I Almost Died! (Happy New Year)

I almost died. I don’t mean the silly social media jargon where your reaction to a joke is death, I mean real dying… the pre-zombie kind. Come to think of it, I have had a few brushes with death this year, but I will get to that.

This is my first post this year so, happy New Year!

This year has been crazy. First there was January, the cursed month that left many freelancers living Meja’s song Landlord, then there was Valentine’s Day, which should be renamed expectations day, then the realization that by the time you are reading this post I will be 25 and all I have to show for my measly life is a blog about zombies, nothing to make my dad introduce me to his friends. These three…things… left me in a quarter life crisis-led rampage, trying out things I had never before while still trying to make sense of the things I was used to doing. This of course, meant questioning everything I believed in, including my writing.

Every week since January, I would open a new document and stare at the white empty space, the white blank landscape filled with nothingness, overflowing with unending emptiness would stare back at me; like a mirror I would stare into the nothingness, see me, see my life, see my achievements, see this blog, then see nothing. I would key in a couple of words then hit the backspace. On one occasion I managed to come up with 300 words then promptly hit cltr+A and backspace. I had become the one thing I feared most, nothing.

Pictured: Nothing

So at some point I gave up and started focusing on other things, after all, this blog wasn’t paying any bills.

By the time February was rolling in, this blog had become one of those things I used to do. I shifted all my writing efforts to work, writing whatever The Man wanted me to write about. Heck, I was still writing. For a while I no longer had unhealthy daydreams involving zombies and unicorns, I no longer listened to the voices in my head, unless they were dictating an email and I didn’t feel the urge to share with the world what was going on in my daft head. By Valentine’s Day, the blog was old news in my head.

For the sake of the story, let me just say what Valentine’s Day, that wretched day, means to me. Picture your birthday, that awkward part when everyone is singing Happy Birthday and you aren’t sure if you should sing or just stand there like an idiot until everyone finishes the song,

or  that time when you bump into your ex at the supermarket and you wish you could morph into a dragon and weld that ugly weave on her head onto her scalp and hopefully heat some sense into her head, or… do you get the drift here? I hate the stupid day.

So on that day (I will not mention the name again) I decided to get away from the bloody (pun) city. On Tuesday, 14^th I set out, my boys and I to visit Kisumu and remind ourselves how a city looks without red tents and cheesy roses on every corner. It was evening when we left Nairobi. The sun was ahead of us as if leading us to a promise. Soon it was dark.

Am about to shift tense so I might as well distract you with a picture

 Duuuh...

We get to Nakuru and have dinner, meat pie and yoghurt…a champion’s meal (just not sure what championship) and get on with our journey. It’s a great trip, am with awesome company, three guys randomly traversing the country, leaving all their cares in a city swallowed by empty promises of red roses and balloons. At some point we all can’t wait to get to Kisumu, but it doesn’t matter, we don’t get to Kisumu.

Here is the part where I almost die. Somewhere between my guts trying their best to digest yoghurt and meat wrapped in bread, and me staring into the dark nothingness that is night, I hear the driver, my friend, a guy I trust with my life cry out loud. It’s not a sissy cry, it’s not a cry a woman would make, no. It’s a man’s cry. The cry you make when you run towards your enemy, when you realize there is nothing left to do other than to brace yourself and fight, the cry Mel Gibson made in Brave Heart. At that moment I know this is it. I brace myself, then darkness.

Oh that's me. Sorry I forgot to smile...

Ignore the plates...too lazy to blur.

The car I was in had rolled several times, in the process shaking some sense into my head, rearranging my priorities and making me realize and appreciate the important things in life. Important things, like this blog.

Happy New Year guys, thanks for keeping on.