32 Days of Christmas: Day 20
My friend is a neat little thing with fine teeth, the kind that catch the light before anything else does. She likes to linger around the shops bordering the road. I still go for bread on that side of town, not because it is closer or cheaper, but because it offers the possibility of a conversation. She likes to expose her teeth to me, even when my jokes are tired and clearly unworthy. She knows I like to joke, and so she makes sure we laugh in the early morning rays, as though laughter is how we properly open our lungs for the day. She never really speaks of her family, or her friends, or why she is always by the road every morning. But she continues to make going for bread feel like a whole event. A worthy event.
There is a playful disorder to her presence, a harmless chaos that announces itself before she speaks. She fidgets, sways, exaggerates reactions, pulls faces when words fail her. A foolish creature whose neck is probably what vampires picture when they are looking for necks. She is what Luo musicians dengo as ng’ute ong’ol, whatever that means.
She studied at St George’s Girls, and at first this fact intimidated me. I imagined that she was those queer Nairobi baddies who often come with Mars-level standards, and no patience for nonsense. I imagined I would have to keep up. Instead she disarmed me. She proved to be down to earth, approachable, and almost stubbornly normal. Despite her father’s wealth resting quietly within the hills of Fort Ternan, she wears no grandeur. She listens a lot and attentively. Asks questions that she knows I can answer and ones she genuinely wants to hear answered. Our conversations are light but never empty.
She has her flaws. We all do. She can be evasive when cornered by honesty, and is late more often than she admits. She pretends not to care about things she very clearly does, myself included. She interrupts herself mid-sentence, forgets where she was going with a story. And still you’ll lean in coz she is a good storyteller. Not everyone is a good storyteller. She is all that—layered, imperfect, whatever—and still she feels like a walking bundle of sunshine, and a party-size bag of crisps
It’s Christmas season now, and she has developed a habit of giving me gifts. Not bread—never bread. She once helped lodge the idea firmly in my head that bread is for the poor. Instead she offers unexpected things wrapped in thoughtfulness. I have given her a few things over the years too, small tokens passed across the road with mock seriousness. This year she hinted loudly, and with a tad of ceremony, at what she believed she was owed. I reminded her of the mischief she had caused all through the year, the way she knew exactly when she was being difficult and chose to be anyway.
I shook my head and told her, “You silly goose.” I smiled.
“No presents for you.”
✍🏽Reagan.