A Bitter-Sweet Moment

It has become a daily routine for John and I to have one rollex, a local spring roll consisting fried eggs, cabbages and a half of a tiny local tomato. The taste is good, in the middle of being the fast food and Michelin-three-star cuisine. We then would sit in a small local pub across the dusty street, having couple of sodas. Occasionally, Mac would pop up surprisingly from the street and join us for a while before his figure diminish into the darkness of the street which is lighted up by Matatus' dim front lights.

I did not take soda as usual. Neither did John take any soda at all. I chose Tusker, a local beer, instead. I was introduced to it several days ago when I was busy drinking different brands of beers in which I completely lost my sense of time, direction and everything else. John and I talked as always. In the middle of our daily conversation, he asked me in a tone sounding rather like a statement, "how I'm going to live after you go back," he was in his usual way of projecting his voice while staring at the TV set, few metres from where we sit, on it a woman was singing about her love in Luganda in front of lots of vegetables, "I am going to be really bored"

The hand of mine holding a cigarette unconsciously stopped in the middle of moving closer to my mouth. My feeling was mixed. One could call that a real bitter-sweet moment. It was the first time in life anyone whom I knew had ever said that kind of simple statement to me. I felt more proud than receiving any of my past academic or social achievements and felt more bitterer than any solemn goodbyes I had ever been given. The statement he gave was too simple to be insincere. After a short hesitation, I replied in a mischievous way, 'John, your life sucks!'. We both laughed. I then recalled the past years I spent in China, the UK and several countries, where physical and spiritual goods were in abundance, where individuals' lives were too complicated to make daily sense, where nearly everything could be substituted by something else, and where the value of simple words were badly diminished by everyone's ambitions in life.

I thank John for giving me the moment of retrospect, of warmness and of comforting bitterness. I already started to realise that this place is changing the way I look at life. Maybe, the place is just helping me find the way I should look at life.

"...We don't create them, we discover"