She has been sitting there only five minutes. There is a small table between her and the man on the opposite side. There is another man sitting right next to her – the man she arrived with. He is busy fiddling with his phone. It rings, and he walks out. She smiles at the man across the table, winks, and then smiles again. He is confused at first, then after a momentous period of awkwardness he smiles back. She tactically adjusts the blonde fringe creeping from underneath her weave onto her forehead and bites her lower lip suggestively.
She makes a unidirectional scan of the room as if to look at the man on the phone, then she reaches into her small bag, rummages for a short while and retrieves an eye pencil. She pulls out a wad of napkins from the holder, scribbles something on it and quickly pushes it over to the man across the table. She composes herself just in time for the arrival of the other man. She smiles at him. Broadly.
“So as I was saying, we are getting married in April,” he says.
His phone rings again. He silences it.
“Would you be our best man?”
“Huh?” the other man responds quizzically.
There is a conflict in his mind – two small voices. The first, jarring and rude is singing a line of his favourite party song while the second, a still one, is struggling to be heard in the din.
Don’t judge him just yet because somewhere in here there is an explanation.
At some point in my life, I managed to convince myself that 'filthy' aspects of life like going to the toilet and having to take a bath were a preserve of the unimportant. The 'unimportant' in the context of my juvenile mind were those who had no business being on TV and especially those who didn’t feature anywhere in governing or running the country’s affairs.
So I thought politicians along with their fresh-faced wives, daughters and sons never saw the inside of a toilet or bathroom because they were too important. I imagined presidents were nothing like me – they never stripped for a shower, they never coughed or sneezed, never ever suffered a bout of diarrhoea, and they ate gold for dinner. Of course my science teachers made sure the thought was dead and gone before I got to be an embarrassment to the education system. Then my teachers’ explanation was corroborated by that classic Sonko monologue about parliamentarians: their misplaced nap times and certain smelly biological processes.
I realised that we, the six billion of us, are as similar and predictable as we are human. I guarantee you there is another human somewhere who is a carbon copy of you. There is someone out there who thinks like you, shares your bathroom mannerisms, smacks their lips the way you do, and fantasises about the same things as you do. I like to think I’m as good as a 16th century violin maker at my craft, or at least that part of his nature chose me to be its one-in-a-million carrier. I know a friend of a friend who swears he was here in the 50s. He remembers the music, the people, and the sights. And frankly, meeting him feels like stepping into the realms of creepy.
However, today I’m referring to the times you have churned out a plot so evil, that you have surprised yourself. Or when you discovered you had a romantic streak you didn’t know you had. Well, you are not the first of your kind, look close enough and you will find a thief in the 1800s who is an exact replica, or a slave merchant on the West African coast who was just as evil, or a Victorian era poet who was just as romantic. It’s just a human thing; only pick the first stone if you are not human.