From: Violence & Alcohol

Desire wasn’t phenomenally attractive. Idle men, when coaxed by other idle men to grade her on a scale of one to ten, routinely found her to vacillate between a five and a six point five, depending on the time of night, and the depth of their drink. She wasn’t remarkable or outstanding. In braids, sunglasses and metal-sheen nail-polish, she couldn’t help but sink into the grey. Just another Kampala babe. Just another piece of the noisy trinketry adorning a gaudy and pretentious city.

She wanted to be a model. She called herself Desire. Now that name should communicate something. It should imply that she was, well, desirable. At the very least more desirable than someone named Jane or Mary. But to us idle men it just implied, “My gosh, this chick certainly feels hot about herself.” There’s a temperature range in which New Kampalans are expected to stay, and we don’t take kindly to those with ambitions of exceeding it.

But Desire was hard-headed is she was anything. She wasn’t the type to let anything other than her own imagination decide what she could do, where she could fit, and what she was. Reality was a thing that happened to other people. If she felt she was a ravishing diva then the grades of the idle men meant nothing. She was going to be a model.

There. A salient personality trait. It should have made her unique, but it didn’t. Fact is, in this dusty city, wannabes come a dime a dozen.

I spotted her at the bar. She was chatting with a friend. They seemed so engrossed in the conversation, you could actually believe that they had something worth saying to each other. Look at those jeans. Unconsciously swaying to the music. There’s magic in those Calvin Kleins.

Now, since I had been drinking heavily and wasn’t in any position to know better, I cut through to where she was, stood next to her and let it be the beer talking. “I’m here,” I said.

“Who’re you?”

I sighed. She wasn’t getting it, was she? “Look, you are going to go on, in your life, to have a series of empty, unfulfilling, desperate relationships with men you don’t really care that much about. You’ll end up marrying one, living in misery with him until, after a while, your ass begins to sag, your belly begins to grow and your face begins to wrinkle. One day you’ll find that you are not the hot hot hottie you are now, and then your identity crisis will start. You’ll have spent your life defining yourself by your looks. Now those looks will be gone and you will feel like you should be gone too. Only, on this day, you’ll notice that you’re still there. Then you’ll begin to question everything you’d been believing all those years. What was it all about? Is this what life was for? You will ask, is there really a man for me? A soulmate, a special someone? What if I met him once and I let him slip away? What if I lost my one true chance at happiness? I’m going to answer that question right now, before you get to the age when you ask it. I am that destiny. I am your one true love. In fact, I shouldn’t be offering to buy you a drink, you should be buying me one.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked in a way that showed she really wasn’t seeking an elaboration.

“I want a Guinness.”

Before the fullstop she and her friend had walked away. I watched them go.

Damn, she had a fine ass.

-C&R99ii

I'll explain on Friday