32 Days of Christmas: Day 10
I’ve had my fair share of bad luck in dating. (I say that like I’m old, gaah!) But I’ve had some good times too. Even wild ones.
There was this one girl who loved indulging my fantasies and tolerated my endless conspiracy theories. There’s nothing as strangely liberating yet irritating as someone who has mastered the dark art of letting you talk about yourself without you realizing you’re talking a lot about yourself. In the moment, it feels great—you get to unload without judgement or fear that your words will later be used against you in some unofficial infidelity court. But later when you replay the conversation, you realize you spent 30 straight minutes passionately analyzing the toxic love-hate dynamic between Squidward and SpongeBob, or explaining how modern football mirrors the rise and fall of global society.
Like this one time she asked me who my celebrity crush was. I’d been around long enough to know it was a trap and immediately claimed, “I don’t have one.” Of course she saw straight through me. With that charm of hers, again, she coaxed the truth out of me. Next thing I knew I was yapping about my long-running crush on Ariana Grande from her Nickelodeon days, long before she teamed up with Cynthia Erivo and made everything weird. Then I drifted into local crushes: Sanaipei Tande, Sarah Hassan in her Tahidi High era (I watched a lot of TV growing up), Megan Fox in that one Transformers scene, and Margot Robbie since.. honestly, forever.
You can clearly tell I don’t have a type, I’ll know what I want when I see it.
Naturally it led to a fight. But I was thrilled to finally confess my admiration for these cinematic queens.
But what really tipped her over was when I casually mentioned that, back in primary school, one of my wild visions of success was to date or marry either a Latina or a Japanese woman.
She was scandalized! Probably the way you are right now.
She banned me from watching anime and Mexican drug movies ever again, which is, frankly, almost every Mexican movie ever made.
Latinas for the obvious reasons. Japanese women, to be fair, they’ve always struck me as incredibly pretty and ridiculously smart. Who doesn’t admire smart people? That fascination was fueled too by my obsession with Hawaii Five-0, where Grace Park played Kono Kalakaua. I genuinely thought she was Japanese like her character. Turns out she’s Canadian, but she gave me this early fantasy of wanting to know what it feels like to be cared for by a brilliant Japanese woman.
Too bad things didn’t work out with the lady. She never even got to hear about my run-in with a certain summer bunny. This was a girl who’d studied at Pangani when we were in high school, then flew abroad and came back one festive season while we were in campus. Suddenly Kenya had “not developed since I left.” You know that thing where someone moves to Nairobi and now their hometown is the ushago? Yeah, she was like that, but internationally. Better roads abroad, better public services, better everything. The only compliment she spared for Kenya was the weather.
My girl definitely wouldn’t have liked her. I didn’t like her either. It’s good to explore and seek opportunities all over the world, but you don’t need to talk like your homeland suddenly became unlivable.
And now it’s festive season again. The summer bunnies have already landed, flooding social media with their “local” partners, hopping around Westlands and Diani, repeating the holy mantra: “Kenya hasn’t changed since last time.”
Please.
Spare us.
✍🏽Reagan.