by Easter Mukora
one a.m: i am looking at quotes from the Waking Life and ran into ‘dream is destiny.’ it’s one of those things i never thought i would remember to associate with you, which might be weird because it’s literally written on you. it’s so late into the night that it’s morning and i am better off waking up than sleeping. so i am writing. i still don’t understand what dream is destiny means. i will rewatch it again next week. or some week when it comes up and i want to watch more than i want to write. or if you waltz into my life again when you app finally works. teknolojia! how does anybody know when they’re telling the truth
one p.m: samia is a good singer. so good that for a minute, i forget my troubles remembering that i won’t answer half the tests’ questions right. that perhaps if i can sing samia, failing a unit on women’s health isn’t too unfeminist. it shouldn’t be that hard, i say, reading through the paragraph for the tenth time and recite samia’s lyrics. i sort of just read better with music, you know. like who is not ruined when they start to listen
three a.m: mustafa is singing about gaza and i briefly think about sam kahiga and when the stars are scattered. yeah, the less famous one and islam and rashid and how i read through the quran in some mad frenzy one term and for three minutes and fifteen seconds i want the whole song to be the chorus. and when you left me waiting/i thought/did you do it in the name of god? for forty minutes less, i can’t figure out if this song is sad because of a book with a sad ending that i read when i was fifteen, -there were many such books- a girl whose face i can’t remember that taught me how to read Arabic and that i remember, that i can remember. or yunus, who taught me all i needed to know about the quran to pass for a muslim so i can pick him up from his grandmother’s and let him loose on the khat stall while i walked back home half bewildered and half impressed that he quotes the same quran when i joke about pork. al-khinzeer.
three p.m: mustafa again and i am trying to let the hot sun warm my chilly skin. perhaps it’s the cold breeze, perhaps how cold the heart gets when you remember something so sad it starts turning the marrow into snowflakes. or hail stones if you haven’t seen snow. and you know those stones can kill you. when i was 17, they ambushed my dog and for a week later my mother would finally let him onto the verandah when he heard the rain chase him from one village away and it reminded him of death. and cold. or something close because he shook so much my mother made a fire for him. now this isn’t anything special, but you haven’t seen them bicker when he was alive. okay so mustafa again, and he is singing of the world here below. i am trying to be where my feet are Ahmed, but the tenor droning of an old obstetrician is leading me to grief. help me shut my eyes/ oh/ i still havent’t slept. as i walk out of rhesus isoimmunization and take the sunny way back. i am thinking that hope is a knife might be same song as i’m on fire by bruce springsteen, one just sounds hornier but both are just as earnest. perhaps the difference between horniness and yearning is rue. or an agnostic christian appropriating mustafa’s music because of some has-been grief that never happened. go find your own god.
‘you can think of everyone/ and still only be staring at them/ but you get your dreams for free’
[First published on Substack.]
© Easter Mukora
Easter is a Kenyan writer interested in the impact music has on life and the impact life has on music. Their work has been published in Ibadan Arts. As an artist, medical student and software engineer, Easter aims to create art that represents these combined interests and reflects their ideology. They are on social media as @kindlanski.
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