Moscow

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Guys, for newcomers, here’s how this works: you send an email with your story’s synopsis, and I’ll reach out. Then, we’ll have a virtual call or sit down in person, and you can tell me about the hardest thing you did last year, or the year before. Afterward, I’ll retreat to the mountain with a piece of bread and a packet of Mala to write the story. I rarely run stories exactly as they’re sent because I want to maintain a certain “voice” here. You know what I mean? Unless you’re a writer, in which case my work becomes easier, as your story will run as a guest post. That makes my work a lot easier, and I get to take a break that week. And I’m always looking for a break.

Now, I could write the story as a feature third-person narrative—like last week’s—or in the first person, as with this week’s. Often, I dramatize it a little for the sake of storytelling, but I never change the facts.

This week’s subject was unlike anyone I’ve encountered before. We had our interview virtually at her request, and she kept her video off. She said, “I don’t want you running into me and looking at me weird, Biko.” Sawa, I understand that. Twenty minutes in, I was dying to see her face. There was something very mystic about her. I hesitate to use this word, as these are words I usually save for the last quarter of the year, but she sounded orphic. I asked her, “Are you sure you don’t want to turn your video on? I’d like to see these emotions on your face.” She replied, “Emotions belong in words, not faces.”

It was the intellect of her narrative that intrigued me.

I remember interrupting to ask, “I’m sorry, what was that word again?” Words like “Panpsychism.” Concepts I had never heard of. She used words like “reconnaissance.” When was the last time you used that word in speech? I know that word, but I wouldn’t dare pronounce it, even after the audacity of three whiskies. It rolled off her tongue, just another word.

So, here we are.

**

When I was 7, our neighbour – Mr. Ogot – took his own life. I remember the police van parked in their compound, their gate yawning wide open. The van looked bigger then than it does now in my young mind, something intimidating but also weirdly intimate in the way it dominated Mr. Ogot’s compound. It was a Monday. I wanted to stand and look, but my mom quickly pulled me away from their gate. That day, we waited for the school van five houses down from ours, away from death.

He lived alone, Mr. Ogot. Occasionally, his wife would come from somewhere to visit, or a woman we thought was his wife. Otherwise, he was alone. I remember that cats liked his compound. He put food and water for them on saucers on his doorstep. A clowder of them, bent over saucers, Mr. Ogot leaning at the doorway looking at them. He hardly talked to anyone, Mr. Ogot. His hair was always uncombed. He never smiled. We feared him. When we saw him, we ran away, screeching with terror masked as delight. My dad often called him a genius. I didn’t know what that meant until I had grown up and someone called me the same word, and it made me feel dirty.

After his furniture was taken away and the house remained vacant, the cats would still wait for food at the door. So, my siblings and I would leave food – milk, the crusty part of bread, pieces of meat, ugali, soup – on Mr. Ogot’s doorstep. My mum would scold us: “Don’t go to that house again, it’s cursed.” My mom believed in spirits, and she said if you killed yourself, your spirit would linger where you died forever, angry and never moving on. That scared my siblings and kept them away. Not me. I wasn’t a girl who was easily scared. I have never been scared. After school, before my mom got back home, I’d sneak into the compound that was quickly growing long strands of grass and press my nose against the windows and stare inside the empty house. I wanted to see where Mr. Ogot had hung himself. But there was nothing to see. I didn’t see his spirit, either. The house was empt, and still.

Of course, new people moved into the house, a big family of very loud Kisiis, I remember. Everybody was always talking at the same time in that house in their mother tongue. A very friendly family, too, and always cooking with ghee.

I forgot about Mr. Ogot.

I won a scholarship and went off to study Electrical Engineering at a University in Idaho, in a cold and bleak rural US town called Moscow. Not only was I one of the two girls in my class, but I was also the only other black girl in my university for a whole year; and one of the 2% in the whole university who identified as “black.” Suffice to say, I was miserable, and isolated. It’s in Moscow, in hindsight, that I started spending a lot of time in my head. I think my sadness and great melancholy started in the US, because I don’t recall being overly melancholic before. Our house was full of expressive people; my siblings were animated. My mom is spirited and bubbly, always talking. My dad, however, doesn’t have a chance to talk with a wife like my mom. Ha-ha. I suspect that inside the chill and mild man is a man who has been dying to say something since he married my mother.

Moscow was a very lovely, a quiet university town. The rolling hills looked like something a very competent artist had painted. All seasons were like a set from a fantasy movie, but the Falls were out of this world; the Palouse hills would go from golden harvest hues to soft earth tones, turning the town into a magnificent dream. Despite this, I was still unhappy. I still couldn’t explain the source of this sudden wave of sadness.

I dated. Mateo, the Hispanic boy I dated for half of my time there, would often accuse me of “romancing sadness.” I wasn’t. The romance was the cold. I hated the food. I didn’t have many friends because I didn’t want to have to explain myself, my skin colour, to anyone. Home felt like another planet. My mother’s voice started to fade in my head. The winters were wrecking. When I think of the winters now, in warm Nairobi, I shiver. Literally. My body has carried the memory of winters in my bones. I’d sit in my room, staring at the white frozen beauty outside and feel as lost as a human being can. I drank a lot of coffee the first winter. Then I drank a lot of coffee and vodka the second winter. The third winter, I’d drink vodka without coffee. The fourth, fifth, and sixth winters, I’d be drinking it from the bottle with a white boy I dated named Hank. Hank smoked weed and drank too much. He was troubled too. He was an orphan at 10 and carried this fact to every room he walked into. He was a very talented musician and painter. I liked to lie on his barrel chest and feel his big bush of beard on my forehead. It felt like napping under a big tree. The only time I was nearly happy, and safe, was on his chest.

When I came back home in 2007, a year before Kenyans went mad themselves, I couldn’t fit back in. I had no community to speak of. My high-school friends were either with husbands and babies or were just in a different space in their own lives. I couldn’t connect with them. With anyone. With anything. I didn’t want to go back to the US, and I didn’t feel like I had a life here either. I was a castaway. My sadness grew each day. My melancholy bloomed over me like a black flower. I had managed to secure a great job because I was excellent at electrical engineering; my mind was wired to solve intricate problems, and so I worked and worked to drain the emptiness that I felt inside me.

I met a man, a fellow engineer, an erudite man, and for those years, I felt happier than I ever had. He didn’t have a beard like Hank. He was wiry but strong. He ate one meal a day, never touched alcohol. He believed in Rastafarianism and read constantly, for fun and as a duty. He mostly read all these boring books that men read so that they can be strong and dominate other men. But he was kind and patient, the true great qualities one can ask for in a man. He wasn’t extroverted, and so we would spend a lot of time indoors, reading or watching documentaries on medieval architecture, religious architecture, pre-Romanesque, and the Renaissance. We watched tons of that stuff while drinking our milk-less teas [I had stopped drinking]. We enjoyed watching how structures like cathedrals and castles were built. We were fascinated by the rounded arches, pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and flying buttresses. When we weren’t watching that, we were watching Nat Geo, not the boring ones of lions killing prey, but of archaeology and warfare.

Then he broke up with me after three years.

He wanted babies. A family. I didn’t want babies, a family. I had never seen myself as a mother, someone who rushes back home to wash their baby and offer them her breast to feed from. Motherhood didn’t evoke any imagination in me. It didn’t present a higher curiosity. I couldn’t give him babies. So, he journeyed off to find someone who could give him her womb. It devastated me, of course. I mourned him for two years. I couldn’t find anybody else like him. Most Nairobi men only engaged in any meaningful conversation with you before you slept with them. After that, the pretense fell off, and they preferred to drag you to a bar and watch football as they ignored you.

I recovered from the heartbreak, but it left deep wounds the size of quarries in me. I isolated myself at work, and I slowly slid into the state I was in in Moscow. It felt familiar, almost reassuring. I barely dated again. I slept with a few men out of the primal urge for release. Mostly, I found being touched by a man I was more intelligent than, creepy. I couldn’t bear to kiss a man who reads two books a year. It felt like they were violently robbing my soul.

As my career ascended, my mental health descended. I slowly slipped into a state where I found no more joy in promotions, accolades, and salary increments. I had a fantastic job, everybody was in awe of me at work, and I was making money that most people put up on their vision boards. I travelled extensively for work. But I was unfulfilled and unhappy. I started spending more and more time at home, barely leaving unless I had to go on-site to intervene on a technical problem. I had built a formidable team at work, a well-oiled machine. I didn’t need to be at work; I operated mostly from home, behind my closed door, which I only opened to receive an order. One time, I stayed in the house for a straight three weeks, not ordering food or anything, until the caretaker knocked on my door with a very worried look.

For the first time since I was a child, I started thinking about Mr. Ogot.

I remember thinking I had become the exact version of him; only that I combed my hair, and I didn’t have cats outside my front door. My parents and siblings, at this time, were used to my reclusive lifestyle. “Something she picked up in America,” I heard them say. The more I thought about Mr. Ogot, the more I related to and understood him. He felt like a friend who knew and understood me. It’s almost like our souls communed. I’m a high-achieving individual, like I suspect Mr. Ogot was. I scored a 3.72 GPA, the highest in my class for a black woman, for any type of woman and man, in the whole university in recent years. I later received job offers that were only offered to white men, and I did those jobs better than white men.

My own boss in Kenya would later call me a genius. But I had heard it a few times in reference to me. The first time I heard it again after my mom had used it on Mr. Ogot was from my lecturer in my Masters class who taught me Advanced Circuit Analysis. I heard it again, and again, from different lips, in different rooms—yet each time, it rang more like a condemnation than a compliment. I wanted to ask Mr. Ogot if this was how he had felt—like an outcast. Perhaps his quiet self-isolation wasn’t born of arrogance, but of disappointment. Maybe he found the world too dim, the conversations too dull, and chose, instead, to retreat from the noise of uninspiring minds.

In mid-2023 – a very difficult year – I started seriously entertaining thoughts of killing myself.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like my only way out. I felt that true freedom lay beyond living. I saw death, not as the end of experience, but merely the end of individual identity. I read philosophers of Panpsychism and Existentialism. That Death gives life meaning because it ends. I read Goff and Chalmers. I wished I was alive to consult Mr. Ogot over his thoughts on Mysticism and Esotericism. I was sure he would know. I had dreams of us sitting at his dining table, talking the whole night, my whole family gathered outside, looking inside, banging the window to get my attention.

Eventually, I started to calculate my final exit.

Unlike him, I couldn’t bear to hang myself. Too messy, too inconsiderate to whoever would discover the aftermath. I couldn’t take a cocktail of drugs; it would most certainly be inconclusive and only promise agony. Carbon Monoxide in my car? Does that work outside the movies? I finally devised a plan to drive off a cliff, which seemed better. It would look like an accident. The viewpoint towards Mahi Mahiu was my choice because the plunge was long, and access to the bottom was difficult. It had to be at night. At 2 am, when there was no one. I’d plunge headfirst into the abyss of darkness and not be discovered or retrieved for hours. I’d be free.

January last year, I performed reconnaissance. I drove to one of the viewpoints. I stood at the edge, on the wooden boardwalk, if you will, and looked down at the bowels of the Great Rift Valley. It was perfect. It was evening, and I had on my woolen hat. The sight was breathtaking at sunset. Several people stopped by to take photos and selfies against the setting sun. They seemed satisfied, happy even. They were collecting memories from their phones, something they planned to look at later and smile. I wondered why. What was the point of keeping sunsets in your phone? I wondered why they were so satisfied and assured of tomorrow. What in their lives spelled hope? It disturbed me. It intrigued me. How could they overcome the pointlessness of life? These thoughts barraged me, and I remember putting off the plans to be executed after Valentine’s Day but not before Easter, to try to get to the bottom of this. The more I thought about it, the more it led me to literature because I believe that every answer known to man is hidden in a book.

Reading led me to Buddhism.

The teachings of Buddhism saved me.

In a nutshell, Buddhists believe that life is precious because it’s a rare opportunity to achieve enlightenment and that suffering, or dukkha, is central to life, but so is the path to overcoming it. I learnt that ending one’s life doesn’t necessarily end suffering; it simply interrupts the karmic path and may lead to rebirth in a more painful state. I didn’t want to come back to earth in a more painful state.

Slowly, after months of reading, I stepped away from the ledge and slowly started rebuilding my mind and body. I discovered long, frequent walks at Karura Forest in the middle of the weekday when there was hardly anybody. I liked the company of birds and small skittish animals in the bush. I enjoyed knowing that there was life in the bushes, up in the trees, and that I had a duty to live through mine with stoicism. I picked up books on psychology and mental health. I have not found complete healing, but I no longer want to drive off a cliff.

I recently, reluctantly, joined a hiking group in spite of my love for solitary trails. In that group, I have taken notice of a silent man with a jaw of rock. He is the broody, observant type with the deep, intelligent but quieting gaze. The type I’m drawn towards. He has noticed me too. For now, we bide time.

**

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