Of Coffee With My Dreams

Coffee with my dreams

If you were having coffee with me I would be happy you came to visit, I would ask you to sit and make yourself at home, unless your home is a nightmarish place that could have been out of the pages of a Stephen King book then I would have to kindly ask you to leave.

When I was a child I used to have many dreams about how my life would play out and imagined by the time I was my age I would have retired and died of old age peacefully in sleep while everyone else screamed and lost their heads because I would be the pilot flying this story, flipping the script on occasion.

 Well when you six years old, thirty-five does seem like a lifetime away, but here I am struggling to remember what it’s like to dream; it’s hard to dream, if you can barely imagine what tomorrow looks like and if you will be able to afford it.

If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that when my parents were my age, they already owned a house filled with beautiful kids who dreamt about having a life just as the parents had; two cars, dad and mum’s; a life insurance policy and an education trust fund that would pay out, when the kids reached 18 for that varsity life, everything covered.

If you were having coffee with me, I would ask you, what the last dream you had was, what the last dream you remember was, to be specific what the last good dream you remember having was.

I can’t think of any, all I seem to remember is nightmares, darkness and not much else.

My parents must have had such high dreams for us, the born free generation who never knew the horrors of colonization and the devastation of the war for liberation…

Imagine waking up one day, to find that your life savings are suddenly not worth anything in a hyperinflation economy where what should be your retirement package cannot buy anything worth having, and your life policy paying out bread crumbs when the insurance companies promised that you would be creating a nest egg for your children, oh and the precious education you worked hard to get your kids, only creates a generation of graduates who might never get a formal job, and the government you cheered for on independence day, well, the good old days suddenly seem better..

If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you, my parents had such high hopes for us and I had even bigger expectations, yet, now I can barely come up with what my dream life should be like, its hard to dream when it feels like the future has been robbed from you and the light at the end of the tunnel has been switched off, due to load-shedding.

Every day one wakes up to check on the ailing economy like a critical patient in the ICU “Rate yakamira sei nhasi?” “What’s the rate like today?” You enquire as you wonder what else has gone up today, as your money loses its value, it seems like a lifetime ago when you could put money in the bank and get some cash from the ATM or pull up at a service station knowing there would be fuel, how about flipping on a light switch knowing the lights would turn on, and turning a tap and knowing clean water coming out of the tap? These are the things I dream about.

“Chikuru kufema” we say to console ourselves, which literally translates to “what’s largely important is breathing” a way of saying as long as we still alive and breathing…

What do my dreams look like, I dream of a world where I can dream

~B