“Jeez! I look like Barack Obama,” I whispered to myself, as I regarded myself in the rusty bathroom mirror, goofily futzing with my crimson-red necktie– my mind bursting with odd bits of poetry and sentimental rhymes. Unlike Barrack Obama, I was a hopeless romantic; an emotionally-shipwrecked idiot suffering from the “Njoki Chege complex”; an evil psychological phenomenon where a man can’t reconcile himself to the fact that the woman he loves can’t love him back.
Today was a new day; a day to close a horrid chapter of heartbreak and open a new one full of hope and yearning. A new chapter away from the agonizing memories of how the self-regarding drama queen, Njoki Chege, savaged and butchered my weekend by condescendingly rejecting my romantic overtures, leaving me with a deeply wounded and scarred soul, unable to divine what wrong I had committed to deserve such barbarism. The devil had planted a bomb under my romantic life, lit the fuse and gleefully watched the shrapnel fly.
I know understood the pain of Prince Charles after the murder of his granduncle when he said, “It had seemed as if the foundations of all that we held dear in life had been torn apart irreparably.” It was not the statement of a politician, but of a wounded man.
All that was behind me now. I was now readying myself for a date with the most beautiful lady in this side of the Sahara. A true portrait of African beauty. A soft-spoken angel with a heart of emerald and nerves of steel. A tangible testament to God’s creative prowess. You sit next to her; her beauty explodes in your face. Whoa! The English Language is hopelessly inadequate to describe her. We possess an odd telepathy; the ability to know what the other is thinking.
Lake Victoria has a special place in my heart because a blisteringly beautiful mermaid hails from there. I remember the last time I saw her as we lazily strolled the paved paths of Moi University, side by side, amongst the whistling pine trees. The lukewarm sun struck her dark skin, giving it a lovely obsidian rock glow. Humility lurked in her milky eyes. My heart wrestled with the temptation of telling her what Ronald Reagan told Nancy after trouncing Jimmy Carter in an impossible election: “I have never loved you more!” It was a scene out of Jupiter
And then her call came, rendering every nerve in my being afire. My misfiring brain slid into momentary paralysis in protest of my body’s reluctance to execute its impulses. “Are you coming,” she queried with the eloquence of Queen Elizabeth and award winning actress Kerry Washington combined.
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