On Friday the 13th a few months ago, my best friend committed suicide.
She
tied one end of a strong wire round her neck and the other to a tree behind her
house. No one found her until her vivacious soul had long left the body. The
pathetic mess that was her remains showed no resemblance to the luscious beauty
she had always being.
The morning of the funeral, her father brought out
photographs of her since she had been a baby. We went down that memory lane as
we stared at and mourned the bubbly little girl whose smile had always being
infectious. Even her smile on the obituary was infectious. She was the
prettiest face most of us have seen. We stared through those photos into the
heart of this happy little baby and into the person we all remembered her to be.
Lisa was a gem.
At midday, her coffin was laid six feet under and the grave
was hurriedly filled with earth. Her siblings cried and wailed hysterically. Her mother, long
dump-found and immobilized by the shock, could not bare to witness the burial.
She stayed in her room crying her heart out. Some of her women friends stayed
with her,they of course could not manage to console her enough, but the stayed
to watch her. Yes, she needed to be watched in case she (in a fit of insanity) decided to follow her child to the other world.
I peeped and saw
her old man wearing a face of courage. But the stammer in his voice when he
said his speech betrayed his bruised soul. She had been his first child, the
first fruit of his virility. He had sired other children with his wife, all of
whom he loved dearly. Still Lisa had always been his bright star. The one who lit
his sky in the darkest of nights. She had been his pride. Every morning this
civil servant went grudgingly to work, it was just so he would feed his Lisa.
The others could eat whatever could be salvaged from the shamba. But his angel
had to have the best. What was left to toil for now?
I almost dressed in orange. Or pink. Maybe even luminous green.
We both hated black clothes. It was beyond enough that both our skins are the
darkest tint of black you could find. Lisa had several times amid in jest said
that if her time came before mine, she would like to peep from the yonder world
and see me dressed in something colourful for her sendoff. She believed in all
things bright. Her favorite colour was the rainbow. I’d also jokingly made her
promise she’d wear a sky blue balloon dress should my time come before hers.
How
I wished I could take her place and she mine. I know she would have worn my
favorite colour for me, for our friendship.
I love life and I like to believe that
life loves me back. But for a few moments, as I watched her casket disappear
into the ground, I couldn’t help but wish we could swap places. I wore plain
mundane black. I wore black from my 3” high heels to the solid stockings to my long nunly
dress and veil. I hid myself in black and hated myself for being a bad friend.
I left early. I should have stayed out of respect. I should
have stayed to read her eulogy as was scheduled. But I couldn’t
bare to stay there. I could feel her disappointed stare prick
through my disguised clothing past my pale skin into my conscience. I felt
her hate me as her troubled spirit wondered why. So I left. I promised myself
that I would be back when I found the answers to all these whys.
Why had I cowardly worn black to her farewell party?
Why had I not read the poem I wrote for her, why hadn’t I
read her eulogy?
Why had I killed her?
After I had pulled away from the crowd, I sat at a distance
from their gate. I sat at the ‘base’ where teenage boys usually sit to smoke while
their parents are away at work. I did not have the courage to go too far.
I remembered meeting Lisa in Campus. Lisa had
always been the kind of girl who never cared to please anyone but her
overbearing self. Needless to say, I had disliked her at first. I had gossiped
her and her click for most of first year. But in the second year of campus, we
got the same room. I instantly thought of moving out but I had no where else to
go since most rooms in campus were taken already. But in less than a week of being
roommates, we discovered that we had so much in common. And as Alaine sings, we
discovered that what tears us apart is what brings us back together. We had
disliked each other because that’s what bitchy girls in rival cliques do. But we
were in essence, mirror images of each other.
I sat reminiscing over the many week nights we‘d stayed up all night chitchatting and
gossiping. We watched only a few movies but sang to almost every song. We both
knew every popular song, and the unpopular ones too. I slyly smiled at the
memory of all those afternoons we gossiped and made noise in class. A few times
we’d been thrown out together. I reminisced the numerous times Lisa and I had
been out raving. The countless times we slept through morning class because we’d
had one too many the previous night. The mwakenyas
we wrote on our laps the morning of an exam, because we’d been too busy raving
all semester to read a thing.
Lisa and I had friends. Tons of friends. Female friends and male friends. Real friends and pretentious
friends. Straight friends and gay friends. Lover-friends and just-friends. She
was gone and they offered me a shoulder to cry on. Some of them called me at three in the
morning to say that I shouldn’t worry much, that it would be alright. They
still loved her, but I doubted they still would when they found out why she’d
decided to kill herself.
They were bound to find out. And they would blame me.
