The Mobile Subscriber Cannot Be Reached—Please Try Healing Later

Ghosted, Blocked, but Definitely Not Forgotten!

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This story is just one juicy part of a bigger picture. Read the intro here to get all the tea!

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It’s 18:45, just 10 minutes after a one-and-a-half-hour dreadful bus ride. The Citi Hoppa isn’t much for comfort, but it does get us places. Dom, the only other person in the room besides me, can’t tell if I’m mad, happy, or crazy. I am worried about making the call. After all, it’ll just add to the fifteen that I made on my lunch break.

1 minute later, the call ends, no answer. Five more, and the results aren’t changing. I catch myself hyperventilating at the kitchen counter, about to make the sixth. I’ve been told I give up too fast or I am not persuasive enough, sometimes a coward cherry to just top the vanilla humiliation.

For a few years, I had known the face of this dreadful bond and ambivalently refused to be a reflection of it. I didn’t mind being alone; sure, a longing hit now and then, especially in the 15 minutes before bedtime or the dusk walks around the city streets.

I can feel myself replete with emotions that are not fear, anger, or happiness. At this point, I’m just about to lose it.

19:30, I reach for my coat and head out for a destinationless impromptu walk through a town I’ve just known for 3 weeks. “One more call—The very last one,” I tell myself, but… seven more later! I changed the tune; I bought the minutes: OFA MOTO YA MTAA.

I can’t tell how long I’ve been on the road. I think I’ve walked too far, but with the line of street lights and the smoky jikos of vendors roasting maize casting a brown misty effervescence assures me it’s still early. I can’t keep walking anymore, for obvious reasons: I am not Johnnie Walker.

I grab the front cover of an A4 Kasuku book page from a swept-up pile on the corner of a minimart and decide to rest a little. I’m at that point where if you had a little space you’d probably decide to pace back and forth. I can’t walk on. Yet still, I can’t go back.

A myriad of personal insecurities stormed into my head at once. This is no longer a case of ‘walk it off’; I need to run a mile. When I no longer feel in control, I am no different from a drunk person. My speech gets impaired, and my motion is as if I stood under the rain. I am bottled with compunction, and rhetorical questions manifest as versions of me become my judge, jury, and executioner.

I wish I’d remained apathetic but no. I had to dig my own grave. I knew I was getting myself into something that was not tenable, but impetuously, I brought a diving board. All this self-loathing was not extenuating my circumstances anyway.

I start having pareidolic visions of this person. Everywhere I look, mannequins, and contorted shadow figures, all start to morph into familiar attributes that have one job-to haunt me. Just one job, they had one job—not to do it—but they quit, and this useless self-healing talk is their last paycheck that I am using to replace a stapler they broke: my heart.

Then ensuing are the feeble sorrow-drenched affirmations of I will never again because no amount of cursing helps my case. Normally, I am a reticent person but this is too much for me.

I scroll through my contact list of 92 people, eleven of whom are family members, 60 are the static people you keep around, comprising of former classmates, former or current workmates, or someone who just gave you their number when that moment felt right.

After skimming through I can only call my sister and Miriam, a new friend whom I’m yet to meet for that matter. When it comes to my sister, she has a way of blending, asking for money and therapeutic talk, so she doesn’t pass the chance to talk to her big brother.

I can’t really tell what I said but one thing still stood out, ‘Antony, you’re like the weapon formed against women, you’ll never prosper’, she said. We jokingly laugh about it. Apart from that, she just laid a canvas for me to project my insecurities and later on hit me with the ‘Get over it’.

The capricious thoughts of jumping in front of a moving vehicle or slamming my phone against the floor are replaced by ostentatious whimsical smiles as I get myself ready to make the second call and head back to my house. ‘Hello’, Miriam answers. I haven’t said this to her yet, but her voice is amazing.

I put a disclaimer first before we begin that no matter how my voice might project, in no way I’m under the influence whatsoever. I try to play it off by asking a question but masking fresh cut wounds isn’t something I am good at, especially if I am oozing blood from the words covering them.

After approximately 11 minutes, she notifies me she has to get back to work and I can’t spend the whole night wheezing on self-inflicted pain. I guess when you become a comedian, everything is a joke, it’s only when you get the joke that you can decide if it’s a good or a bad joke. It’s 21:00, I …

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I don’t know who to blame for my misfortune—maybe I’ll just blame it on the lifestyle.

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About the Author

Skipper pens the unspoken, where emotions blur and the ordinary becomes profound—where words dance between joy and sorrow. Engage with them on IG: @Iambskipper

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And for the grand finale: A Stranger in My Own Bed—this one’s X-rated. It’s steamy, messy, and unforgettable. So let’s close the curtains, lock the doors, dim the lights, and let the story begin.