Written by Nyambura
My girlfriend has insomnia. The whole time we’ve been together, eight weeks now? She randomly wakes up at 3 am, texts me, and sends me memes and GIFs or TikToks, and if I am with her, she’ll naggingly wake me up.
On a Saturday night, she wakes me up in the middle of telling me to listen to the sound of the rain. I don’t know what is so good about hearing the rain fall, the way it sounds like a wet blanket enveloping the night. I mean, personally, I could care less about the rain, and I am not poetic or spiritual like her. Also, I am exhausted, and I just want to cuddle her as we sleep. We were out in a bar until about 2 am, and when we came home, I just passed out. She barely sleeps after drinking alcohol. It doesn’t wear her out, for some reason. She gets busy cleaning, cooking, watering her plants, and then watching sitcoms that she has already watched like one million times. Maybe, low-key, she is a functioning alcoholic. Because sometimes, she even works when she’s drunk.
But now it’s 4 am and I know she hasn’t slept since we came back. She is kneeling beside the bed, next to the bookcase and the plant, nudging me awake. In my hazy gaze, she is bright-eyed, and she keeps asking can you hear it? I’m like what? She says rain. Now I can hear it, muffled sounds of rain, but my head is spinning.
“Can you hear the crescendo rise? I love it! It feels like a symphony of 1,000 instruments coming together in a voice. It lifts my soul,” she says.
I love her. I realize at this moment. And I just want her back in bed so I can cuddle up with her, and maybe we can make lazy love early in the morning. I want to nuzzle her neck, smell the coconut oil in her hair and simply lose myself in her as she whispers my name and runs her soft hands over my back.
But instead, she gets up with agility and lifts the plant next to her; she told me it’s called a rubber fig, and gets around the bed to the window, which only has sheers because she decided she doesn’t want to have curtains on there, cracks it open, and places the plant on the windowsill.
The moment the window is open, cold air sweeps the room, and I cradle the duvet that smells like her closer to my body as I watch her in amusement.
She puts her hand out, and I see her catching the raindrops and dripping them on the rubber fig.
Then she takes out the Chinese money plants that are on the windowsill, inside, and lifts them out to join the rubber fig. She spreads them until all five pots are out, being rained on. And she’s just staring at them. I wonder what she is thinking about.
Through the white sheers, I see the rain outside, like thin shimmers of bleeding or melting silver, trickling down gently, and since she is standing in the light of the streetlights against the apartment, I see the melting silver as if it’s running along her naked body, along the long rose tattoo covering her left arm and going all the way to the curve of her back, giving her a moon-like shimmer, almost ghostly but angelic, and I slip back to sleep then in my dream, I hear her whispering to me that she is not afraid of death.
ii.
I met her when I was terribly drunk – and high.
And she was so sober, I think; I can’t remember. She had a certain energy that drew me in, and she can be like that. She has moments when she only excludes sexual energy in a prurient manner.
Being drunk and high, at least for someone like me, I get lascivious so in the moment we met, our energies were on the same wavelength. That night, her neighbour, my friend, had gone knocking on her door to tell her to come out and take some shots. It was a Saturday night, and she had come, complaining, wearing pink unicorn pajamas, having a silk wrap on her head, and a hoodie.
She was complaining because she had been sleeping, but Faith, her neighbour and my friend, had begged her to come out and meet me, and she hadn’t had a chance to change.
Faith thought we were from the same community, and for some reason, Faith thought that would’ve made us bond. But she wasn’t from my community. And she was annoyed at the stereotype. But we had been drunkenly sorry, and after a couple of shots, she simply blended in.
On Faith’s couch, she had sat next to me, and I remember whiffing a scent of flowers, spreading like vapour on top of my already clouded head, and I just wanted to immerse my body into hers. Up to now, I think she consumes me. She traps me into her being and all I can mostly think about is her. I read her messages twice, I scroll through our last texts, and rehash conversations we have had and my mind replays them like an earworm of a song I can’t remember. Somehow, she’s held that power over me since we met, because I ended up in her house, in her bed that night and we had the best sex I can ever remember. Like four times.
But I guess it wasn’t that good for her? Because the next morning she literally chased me from her house. I keep asking her why, but she just claims that she never chased me. But she actually chased me – I know what being chased feels like.
Then she went cold turkey on me.
I sent her messages after checking on her but she was never responding. Imagine the turmoil. At that time I wouldn’t even have called myself a jilted lover, because I wasn’t her lover. Just a drunk guy who fucked her one time.
The obsession of stalking her creeped in. Not just online, because all her social media was private—even on Google, I could only pick out that she’s a lawyer and she practises at a high-end law firm in town—but no personal details about her—I wanted to know her. I wanted to know whether she was with someone else and I wanted to beat that other person to a pulp.
– but I also wanted to run into her on the stairs everytime I came around to her apartment building, which I now came to more often, like a crazed man. I just couldn’t bring myself to even knock on her door to say hi.
But she was on my mind.
I wondered why she would shut me out.
If only I knew I had made her pregnant. The first time – but she never told me; up to now, she has never told me. I just found out on my own.
For six weeks, she had been cold turkey.
I couldn’t move on per se or even be with Joy, my fuckmate at the time.
I now found Joy unpretty, not in the conventional sense, but my girlfriend, well before she became my girlfriend, had had a certain essence. I had liked how her body had responded to mine, how she had trembled to my touch, how we had talked all night before she chased me out. I liked how she smelled, I liked that her living room had piles of books and plants, I was attracted to her mystery, and her eyes. She had listened to me rant/talk – I don’t know about what – that night with her eyes in wonder. I could see them because at night, her bedroom is awash with the streetlight through the sheers. They were/still are (in my mind) so seductive and so demure, and they pull you in.
Now I found Joy bland, boring even. So I had also been avoiding her. Talk about full-circle moments.
But I would scroll through our – rather, my – texts to her and one day I realized I couldn’t see her WhatsApp profile picture anymore. So she had deleted my number. There was no other explanation; she had had that pretty picture of her for weeks and now suddenly I couldn’t see it?
I have to say that was so perplexing. I remember feeling inexplicable loss and heartbreak for someone I never had. And it sucked the air out of my lungs. That day I had finally fucked Joy. But in my mind I thought I was fucking her – hard and soft.
After six weeks, on a Friday, she had texted me out of the blue. Saying I ghosted her.
I saw her texts through the notification bar and I was appalled. How dare she say that? Suddenly I now had this unprocessed anger. Of my number being deleted, of being ghosted, of thinking of her too much, of continually wanting her, of feeling dumb like I was clutching on to something that probably wasn’t real.
After she randomly reached out, when I responded to her message, I took it easy and asked her how she had been. No need to sound like a drama king, right? I ignored the ghosting question.
She asked if I would be at her apartment that Friday, and although I initially had no plans to be there, I said I would be.
I was curious, though, why she would eventually reach out. I would know later (secretly) that she reached out because she had gotten her period after carrying out the abortion of my baby. And she was finally in a mental space to talk to me. Or see me. Or be with me.
It didn’t occur to me that she had gone through it as well. And finding out that I knocked her up lessened her mystery; she now seemed real, because being a human being is so vain, unlike the image of her that I had curated in my mind.
This is how I found out – she had written a text about me on her notes, in her laptop. This one time I borrowed it to access my email and the notes app kept popping up and I had clicked on it so that it would stop popping, but instead, it had opened. I think fate wanted me to find it.
‘My dear body – I also know now you are regretting feeling all that, for those fleeting moments on that Saturday night when you came apart in mind-blowing orgasms. When he suppressed the groans coming out of your mouth with his, then the same mouth moved to the nape of your neck and whispered to you how good you felt to him. When he pulled you so close and pressed himself into you, and you felt him inside you, hard, throbbing, probing, and grinding, and you didn’t want that moment to end. Because it felt so damn good. When the next morning, you woke up to his penetrating hardness and embraced his illicit affairs, you were ready for him, and you responded, curling your toes. When, a few minutes later, the mind, saturated with dopamine, told you to live in the moment, to relish the pleasure and let it be, in the true motto of que sera, sera. You didn’t mind being cuddled by him, and when he turned you to face him and looked at you in a post-orgasm haze, you almost felt love, then him placing his forehead on yours, him wrapping his hands around you and pulling you closer still made you feel like you wouldn’t rather be anywhere else in the world.’
The second time, on Friday, when I am finally inside her, and her walls are clenching around me precariously, I ask her, in a voice I think is husky, whether she has missed me. She whispers vaguely a strangled yes. Then I ask her to actually say it. And to look at me as she says it. She knows I am delaying her gratification, but I don’t care. I want to know so that I can make that move I know will push her on the edge, and she can remember how good we are in this together.
In the streetlight-lit bedroom, she makes eye contact, and I see her beneath me while pressing down on her as she says, ‘I missed you.’ And while I bend to kiss her plump lips, I tip her over the edge and I feel her legs tighten around me, while I also let go, mumbling how I have missed her more.
‘I look at you in my bedroom mirror. Naked, pressing a hand on my belly. Imagining how there’s life there, I am about to crush your power to bring new life. But this is also my choice; it is good for you, I think. Because we will both be very exhausted, shamed, and abandoned, and right now, everyone is against you. I mean the heart, mind and soul.
And remember the guy who made you pregnant?
He is somewhere on the other side of town, blissfully unaware, posting stupid memes on his WhatsApp status. It is only us making this decision.
Carefully, I place the two tiny pills beneath the tongue. They are chalky.
Next, I lift one leg, place it on the bed, and carefully insert one pill at a time into my vagina. I feel them go in freely, the same vagina that welcomed a hard penis that made you, the body, come apart. I don’t even want to think about that.
I just want to go through the motions.
I want you to feel pain as a consequence of my very bad decisions. I am ready to feel that pain.
I keep staring at you until five minutes later, when I decide to heat up a bottle to place inside my bed while I dress in pink pajamas, with unicorns patching it up.
I get the bottle, still I haven’t opened my mouth, and I’m cozy in bed watching Netflix, Friends ‘the One After I Do’. I want to watch something relatable, and in the episode, Rachael discovers she is pregnant, and she doesn’t know what to do. Unlike her, when I saw the two stripes on the pregnancy testing kit, I knew exactly what I had to do. Even before laughing deliriously, I knew exactly what I had to do – no hesitation, no second guessing; I just knew.’
Later on, when I found out she had been pregnant and aborted my baby and she had no plans of ever telling me, I came to see a vicious, depraved part of her that I wish she’d reveal to me. A side of her that’s wilted, that makes her care so much for her plants, as a way of expressing her desire to bloom. I see why she likes rain, because it’s nourishing to the earth, and I see her trying to nourish. She keeps that depraived part of her in deep shadows; she always puts up a show of sufficiency. I wish she would know that I can handle her ghosts and her darkness, and that if she is tipping on the edge of oblivion, I want to tip with her, and we can go on a free fall together.
‘When I stand up, I feel something heavy pass between my thighs. I rush to the bathroom, only to find a huge clot, the size of a lemon, tissues and all, lying delicately on the pad. Oh My God. I sigh deeply, and I am immersed in its shape. Its formation, its essence. Is this the pregnancy tissue? Gosh. It just came out? On my bathroom floor, it seems a little gross, but I can’t stop staring. I probe into it with my fingers, trying to feel its texture. It looks rough but soft to touch, easy to break—delicate. This is where the cells would have merged to create legs, hands, neck, chest, and feet. To think of those tiny feet, I feel tears start to pool in my eyes. I read somewhere that the first organ to form is usually the heart, during the first three weeks of gestation. Then there are hundreds of different types of cells needed that are going to make up the human body, like the brain, spinal cord and nerves. You have so much power. Yours was at 5 weeks, give or take one day? Yeah, so there was a really tiny heart already in formation and the nervous system was in the works. I also read that in those first five weeks, the embryo looks like a grain of rice, impossible to see through my blurry vision, because now I am crying. Sobbing uncontrollably. Grieving for something I never had, something that I am now destroying. Something I did not want. Oh, my heart! This is too much; I can’t even begin to unpack all my unprocessed feelings. I am sad. Selfishly sad and unjustifiably guilty at a loss of what I should have done.
Dear Body: I am terribly sorry for taking you through this. You deserve only pleasure; you deserve good food, good and safe sex, lots of water, and you deserve to be wondered about. Not crawling in pain. The way you hurt, hurts my mind. Because in that moment of pain, I cannot think of anything else.
It hurts my soul, because it shrieks in loss. Whether I like it or not, I am experiencing a painful loss, and the soul will be tainted eternally. I can never forget.
One day, when I look into the eyes of a child, I will get, willingly and with someone I love, my soul will constantly remind me of the other child who I did not give a chance to even fight for their survival.
You hurt my emotions because I am experiencing grief from the loss; I am sad. I am not okay. And at this moment, I almost hate you. Because how can you get pregnant? How could I have possibly been so reckless as to let you go like that? you didn’t warn me. How could you?’
I wish she would see how I love her body, which is covered in melted chocolate, firm and round in wonderful places, with the tattoo that spreads on her arm, and how I love holding it.
More than that, how her body is able to sustain her brilliant mind and her heart and feed her soul and how the same pours into me.
On this rainy Saturday night, when I feel her finally slip into bed next to me, her cold body pressed against my warm one, I cuddle her and place my right hand on her left breast to feel her heartbeat, and I am reminded that we are both a miracle, and maybe one day she’ll tell me, and perhaps willingly, we can create another miracle.
I’d tell her what Rupi Kaur[1] says –
“Stay strong through your pain
Grow flowers from it
You have helped me
Grow flowers out of mine so
Bloom beautifully
Dangerously
Loudly
Bloom softly
However, you need
Just bloom”
[1] Rupi Kaur, milk and honey
