries because you have to wait for them to rise. Pastries teach you to wait for things. Sometimes you have to wait for things to rise again.”
**
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