Becoming The Muse

Our family doctor must have been very concerned about my state of being…. That opening line makes more sense if you are already acquainted with the story of how I ran barefoot and hurt the soles of my feet because the doctor had his own ideas as to how I sustained those injuries.

The next time I went to see him was a day after we started the summer break during my senior year in high school. I had a scarf tied around my neck even though it was during the summer break, I was sweating a little but tried to act cool. While the doctor was completing his check-up he requested I remove the scarf.

I unwrapped the scarf, thereby revealing the angry welt across my neck that I had been trying to hide. It looked bad… It looked like the sort of rope burn one would get if one were to lets say, “Attempt to hang themselves by the neck until they died.” I knew what it looked like, so when he raised his eyebrow quizzically I tried to explain to him how I came by that particular bruise.

But first a bit of context. I learnt at a Catholic boarding school that was located on a mission farm, far away from places young people looking for trouble could find trouble. As senior students we didn’t have a curfew, unlike the junior students who had lights out at 9pm when the main news on ZBC ended. While there was no perimeter fence demarcating how far students could go, it was understood that some places were out of bounds.

You know the saying boys will be boys, even on a mission school farm with no trouble to get into we still found it… At night, we would trek to a granite clearing behind the hostels which had these rocks that sounded hollow when you banged on them, like some sort of natural drum…  Later on this place would go on to have a grand significance but that happened way after my six year tenure at boarding school.

Last time I was there, I was pleasantly surprised at how the place is now a designated “Shrine of Mary Queen Of Peace” with modern amenities, pavements and a statue of Mary. Apparently, there has been cases of people experiencing a Marian Apparition there… and a Catholic nun who had never been to Zimbabwe let alone Africa dreamt of the place in great detail… Life’s mysteries.

But back when I was still at school, it was just an interesting place and we would go out at night to bang rap beats on the rock drums, rap some rhymes and smoke. Yes smoke… but its not quite what you think. We’d smuggle tea leaves from the dining hall kitchen and roll them into “joints” then smoke it pretending we were living the thug life, you know Tupac live and die in LA, I wonder if Heaven’s got a ghetto, nobody cries when we die, we were out laws let us fly…

Boys will be boys.

Until one night, the boarding master showed up and we fled like the wind. I forgot to mention that our boarding master could run… On Sports Days he always won the Teacher Races and he had gone to a university in Cuba on an Athletics Scholarship. The boarding master was like bet… I will race you to the hostels and do a role call… anyone who is not in their room when I get there will have some explaining to do.

So we ran.

I was also a decent runner too… remember I won a bread race right, my feet were healed and this time around I was wearing sneakers… plus I knew a shortcut.

Running in the dark is an extreme sport.. one second you are racing towards the lights of the hostel blocks, the next second, you are starring at a sky full stars twinkling above the world so high and before you can process whats happening, you feel the cold hard earth slam into your back and there is nothing but silence broken by the jangling of the clothesline.

See, I had run into the clothesline and it had caught on my neck before dropping me exactly quite unlike the way wrestlers did the clothesline move.

And that’s how I came to have the bruising around my neck. I had a sore throat for days and had gone around with a scarf around my neck to hide the angry markings.

I didn’t tell the doctor the full story, I gave him a summarised version that I had run into the washing line and he just looked at me like; “Son, do you think I was born yesterday?…”

~B