A Nerd's Life

Prologue

What exactly do you want me to do? I have been up all night waiting for you to say something - anything - so I can drift into my usually fitful sleep in peace. Why do you do give me the silent treatment? Why the double-edged signals? What have I done to you? I think you are one of those people who play with people's heart with sweet nothings and a load of sweet meaningless words. Its unGodly; please do not do this to me. I have suffered enough. You have ruined everything and right now I'm in the shitiest mood I had ever had.

I’m not having clear thoughts right now, but you are a very smart girl, and you will figure things out if they don’t appear to make sense at first.

So here goes. Yea. Here. Goes. Things always have a funny way of coming to me when I least expect it. All things. Good things. Bad things. Physical things. Thoughts. Once I was watching a soccer match and I wondered why the ball was getting bigger – then it hit me…

Right now it has come to me and I am thinking; it is but a funny old thing, this life we live. Sometimes you think you have said it all; everything that needed to be said has been said. There is nothing more to say that she doesn’t know already. Maybe you could tell her you love her. But you have done that already. A million times over you have told her you loved her. And she has done exactly the same thing. So what else is there to say?

But then there comes moments like yesterday when she loses her cool and shakes your belief and that lackadaisical sense of security right to its core. You feel it because you literally jump out of your sleep with a start, like you are late for something. It’s four. AM. 4AM! Already! But I just dozed off seconds ago, and it was just 2100hours! How come it’s tomorrow now, and it’s 4AM for fuck’s sake! Why not midnight; or better still why is it not still 2100? But it is four. AM. And the last thing you wanna see is your phone blinking about calls missed at 2200 last night. A good six hours ago. Three of them. And another notification reporting two texts on Facebook Messenger. But that is the very first thing you see.

And your first thought is, I'm toast.

Because you know where the calls and the texts have come from. Far. Very far. And they are not calls to miss when they come; they are like that perfect girl with the longest girl name in the world – Leeloominailechatainachiblahblahblah – in Bruce Willis’ The Fifth Element who should not fall in the wrong hands if she is to succeed in her mission to save the world. There are no two things involved; missing those calls and texts will only mean one thing; you are toast.

But because your mind has a mind of its own, it won a battle of endurance wits last night and decided to sleep through a vibrating phone and two beeps. Who can blame you; it was cold in the house last night – the small matter of a very fledgling winter flexing its muscles and clearing its throat before its starts to really sing – and the warmth of blankets was intoxicating. And it is still cold this morning. But suddenly, you feel hot all over. With good reason. You should feel hot. Or better, you should be roasting slowly on Satan's Hades hearth right now. There are moments when one just wishes for the days when one had no phone. Today is one of them.

Because a heart can only take so much, baby. You skim through the texts looking for the bad parts. The first one is soothing and all lovey dovey, but that is not what you are looking for; it is not why you suddenly feel sweat beads crystallising on your back right now. You skim through the second message; and everything seems to be falling into proper ranks now. This one is bad. And it looks like all the parts are bad from the first word to the last. Fuck; this is serious.

Then you go through it again, this time slowly, looking for the parts that would drive the nails in your heart. God, you cannot hold the chilling suspense of it all – isn’t there something, anything out here to burst the bubble that had been growing in your heart for close to a year now?!

Maybe the worst parts – by confirming your misery – will put you out of your misery. The parts that confirm your worst fears. And you know what those worst fears are - what the hell was I thinking to actually believe that a girl like her can actually look at me and see a soul mate? A girl with such beauty that she can make Brad Pitt slam into a wall while ogling her out. A girl with such a golden heart. Tell me again why such a girl would waste her life returning even an iota of your love? Anenge ashayei?

Look, no offence man, but you are a literary nerd. You have been married to literature for as long as you have lived. You are a geek. A dreamer. A dork. Put in layman terms, a loser. And in words of simple syllable, losers do not get love from hot girls.

Read my lips: They...don't.

The world does not work that way. Haven’t you heard them prat ad nauseam about the world being all for capitalism, not idealism? Well, nerds are the only idealistic people there are. With their sunglasses and squinty eyes and wacky theories and experiments that rarely make it out of the lab. Or literature that has no hope of harbouring its own ideals about getting published for the world to poke at and criticise someday. The sole purpose of nerds in the soap opera of life is to dream about what their dream girl would look like and how they would love her. Fair skin. But you are not so particular about skin – she could be light or dark and still be lovely. Actually dark skin on a girl can drive many a nerd into wanking oblivion. Teeth; even. She will be a strong girl who is as smart as any nerd in the world - except that she is not a nerd - she is THE girl. She is funny, and you imagine her pregnant with a nerdy junior you and barefoot in your kitchen. With only a towel covering her perfect body. A towel, a pregnancy, and the soft pitter patter of a size 7 foot. That is a dangerous combination for a nerd’s penis. It gets so hard you fear it has developed a special case of sclerosis.

Buuuuuuuuuut… that is all in your head now. Don't get ahead of yourself. Girls like that only appear in magazines and books that you write, and you use them to wank yourself silly on the bed during the weekends. But even in those scripts, they will still dump you. Loser. So if at any time in your life you ever get yourself anything on two legs with pussy and a sign of cleavage, then you have to thank your lucky stars. Even if she is a stuck up, uptight church girl; she is a girl right, because she has the right girl parts. Even if you are not allowed to see them. She is NOT an idea. She is real. She is real because she hurts now. And there is no way even a nerd can dream about being hurt. Her purpose is to make the fantasies about that girl you will never have seem real.

I guess that is why most nerds are doctors who can perform perfect plastic surgery on people – it is because they have dreamt of perfect girls for so long they have become perfect artists in their minds. Sewing up people and giving them new faces is not that hard. And by re-perfecting the beauty of people's faces, they will be living the vicarious lives of rich knights in shining armour who have all the privileges in life to get all the perfect girls they want. And dump them still. Some men have all the luck in the world. Or so you think.

Then you go through the text again, this time more sober, because your temperature has dropped a little and your brain has returned to your head from whichever corner of the world it had fled when the panic hit home. And because experience has also taught you that your first reaction to negative comments is self-purging. Like a nerd, you always expect the worst of people. But then, you have never had the best experience of the best people in the world. Worst is normal to you. 

Maybe it was best with your mother when she breastfed you – sadly you don’t remember the taste of breast milk. All you remember is that women are some very cunning creature that is so good at breaking a heart that she does it with such a swagger you can’t help to pause a second and marvel. So, if previous work experience in the job of heartbreaks is to be considered, it is no surprise that in such cases, a nerd’s reactions are always extreme. He has had so many heartbreaks in life that he once thought of researching whether a human body has some hidden cache where fresh hearts are kept to replace broken once and mend those that are perforated. Heartbroken so many times that he thinks heartbreak is the only way of life. So he breaks his own heart from time to time.

But that is me, baby. I'm not a player, so it is to be expected that I have confidence issues. Piss pots of confidence issues. I’m a nerd after all. I expect people to tread on me, and stamp on me, and I don't retaliate. Because I have come to believe that is what people do to other people. Trample all over them. I don’t understand why anyone would want to hurt another on purpose – and for no reason at all – but I know people go out of their way to hurt each other anyway. It is just their nature. And it has happened to me many times. That is why I told you sometime back that you are inheriting a broken heart. A heart that has been let down a few times too many in the past such that it is scared to love again. A heart that may have never known true love before. A heart that no longer has a place to even feel sorry for itself. Because it has fed on the gospel of false promises for so long it no longer knows what to believe.

But as I went through the text again, I felt that feeling wash over me. Yea, baby; THAT feeling. The feeling you have when you are a child and your father materialises out of nowhere like Santa, and hands you a large box in which you find Christmas clothes and a lot of other festive goodies; just at the moment when you had given up hope that dad would be home this year and you were planning on spending the day herding cattle, away from the prying eyes of other kids at the shops. Because it is safer in the bush with the animals and there is no way you will expose yourself to your peers’ judging eyes that reduce you to the humongous importance of a lump of dried bullshit.

But on that your hysterical outburst - pride. That is what I ultimately felt, baby. Pride. No; not that kind of pride with a sense of de javu attached to it. Of course I had to wear off the initial shock. Because for once in my life, I feel like I have reached for the person beyond the physical reach of the hand. Beyond the pretty face with fair skin and even teeth. But I seem to have touched a heart. A soul. A soul that has willingly chosen to connect with mine and is not happy when that connection is broken, even for the shortest of times. I felt pride baby. Pride that for once, my purpose in life is to provide hope and happiness, instead of being a punching bag where people come and beat the shit out of whatever has hurt their feelings. 

But I, Whatongodsgoodearthismymotherfuckingname, who rejected the middle name of BlahBlahBlah because it sounded like some exotic name only a girl can respond to, have touched a heart. Not the beautiful face that everybody sees and swoons over, but the golden heart inside. A heart that was on a fruitless journey of soul-searching before it found a haven of MY very own troubled heart. And the two created a beautiful thing. They called it love. And for once, the nerd in you had no hand in formulating this pattern of events and you cannot name a hypothesis to explain this development. You just know you love this feeling and you wonder how come you never felt like this before.

That does not happen everyday baby. Love is not picked from the ground like a grain of sand. For love is a grain of diamond that survived weathers as hot as the earth’s core and came out of them shining to the core. There is something that Ngugi said about grains and their quality to die and raise from the rot like phoenixes; but I forget what it was now. But I’m not thinking straight, remember. I’m allowed to say things again and again. And again. And to forget things. Just like you are allowed to go hysterical and historical from time to time.

I have to come to accept that there will be days when you will overreact like this, and I will call you on your bluff, and ask you to eat your words back. But today is not that day. You will lose your cool and you will throw things out of the house – the sink through the window and the bath in the bath water – and I will kiss you before asking you to bring them back. But today is not that day. Today I want to tell you this: I will always look beyond your hurtful words and tantrums and I will see the underlying currents of love flowing within them. Every insult is like a hot kiss planted on the parched lips hungering for love. For every hurtful word, I see Scarpussy furiously pouting her soft wet lips demanding to be filled to the full because she has been thirsty for three long months and she needs her quality time.

I see Scarlett asking her man to log off whatever he is doing because she needs some me time. She demands it. Because she is here for me. She came so I, and nobody else, could make her feel like a woman. I see love. In its purity. And when I finally overcame my brief grief today, I said to myself, one day I will surprise this girl when I ask her to marry me right on her wall on Facebook with the whole world watching. Preferably on a date in June in remembrance of the very first text she sent to me.

And you are right, I do have a writing talent. And I know it. Didn’t you know? I am a fucking nerd.  The nerdy kind of nerd. I know about my talent so well that I even know when to abuse it. But I am asking you to believe this today. I am begging you: When I write to you I don’t think at all. The reason why my books and my stories are something only I can drool over and marvel at from the safety of the cocoon called my head, and not yet published, is because - even though I have the plot in my head and I know what I wanna write about and how it will start and end – I can spent hours staring at a page trying to decide how I’m going to create sentences. What effect should this sentence have on the reader; what message should it send? I don’t like the sound of this word; can I find another? And off, my brain scatters to find me the perfect word. Which does not always come right then, mind you. And I get stuck in the hopeless Wordsworthian maze of so many words I forget who or where I am. Who am I? What am I doing here? And where is here?

But that confusion is only specially kept for scripts of fiction. Not for real life. And you are already a real, perfect human being, Miss Scarlett. When I write to you, I just put pen to paper and let my mind drift.

Because that is my true feelings for you, baby. It is true that in the first days I thought that you were just being nice to me because you figured I was lonely and you decided to keep me company because you are a good person. And I tried to protect myself from the inevitable hurt that would come when people who are nice to me for the sake of being nice finally decide that they cannot be nice to me anymore. But little did I know that you would teach me so much about myself in these few months than I had ever done in the last thirty years. And I found I didn’t feel good if I didn’t talk to you. In fact, living became hard without your voice in my ear or your words in my eye.

Then I fell. Hard. For you.

I can put it in words of simple syllable, really. I met a girl. She made me laugh. She made me love. And this is my only literature to you, Scarlett. A jumbled rambling of loose, incoherent thoughts. You know, what they called a stream of consciousness in our Shona Literature lessons. But it comes from the heart. It is not poetry, with catchy sonnets and limericks and rhymes and meters that sound like a song and will steal a heart with the melody of it all.

But it is prose

Because love grows.

There are boring paragraphs, which will serve a lesson that even though love found us, we will have to work at it to see it bear fruits that would keep us awake through the night, and see what the world looks like at two in the morning. Like we do not have enough things to do through every night already.

And there are paragraphs that we will enjoy, and these are the poetry of our hearts. The parts that remind us that we have a magical thing called love between us, and we should cherish it.

Because it is true.