I was 18. She was 16.
She was the most beautiful girl in the village. And very bright - she had topped her class in primary exams, and been admitted to Mary Leakey. When I first saw her, I was doing my Form Six at a certain national school in the bush. She was in Form Two.
It was love at first site, as true and pure as puppy love can be. I dreamt and thought of her every minute in that mushy, pathetic way that only an 18-year old in love can. I wrote her in on the Don Williams and Skeeter Davis and Dolly Parton songs that I listened to endlessly, either on the family cassette player or on KBC’s Sundowner programme.
When the music played, the imagination and hormones took over. One moment she was breaking my heart, the other she was holding me tight and looking deep into my eyes.
In real life, I tried to make her know that she was the one for me. I wrote endless poems and letters that I soon crumbled into little balls and threw away. They weren’t good enough for my angel.
Weeks later, when I gathered enough courage, I would go to the village path from their home at 4pm to wait for her as she took her family’s milk to the dairy. She always passed me quickly with a polite “hallo”. Often I was tongue-tied. I wanted to follow her and make her understand but I was scared shitless. I wanted her to know I loved her. But how do you talk to an angel?
Because her family and mine were friends, occassionally I would travel the ridges and wade small streams to visit their home, you know, like I was just passing by and decided to say hi to her mother. Sarah would be there, but she would never stop whatever she was doing to chart even for a minute. I would be stuck with the mother, who probably knew all I was going through, because at the end of it all she would ask her daughter to escort me out of the homestead.
We would talk about school and other odd things as we walked out of their driveway. Country music and novels. Church and the shop her mum run. I would throw a hint here and there, that I loved her. She never gave me a hint back. It hurt.
I wrote the poems and the letters, and crumbled them into balls. One or two I delivered, to be answered by an astounding silence.
It hurt really, really bad.
A few years later, after we had both finished school, she was working at Barclays. I was a newly employed intern somewhere in the big, bad city.
I visited her office at Barclays Plaza, 7th floor, endlessly. I invited her for lunches and movies at 20th. This time I a little more confident, and a lot more experienced. I told her I loved her. Not once, but every time we met. She just always looked at me with mild bemusement. I did not understand how she could fail to see that, after something like 8 years, it must be the real thing. I really did love her.
It hurt, really bad when she just acted like she didn’t give a damn.
Later, I heard on the grapevine that she was fucking Tony, one of my best friends from the village. He was the son of a very rich former DC. I knew I had lost my love for good. The first girl I had really, truly loved had snobbed me, and run off with a rich boy.
For days on end, I listened to Parton and Davis and Williams and just became one big ball of sad.
When I heard she had given him the crap, and they had parted, I winced. She was my angel after all, and to be honest, I still loved her. A new hope grew in my heart. Finally, I could convince her that her destiny was me, and mine was her. I would save her from the depths of deprivation and restore her on the pedestal of love.
I tried. I really tried. She refused to as much as acknowledge me. She had a string of boyfriends, some downright losers. But for some reasons, not me. I just could not understand it.
Then she got married, had a daughter, and divorced. By this time I too had moved on. I had travelled the world, fucked hookers in 20 capitals and even made babies with random chics. I had paid strippers in New York (they never removed their panties though) and watched shemales peep shows in Amsterdam (fucked-up city) I was light years away from that sweet, wide-eyed teen that first fell in love along the village path in Kijabe.
One time, in the village, we met. She was, incredibly, taking milk to the dairy. We exchanged numbers. We talked. Somehow, we reconnected. We both still loved country music. We both, of course, could hold intelligent conversations about similar issues.
She had long left Barclays and fallen on hard times, divorce and all. A few friends told me she had become some sort of alcoholic. But she came from a good family, and they stood by her. Now she lived at home with her ageing mother and her daughter, much as we had 20 years before - waiting for the plums and pears to mature. Taking milk to the dairy.
It hurt. My angel had fallen from the sky. After so much promise, after so much effort, she had become just another village divorcee. For nearly 15, she had spurned me, ignored me, humiliated me.
And all for it to come to this?
I thought of things that could have been. Of arguments and fights and laughs and babies and love-makings and plans and cries we could have had. If only she had agreed, years before, to me mine. We could have been great together. Or we could have been divorced. Either way, these feeling of lost opportunities would not be there, this regret, this frustration.
One night, when she called me like she always did every two days to talk abou a wistful song she had heard on KBC, all my pent-up frustrations came pouring out.
She was a loser now, I told her, and that’s why she found time to call me. Why had she not paid me the attention when she was young and hot? Why didn’t she call the guys she used to fuck almost right in front of my eyes back in the day? Why, now, did she find me comforting and interesting?
I told her never to call me again. When she started to cry, I felt like a jerk. A real jerk. But the anger in my heart was too much. Why, why had she treated me like dirt when all I had ever wanted was love her? Why, in all the years of our youth, did she treat me like a stupid painting?
Today, as I ponder what could have been and what never was, I will listen to Davies and Williams and may be become just a little nostalgic, sad.
Because when all is said and done, there is a place in my heart that is forever Sarah.
