The Kenyan Seer

The more I stress, the balder I get. Insomnia, migraines, rage, tears, shortness of breath those are the normal ways stress manifest physically but for me my hair pays the price.  It is sad. I want to do something about it but as a creature  of habit, this has been hard to break. At one of my temples, lies a patchy spot: rough, unkempt thatch’s, alternating gaps of hair and scalp. A physical testament to the emotional turmoil the mind has been sailing through. Reddit says it’s trichotillomania  and treatment is therapy, head scarves, stress balls, and tretinoin. Self diagnosis says I’m in the stage four. Death is looming. Though this patch is met with pity, it has been my body’s way to say we only have each other. My bald spot has held me together like no other. With no shoulder to lean on, I have leaned on her strands. Laying the fardeaux of my heart at her feet, till her follicles could bear no more. My teeth comfort her. They say that this too shall pass. They speak of...

                                                            “Wash your feet before you come into bed.” I never wash my feet before bed at home. All I do is shower in the evening, play hard till it is dark, sit on the couch and wait for dinner, and doze off ignoring any pleas to wake up and eat. My mum carries me to bed. Whenever I find out that they had meat for supper and I missed it, I promise myself to stay up next time. However, today I am not at home. I am in a sleepover. I love girl sleepovers. My mom lets me sleep at other people's homes. She has faith in the good of mankind.  This time around, I am at Jackie's. I met Jackie when I was 6 years old; I am now 10. We became friends through my mum. At that time, she was working at a Shell petrol station. She was working at a petrol station owned by...

Image coronal brain slices and see if they express the virus. Expression means a red glow against the lens. This is my task for Thursday. I task that I vehemently did not want to try. I did not feel up to task.  “Acquaint yourself with it," the one in charge of the intern today, urges.  I start caressing the knobs, big and small, I wrap my fingers on the eye piece, squint through the lens, adjust and readjust the objective lenses. Deep down, the voice whispers ,woe unto you, thou shalt have learned to use a miscroscope. I wonder why my incantaations against the working of this microscope were not heeded. Last Thursday, my imploring had reached the ears of Heaven.  The postdoctoral fellow in charge had worked for two hours in vain. The slices sitting pretty in the wells could not be seen. Oblivious to him, the invocations I had made became a stronghold to the science he possessed. Utterly embarrassed, dejected and destitute, he gave up and told me I could have the day to m...

My lovely friend Katra has introduced me to watching Studio Ghibli, and now I'm on my fourth film, and it's the best thing I have discovered in 2026! My last watch was a movie called Whisper of the Heart, a romantic story about this young couple who are about to join high school and are studying for the high school entrance exams. The main actress is Shuzuki; coincidentally, she keeps checking out from the library the same books as Seiji, and as fate has it, they eventually meet and like each other. Seiji seems to have it all figured out, according to Shuzuki, in that he knows what he wants to do in the future. He wants to go to this town in Italy and make violins. Shuzuki, on the other hand, writes poems and has written a really funny adaptation of the famous song “Country Home,” but she has adapted it to “Concrete Road.” She thinks she wants to go to high school, but she says she just takes a day at a time as it comes. Her meeting with Seiji, who is actually going to be an ap...

I have thought hard about situations where COVID happens again. What if something happens to me, something that is so absolutely out of my control that it gives me a new way of seeing life. And I think I just experienced my COVID, only that in this one, death was so near. And yet, seeing death and escaping its fangs makes you appreciate life more. I now want to live. And this new longing to take on life head on comes at a good time. The new year is almost here. It’s December. What a time to make those resolutions and start a clean slate. You and I know there is really no clean new slate, but let’s just delude ourselves that there can be one, okay. Now that that is out of the way, let me let you in on what I have been thinking about. For the past few days, these were the lines in my head: “I want to finish my year excellently.” As in, in everything I do, I want to perfect it. Not in the sense of that crippling perfectionism feeling that makes you edit and re edit work, push things over ...

                                                                 I was happy today. Happy, just happy. I experience many types of happiness, but the one I like most is the kind that lingers. It has an aftertaste I can still relish even when the cause is long gone. Or maybe they are happy memories, yes, that is the word. And today I think I was conscious when I made one. You might be tempted to judge and say, “Oh, what a trivial thing to hang on to.” But in a life where joy is thrifty, this is huge. So let me tell you what it is. I do not think you care for me justifying its grandeur or its smallness, so here goes. I am taking this class. It is challenging, so challenging that there is no grade for it. I think the professor realized the highest might forever be a B, though students here are full...