End of Days

Flickr.com Photo from Laurel Harrish.

Does it bother you? After all the money, all the lovers and admirers, all the songs and all the praise, does it not bother you-- the lack of kindness? You have been a good Christian, but you have always been a mean person. Your heart was small and cruel, and you have always known that. Does it bother you? That your sins never caught up with you?

December 2007

Taxi detours off the main road, to circumvent the traffic jam by squirreling through the pathways inside this neighbourhood. At some point I am looking through the open door of a guy's house. His walls are painted blue. Suddenly I feel disappointed. And I know it isn't the mundane discontentment that every sunset settles like dust over lives like mine. It is greater. 

I feel let down by this millennium. The whole thing should have been... more outstanding. I don't expect any favours, I didn't expect life to necessarily be better, but I thought it would match the spectacle it came with.

I remember the last night of 1999, lying flat on my back on the lawns of Speke Resort, drunk witless, fireworks raging above me ripping the sky to shreds.

I left Munyonyo right after midnight, for Lugogo, where the convert was. Loud drums and guitars, Bell in plastic tumblers spilling their bright gold glow, stupid friends shouting dirty words, three girls squabbling over my bandanda; these were the first hours of the next thousand years.

How could they have come to this? Morose and exhausted in the back of a taxi, gazing listlessly at the open door of a poor man's house, his walls painted blue.
 

 

 

A long December

And there's reason to believe

Maybe this year will be better than the last.

I can't remember all the times

I've tried to tell myself to hold on

To these moments

As they past

 

Counting Crows