The pleasure was all mine

Sitting on a restaurant balcony, leaning back, wearing blue jeans, a button down shirt and a subdued manner while a pretty woman smiles and speaks and shines and glitters and tells me stories. The clouds are low and dark, threatening rain that will, it turns out, not fall until late in the night. The tea is tasteless. Four hours pass by. Somewhere a king is crowned, somewhere a hero slays a dragon, somewhere a deal is signed and billion dollars are made. The world is full of greater men and more momentous deeds but I think that life is contained in seconds, not in epochs. Somewhere a mountain is scaled. Here, here I made a pretty girl laugh.

End of Days

Day ends and everything speaks to me in Eliot. "His soul stretched out across the skies that fade behind a city block" "the burnt-out ends of smoky days" "I have lingered in the chambers of the sea". Even when the words don't tally exactly, they fall with a slow cadence, a rhythm and a texture that settles easily on this hour.

It's going to be seven soon. The work day is done and I have left the office. I've slung my rucksack over my shoulder. I'm wearing rubber-soled shoes. I'm going to walk about 200 meters to the stage where my taxis wait.

I left my car at home because I didn't think I would need it today. Her brakes are bad and I'd rather not risk taking her out unless I really have to, but I'm beginning to think that maybe I left her at home because you can't do this with a car.

You can't plug yourself into a Lupe Fiasco mixtape and sigh at a pale moon rising over steeples of Nakawa and just roll down this hill. Lupe turning words into trapeze artists. The man is amazing. The whoosh of traffic—Kampala rushing out of itself. Everything hot and frantic and cramped and crowded and furious about the day is coming to an end. Night is falling. Sigh again. Exhale. Do you feel that?

Seven p.m.

Round Midnight

This saxophone is made of miles of silver and each finger on each key touches the truth. His fingers dance over her keys like the crackle of electricity sparking over the eternal wires beneath the sublime, animating the ethereal under and around us. She speaks in riddles but just because we don't immediately understand does not mean she hasn't just said the names of each and every one of us and just because these stories have been told before, just because the same tale was told by Dizzy, by Ella, by Bird, by Miles, even by Kirk Whalum, doesn't mean that each time, each and every time, the tale was not freshly spun. The sound curls through the air towards us and cradles in our earlobes and, like a newborn child, declares this home and falls asleep.