For Cavalier

… and I am a Kampala city desk jockey with a moderate middle-class income. I live alone, a quiet, sub-ordinary life between the cigarettes I smoke to get me to sleep at night and the coffee I drink to keep me awake by day. I hate my job, but I have learnt to tolerate my workmates and I don't go to the bar when the day is done because I get too tired. My life has ground, over the years, down to a monotonous routine. Every day as grey and endless and devoid as the last. It seems that, like the tragic pawn in a horrible movie, I am trapped in endless rehash of the exact same day that I have to live over and over again. The only difference is every morning I launch into this day a little bit older. My life is being wasted right before my eyes.

And to make it worse, I can't find the energy for outrage. I am too tired.

I live in the third world and realise that this stupor is only the calm at the eye of the storm; that beyond this ring of bland yuppie routine furious streams of destruction whirl. How can I complain about my life when my own direst crisis is mere boredom?
I am less than a day's journey from the LRA, Darfur and Kivu, just two paychecks away from the slums at the bottom of the hill where the children die from the water they drink. I am less than a generation away from Idi Amin, and no idea how far or how close from whatever doom the future holds.

I don't know the future, but I know the past. I remember the past held moments of brilliance. One of those moments was a whole year long. Our veins coursed fire, that year, our laughter mocked the sky when we ran through bushes drunk and frightened, aware of every inch of our souls.

Maybe that is why I write this. Because I think that maybe I may still be …vital. Maybe if I look closer, more keenly observe the details, I will find a pulse.

Or even more: wonder, beauty. Maybe even meaning again. And it will be like that time we swore we were indestructible and dared fate to prove us wrong.