Author: Chiedza Zimudzi

About the author: A lover of words living in Harare.

Story title: 24

About the story: This story is inspired by what I call a “mid-mid-life crisis” encountered by the characters in their mid-20’s. The main character has a crisis in her career, a crisis in her love life and realises she has to leave the only home she has ever known.

When you left, I kept everything. I kept the car we drove all around the city in — driving to work in the morning, from yet another alcohol-soaked Friday night at Harare Sports Club, home to sleep. I stayed in the city you left, this city that was too small for your bright, shining dreams. You’d tell me all about the new life you would have there in England, and how much better it would be than your load -shed, dirty tap water drinking, late salaried Harare life, not realising that I too was a part of your old life. I hated all the things about it that you did, but I loved you. I loved how sure you were of yourself, that all you had to do was leave our failing state, and that the universe would bend to your will and make all your plans succeed because you deserved it, whereas I was riddled with self-doubt. I always had the niggling feeling that everyone could see the truth about me as an adult: that I knew nothing and I was making it all up as I went along.

Every day, I had to drive past the golf course at East 24; where we played slightly drunk mini-golf one February afternoon. One evening, on a date after you left, the man I was with drove me past there, and I sobbed quietly in the dark, and he never noticed. When we got to Chez, I danced with him as if my life depended on it, and I saw your friends at the bar, and I know they saw me and knew they would tell you they saw me. You never asked. I kept going to the hair salon where you used to get your hair cut; silently willing your barber to ask me about you; just so I could be sure you had once really been there and that it hadn’t been a figment of my imagination — that for 11 glorious months, there was laughter and fighting and lovemaking and reconciliation and good food and fun between us; but I answered curtly when he did ask the inevitable question about you, and when I would follow you there, to England. To England, where you would meet people who were just as brilliant and dazzling as you were, how could I ever hope to compete with that? You did not even like to have sex in the same position for longer than a few minutes.

I kept my bed. For the first few months after you left, I tried very hard to make sure I did not sleep in it alone for more than a few nights at a time, because your ghost lay there. In vain, I tried to chase it away with Mike, then Tafadzwa, Munya, Brian, Tafadzwa again, then Nyasha; until they all blended into each other, and I barely knew whose arms I was waking up in. I would watch myself, from the chair in the corner of my bedroom, as one after the other lay on top of me. Suggest they do something you used to do, but it was never the same, and I would feel my body there, and all the rest of me somewhere else I knew not where. I kept the bottles of whiskey you left at my flat; and replaced the men with a bottle of triple distilled every weekend. The smell reminded me of you. Of you; slowly drinking a bottle down in one night, with no sign of being any worse for the wear except when you’d nod off without warning.

To listen to you telling it; England also did not suit. It was the food — bland and over-priced. You missed your favourite beer, your family, murivo & trotters, and your friends, quite possibly in that order. The indignities of ordering your schedule around a public transport timetable. And how expensive everything was; when you got your scholarship you thought you would be able to live like a prince there, but you had to wait tables on weekends to make ends meet. Too many West Africans, and you caught the Vietnamese doctoral student you shared a flat with washing her hair in the kitchen sink more than once. I listened. I did not tell you that I could not remember the last time I’d had a full night’s sleep; like clockwork my mind woke my body up at exactly 5 minutes to 3 every morning, to think about everything that had gone wrong in my life. That, some months after you had left, I moved back to my parents’ house after I hadn’t been paid my salary for four months, and that I too was now looking for a way out of what our country had become. Or that I would not buy lunch for a week so that we could have our Skype session once a week. No, these things were not necessary to say; it would have embarrassed me to have you pity me.

I told you I missed you, and you asked what I missed. The smell of your skin in the morning before you put on the cologne that smelled distantly of cucumbers that you wore. If I sit down and concentrate for a few seconds; it wafts through my nose as if I am lying on your chest; instead of being an ocean and a continent away, as I am. I miss sitting in traffic beside you; I hate being idle, but with you it always felt like I was in transit to the next big adventure of my life. Calling you ten minutes before lunchtime to meet up in your office for an impromptu lunch of what were marketed as spring rolls, but are in fact long vetkoeks with chicken and vegetables in the middle. Silly, small things like that are what I miss. And bigger things too — such as singing along together to Coldplay on the way home, because it is not every day that you find someone with whom you can sing along to the more obscure Coldplay numbers. I skip them now, when they play on my car radio, because they are all you and me now, but you are gone.

In a few months, I too will leave here, with no intention of returning. I am leaving because I cannot make a living in this country of my birth; the country whose flag was a promise to me that has been broken at every turn. I am leaving because my parents are not young anymore, and they have carried me for far longer than they or I ever thought they would have to, and I now wish to fly on my own, and to help them where I can. I am leaving because I want to live in a country where there is hope, where the streets are clean and where, as our national anthem fervently hopes as it winds down, ‘…nevatungamiri vave nenduramo.’ I do not want much, you see. But I am also leaving to get away from this place, where every street, every bar, every night I lay my head down on my pillow, reminds me of you; but you are no longer here.