The Right Person on the Wrong Road

I am on Bole road waiting for a taxi to Bole Dildi. The rain just stopped, the sky is grey and cloudy, and it’s freaking cold. I’m shivering, despite a couple of layers of clothes and a scarf. In front of me, across the road, a crowd of people is fighting to catch a taxi; my eyes are fixed. I enjoy watching the pushing, pulling and blocking strategies. People seem to be on a soccer field rather than an asphalt road. 

 

As I was entertaining myself staring at the Gladiator moves, suddenly, I got interrupted by a beautiful girl from the crowd… Winta! Oh my God… W-i-n-t-a! I screamed inwardly. 

Winta is a cute girl I know from elementary school- I used to have a huge crush on her… I was in the same class with her for grades five and six. I remembered her… even then, she had long hair, beautiful eyes and a breathtaking smile. She still has that same beauty, only now, she has dyed her hair brown and gotten taller. Otherwise, she hasn’t changed much.

Despite not seeing her for so many years, all of a sudden I want to cross the road and say hi. I want to know what she had been up to all these years. 

What if she doesn’t remember me? What if… I ignore my thoughts and convinced myself to talk to her.

She’s probably got married… She’s probably given birth… Maybe not, though… I don’t know why but I’m determined to talk to her.

I want to cross the road but then I realize that there’s no zebra crossing. I look left and right; nothing.

I always use zebra crossings; however, I consider the urgency of reaching her before she catches a taxi and am tempted to jump over the median. But the median was filled with sticky mud due to the rain! So started walking upward, looking for a safe place to negotiate the traffic.

I can still see her. She hasn’t got into a taxi yet and she hasn’t seen me; she is busy with her cell phone. A taxi comes. Damn! It’s blocked my view. I can’t see her now. Has she got in? 

Yes! Y-e-e-e-s! She didn’t get in. Thank God she missed this one. I quicken my pace. I am almost running now. I see a zebra crossing now… I’ve arrived! Now to begin dodging the cars… 

Wait a minute- why am I this obsessed about her all of a sudden? Why do I want to talk to her this bad? I don’t know… and why didn’t she get into the first taxi? I don’t want to believe that she was unable to cope with the pushing… maybe God wanted us to meet again. Who knows maybe he wanted to place my childhood crush at my side as he did to Adam. Maybe…

I’m now going down towards her. I’m almost there. Another taxi comes. No! For a moment I want to scream out her name: “Wi…”. But I don’t. That would be lame. 

The crowd is fighting to get into the taxi and I’m blocked again. Where is she? I can’t see her. I’m breathing heavily. I still can’t see her… Wait… I see her! S-h-h-h-h-h-i-t! She got in. Panting like a dog, I stop walking towards her. 

Blaming time, I start calling the names of who I think is responsible:

One- the Ethiopian Roads Authority;

Two-China;

Three- the taxi;

Four- the rain.

I insulted all of them with bitter words…

Even God- why did He make me see her in the first place? Why didn’t he let her go in the first taxi? Why give me hope?

Why didn’t I just yell out her name? Why didn’t I walked faster- or even run!?

Winta: why didn’t she see me? Why did she get in that taxi?

Why? Why? Why?

The Writer’s Nightmare

Why do writers wake up whilst the rest of the world sleeps? Why is the night more artistic than the day? Why do writers prefer to talk in the day and write at night?

Here I go again… Awake! At exactly 2AM, while the rest of the world is down for the count, while the world falls in to the unknown; lifeless. One question always crosses my mind: where are we exactly when we fall asleep? We don’t think, we don’t talk. We are nowhere but in the middle of life and death and are nothing but breathing corpses. Unconscious.

As habit has it, thoughts or questions wake me up; or, should I say I get woken up by thoughts and questions? Great thoughts most of the time! So I open my laptop and play the keyboard like a piano. Words pour out of my fingers like a sweet, gentle melody.

I usually wake up mumbling words and phrases for my writing. However, without any special thought, word, phrase or question in my mind for the first time, I got up, just now. I forced myself to fall asleep because I thought maybe I was awoken by a nightmare but I couldn’t manage to do that. I am still awake. Suddenly, a question comes to mind- or, my mind went questioning- “why did I wake up”? Probably a question one has never asked before.

… Why isn’t my mind tired when my body wants to rest? Why do thoughts keep knocking on the ‘write’ part of my mind when I have nothing to put down? Can’t I just sleep like the rest of the world? Why are my fingers still typing? It’s like I am on auto-type, I can’t control myself or my fingers, and they continue to play out a melody on my keyboard. A melody I don’t really understand.

I don’t really know the point of my writing and I don’t even have a title for the thing. Should I call it ‘An Article With No Title’ or ‘A Title-Less Article’? This must be a nightmare! I don’t think I am really awake. For a moment, I wanted to slap my face to check but I have still don’t have control over my hands. I think I am dream writing.

“Excellent”! I jumped in excitement, now I’ve got the title for my article! ‘Dream Writing’... All of a sudden my hands feel crushed and I have a sharp pain on my backbone and I hear a screaming sound I seem to recognize…

“WAKE UP! WAKE UP! It’s a nightmare”! My friend shouts as I fall from the bed.

Zoma Magazine: August 2013

THE LAW OF EMOTION

After having a rough time arguing with her boyfriend, a friend of mine called me for a shoulder to cry on. Her eyes were red, her eyelids swollen like a fresh mourner. As she sobbed we sat in silence for a while; I was trying to find the right words to say and she was waiting for me to break the ice. “What happened”? Slipped out of my mouth, finally.
“R-e-l-a-a-a-a-t-i-o-n-s-h-i-i-i-p-s suck”! She said as she burst into tears.

How often have you felt or said the same? I guess it depends on how healthy your relationship is and how often you argue and fight with your partner. I am not saying relationships are unhealthy just because there are arguments; arguments are inevitable. However, relationships become unhealthy, in my opinion, when you argue on the same topic over and over, day in and day out.

Can a relationship ‘suck’? Surely a relationship is a reflection of the two people who are in it. If there are problems in your relationship, it is because you (collectively) have problems. As the saying goes, it takes two to tango. Accordingly, it takes two to make up a relationship. So the problem must be with one of the two of you.

However offensive the above statement may seem to you, it is a bare fact. Yes! I said it and I’ll say it again: if your relationship sucks, without doubt, you suck.
The universal principle of “what you give is what you get” applies to every aspect of our lives. Also, Newton’s law of motion or, in our case, ‘law of emotion’, states that for every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction. So whatever you knowingly or unknowingly do will eventually come back to you. That’s how life works, that’s how it balances itself. Simply put, what we experience in our life is a routine of our actions and reactions. So the hard times we face in our relationship didn't just arise out of nowhere. We created them, knowingly or unknowingly.

The key lies in your hands- if you alter your input, you’ll get an altered output. If your inputs are positive, you will get positive outputs, and vice versa. So our relationships have issues because we are putting our issues into them.

After finally managing to calm my friend down, I convinced her to pick up her phone and send her boyfriend a positive message. I bet that he would definitely send her back a positive response.

So, as per our bet, she picked up her phone but did otherwise and called him. And to my shock, she was not positive at all! She started arguing with him right in front of me. She asked, in fact, begged him, to talk to her in person for only 30 minutes. He insisted that he couldn't because he had a meeting. Their heated argument went on for almost half an hour over the phone. She finally hung up and started crying all over again.

“You heard what he said, right”? She asked me, sobbing once again.

“Yes, but you didn't listened to what I said! I told you to send him a simple, positive message and instead you let your anger get the better of you and aggravated the situation.”

I suggested a change of scenery and we went to our favorite restaurant. “By the way, when someone advises you, it doesn't mean they’re smarter than you, it’s just that they’re in calmer than you emotionally in a better place than you emotionally. So listen to me carefully: what you guys are doing now is silly. You can’t end an argument but you can abandon it. Both of you are playing the ‘I am right game’, which is a never ending argument. I want you to know that the opposite of an argument isn’t agreement; it’s being smart enough to know how to disagree and still maintain mutual respect and love.”

While we were talking, she received a text message from her boyfriend: “No matter what happens, I will always love you.” I told her to send him a similar response but she was determined to ignore him. I picked up her phone and wrote: “That’s what I would have said if we had met. Sorry for being so hard on you earlier. Have a great evening. I love you”. After a long-winded argument, she agreed to send it.

The reply: “I promise to fix our problem. I love you too, my love.”