A few years ago, maybe more actually, I was going through it with Nyayo House as narrated in Room 15, a short story in my book Highland Cactus . I was in the CBD pretty early. I could feel the weight of the day already and I looked like I was returning from war even though I was going into one. One against a system that was certainly going to make me feel like I was an alien forcing myself to belong. I shall not delve deeper, for fear that the anger of those days is still potent.
So it is in this manner of exhausted demeanour, that I was waiting to cross the road at the GPO stop, when on the other side, also waiting to cross, my eyes caught that of a man. A fine specimen too, by my downtrodden standards of that chilly morning. We held a gaze, he probably wondering what the heck was wrong with this girl, why she look like she just left a tavern? And me already writing the first few stanzas of a poem about a man. And then we crossed the road and I went into the battle, and he onto whatever had him in town at 6.am.
The poem haunted me all day even through the dehumanizing Nyayo House experience, kept me company when I was sent from office to office, followed me around to printing rooms and waited in queues with me, and then followed me into the café where I asked for a double espresso. It sat through the bitter taste of the coffee and then burst through like a volcano, when I pulled out my sticky note to try and jot it down.
What I love about writing is this obsession, this infringement of creative energy on my days and nights, getting me out of bed at 3 am just as the elusive sleep starts to clasp at me. This observation of people’s bodies and minds, their thoughts and their words, this stealing of little aspects of them that they’ll never miss. Sometimes, with their knowledge, mostly without.
Borrowing their basic and their eccentric so I can create me a world in which something is born; beautiful, complicated, suspicious or tragic. And throughout this borrowing and stealing, I think of my muses too, knowing that most of them have no idea just how that momentary intersection of our paths was the poem, the chapter, the missing piece of a story. I sometimes, share the pieces of what I create, with the people that inspired them, to honour us both, but mostly, it is my secret to keep.
This looking at a place and knowing just which character has to come and die here, or live here, or find love here, or lose it here. It could be a quick glimpse from a moving vehicle, or on the walks I take to places I must get to, both physical and emotional.
Today, I am writing from Caffeine Fussion, a little cafe quaint in that manner that creatives obsess over. My sisters and I happened upon it on one of our weekend walks, and I knew I would create something here, probably something beautiful. Yesterday, I was writing from Kikuyu, and the garden of that location was an immediate inspiration to the fields of my wandering through the creation process. These finds, these constantly seeing places as somewhere something could happen, is what I love.
I am in my gym wear, because my character starts her running journey today. A few years ago, I read An Unnecessary woman by Rabih Alameddine. Then later, I watched an interview in which he said he embodied his character Aaliya Sohbi who had blue hair, he wore a blue wig when he was writing. I liked the idea and have since tried to become a little bit of the seasons my characters are going through. I am crying while writing their tears, smiling while writing their quirky sides, all the while, plotting just how much more to put them through. When I am writing, I am just as lost as my characters, wading through the mud to find something sparkly, relatable, hopeful. I am not me. I am not in control even though it is my fingers that hover over the keyboard and press in the letters.
These and more, are all the things I love about writing. And maybe in time, I will tell you just what I don’t like about it, and then tie it back to how that’s precisely why I love it because if I am being honest, however had and painful this process has been, I wouldn’t want to live without this ability to create, however good, however bad.
To be a writer, as has been my experience, is to live in the fiction I create. So there must be a deliberateness in reminding myself that yes, I am a story and a creator of it too. But I am a person experiencing them and must carve time for that experience, without rushing to build a world I am not fully familiar with.