Having friends is a luxury I could do without. Not only do friends manage to constantly bankrupt you with mundane activities like hanging out at restaurants and/or more crippling activities like making you finance your bridesmaid outfits for their wedding, they also ask you to join them in doing the most inconsequential tasks like working out.
When Kiki made mention of a workout, in hindsight I should have said no and stayed in bed but I was under the impression that we would be going to her overpriced gym where I could shamelessly ogle Presnel, a fitness instructor who is tall, hot and extremely taut, possesses the well-tuned physique of a swimmer and moves his hips in ways that put Shakira and her belly dancing minions to shame.
But where we had gone, there was no gym and most tragically no Presnel. Kiki had driven us, at 7:00a.m on a Saturday, to an open area with nary a building in sight, just a bunch of structures set up on the muddy terrain.
“What is this?” I had asked as I viewed the various contraptions around us with absolute dread.
“It’s an obstacle course,” Kiki had answered gleefully. “The people who sign up for this are mostly army recruits.”
“Then why are we here?”
Before she could answer, a man, who later introduced himself as T the instructor, made his way to us and started barking orders at us to get ready to “feel the pain.”
T was no Presnel.
I have never been fascinated by the bulky and overly muscular aesthetic that some men possess. My honest opinion is that if you are not training to become the next world heavyweight boxing champion, you have absolutely no business walking around looking as if your muscles are two seconds away from detonating. They say that muscle converts to fat when one gets older and no longer putting in hours at the gym like before. Why anyone would willingly walk down this future path towards high cholesterol and high blood pressure is beyond me.
T possessed this physique. Looking like the human equivalent of a tractor, he led us through a grueling fifteen minute warmup that would have honestly sufficed as a full workout and when he laid out the plan of the obstacle course, one which he designed himself, I knew then that he was a spawn of Satan.
There were about thirty obstacles to complete. There were walls of varying sizes: walls to climb, walls to hurdle over and walls to balance on. There were ropes to swing from and ropes to climb. There were tires to run through, tires to jump through, tires to jump over and humongous monster truck tires to transport from one place to another. There were bars to go up, over and under, to perform stunts only done by professional gymnasts. There were logs to walk over man-made water bodies, logs to roll over and logs to do pull ups with. There were contraptions with barbed wires to crawl underneath in the warm mud and at the end of all this tomfoolery was a large pit of blazing fire one had to grand jeté over like a Russian-trained ballerina in order to not get burnt. Oh yes and all of this was done wearing a backpack filled to the brim with cinder blocks.
And now, an hour and a half later, with the sun unsheathing its penetrating rays, potent enough to fry bacon on the ground, T, who has long abandoned us to flirt with a roadside hawker, has us cooling down by jogging, speed walking or whatever it is we think we are doing in a quaint quiet neighbourhood where the residents are actually observing the age-old art of sleeping in on a Saturday.
Every part of my body is hot from inside out. My calves feel hot to the touch as well as my sternum and there is a persistent ringing in my ear. My breaths come out in short painful bursts and my vision is blurry as though I have been staring at my phone for twenty-four hours nonstop. I fear a premature heart attack is imminent.
I could easily blame the sad state of my bodily functions on the blistering heat but that would be a lie. I am not a very active person. My only source of daily exercise is a walking round trip to get something to eat: living room > kitchen > living room.
“Just so you know, I signed us up for a few more weeks. I hear it gets even more intense as the weeks go by,” Kiki says.
Kiki was once as lethargic as me when it came to exercising. Now, she is on a mission: a mission to fit into her wedding dress. To serve as a motivator for losing a few pounds before the big day, Kiki has precariously said yes to a dress two sizes too small and, as a true friend, I am apparently supposed to journey in this boat with her. Kiki tried selling the experience as a bonding one but not without throwing in a few blunt hints about how my flabby arms would not make for amazing photographs.
Neither Kiki nor I are in any way overweight. To be honest, I am borderline underweight but with a curious case of sagging upper arms, where my biceps and triceps should be defined, and thighs that jiggle if I so much as breathe. Kiki has her fat distributed in all the right areas: breasts, butt and hips. She has the type of body my grandmother says our foremothers coveted before colonization infiltrated the land with undesirable Western beauty ideals. I would literally kill for a body like hers but Kiki isn’t satisfied. For her wedding, she says she wants her ribs to be “as pronounced as the creature that died with the ring at the end of Lord of the Rings.”
Unaware of the heated glances being thrown her way, Kiki continues to talk. “As a thank you, I am paying for breakfast at Delali’s. I know their portion sizes are like hors d’oeuvres for snails but we have to remember that from here on out till my wedding day, the main objective of everything we do is for me to fit into my Vera Wang.”
I am too angry, hungry and out of breath to correct Kiki. Plus, I refuse to be petty.
We got Kiki’s dress from Ikechukwu Shum, a half Chinese and half Nigerian businessman whose uncanny, albeit smoldering, smirk had the makings of an unscrupulous man. He had come highly recommended by one of Kiki’s work colleagues who assured her that Ikechukwu was the kind of man who could get anything your heart so desired. Kiki showed him the Vera Wang dress she wanted and he promised heaven and earth to get it for her. He had some deals in Beijing and New York to sort out and he was sure he would find the dress in either city. True to his word, he came back two weeks later with the dress. There were a few modifications but it was pretty much the same dress Kiki wanted. I, for some reason, was urged to check the label of the dress. There emblazoned in black italics were two names:
Wera Vang
It was pointless arguing about the authenticity of the dress when he was hell bent on informing us that we do not know all the fashion designers in the world, that Wera Vang is in fact the best wedding gown designer in the world and that Vera Wang wishes she had an ounce of talent like Wera Vang. This was something a simple google search would have dispelled but in the end we were tired, Kiki had spent a lot of money and it wasn’t a bad-looking dress so we took it, swearing to each other that no one would know the origins of the dress but us.
“Why don’t we go to the gym next week?” I plead. “With the amount of money you spend on membership fees, one would think you would want your money’s worth. Plus, I think I would really like to ask Presnel to be my plus one for your wedding.”
“Presnel? No way. As your best friend I can’t let you continue to fawn over a guy whose name sounds like a birth control pill. If you want a date you can ask T who we will be meeting, same time, same place, next week.”
I started the day with my hair in a perfect twist out. My hair sprung off my head in ideal S-curl, springy coils hanging past my well-moisturized shoulders. Anyone who is well-versed in the dynamic eccentricities of natural black hair knows that achieving the perfect twist out is an Herculean task as well as a lesson in patience and, oftentimes, futility, but now thanks to heat, humidity, mud and copious amounts of sweat, what started out as a twist out now resembles a huge clump of tangled tumbleweed.
As I wrestle my mass of hair into a high bun, I fight back the urge to say the one thing that I have been thinking.
Why go through this boot camp when the wedding may not even come to fruition?
Kiki Adadey has a track record of failed engagements. Third time, she believes, will be a charm.
First was Seth Allotey. With biceps the size of tipper trucks, hands that engulf whole plates and shoulders so muscular they dwarfed his neck, Seth looked like the perfect candidate for one of those body building competitions where contestants are smothered with enough oil to deep fry fish for a reasonably sized village. The disparity between his physical presence and his disposition was, however, baffling to a fault. He was a soft-spoken man, a primary school teacher, whose voice had a timbre suitable for singing soprano. His emotional aptitude made him a pushover and every experience was a tear jerker for him. I once witnessed him cry when one of his students misspelled a word during a spelling bee.
Where he was meek, Kiki was assertive, but instead of using their difference to create a holistic semblance of a relationship, Kiki capitalized on his timidity. She bullied him and tore away a piece of his self-esteem, crippled his self-worth until there was nothing left for him but to cling on to her for his very essence. Theirs was a relationship that was marginally emotionally abusive.
When he proposed to her, I was gob smacked. It was like the man had a death wish. He just wasn’t strong enough to handle the woman that Kiki is. A lifetime with her would have meant a total obliteration of his being but he couldn’t see that, he said he was in love.
But his mother saw it.
At the Knocking Ceremony, where, per tradition, Seth’s family had to formally ask permission from Kiki’s family, Seth’s mother — after having pretended to be enamored by Kiki for so long — showed up at the Adadey’s residence and, instead of asking for Kiki’s hand for her son, unleashed the vitriol she haboured in her heart for Kiki. She was releasing her son from the tyranny of an ill-bred girl, she had said. There was no turning back after that; there was no happy ending, no wedding.
Then there was Kristian Knudson. A prototype of Hitler’s Aryan race, the Scandinavian with his athletic physique had a height endearing to basketball, pale blue eyes like the Indian Ocean off of the coast of Dar es Salaam and hair so blond it was almost white. He was charming and doted on Kiki hand and foot. He worked for a nonprofit that focused on child literacy in the country and possessed the white savior mentality that often went with the job.
Despite having only lived in Ghana for two years, he fancied himself an expert in issues concerning the African continent; he was wrong 99.97% of the time. He did have a more glaring fault, a fault that flew over Kiki’s head. Kristian harboured a fetish for all things Nubian. He believed he was born in “The Motherland” in his past life. As an African studies major in an HBCU, he once contested for the role of president of the African Students Union, a role he thankfully lost. During a drunken confession, he admitted that all these steps he had taken, the paths he had trod in life were all in a bid to procure an “African queen.”
“There’s just something about you guys,” he had said. “Your skin, hair, bodies and nurturing ways are inexplicably the most the desirable in the world. I just knew early on that I had to wife one.”
Was it love? Maybe but it was obvious that he was more enthralled with Kiki being an African woman, his Nubian goddess as he called her, than with her as a living, functioning, multifaceted human being.
Four months into courtship, Kristian proposed. It was a fanfare of epic proportions. He had shown up to the Adadey’s residence on a horse. There were drummers, gong gong beaters and flower throwers proclaiming his arrival as though he were a prominent chief. How he was able to navigate the bustling streets of Accra with this procession without being pelted by tomatoes, saliva and/or stones remains a mystery till this day.
It had been my job to keep Kiki at home for the proposal to go off without a hitch. I witnessed as Kristian stood at the gate, summoning Kiki out of the house. I witnessed as the Adadeys’ watchman opened the gate to let the procession into the compound. I witnessed as Kristian skillfully dismounted the horse and walked purposefully towards a perplexed but beaming Kiki. I witnessed as the drumming woke up the whole neighbourhood and how the flower throwers dispersed petals on the ground, littering the compound. I witnessed the very long speech from Kristian, a speech that mixed English and broken Ga, Kiki’s mother tongue. I witnessed the dramatic bending on one knee and the screech of yes from Kiki’s lips as her parents lamented the whole time.
“Ah, what’s the rush?”
“Are you pregnant?”
“Didn’t you just start seeing this boy?”
“So who is going to clean up this mess after?” they had whined.
This relationship passed the Knocking stage. The Knudson clan made the journey to partake in the ceremony, leaving the Adadey’s residence with the coveted list which detailed the dowry amount and each of the specific items they were to bring to the Traditional wedding, as per tradition.
A few weeks to the traditional wedding, I received a call from Kiki just before dawn.
The wedding was off.
The décor, food and entertainment had already been paid for. Invitations had long been sent out. The gift bags for the guests had been prepared. The Kente attire of the bridal party had been sewn, fitted, altered and paid for. The costs were staggering.
“Are you joking?” I had asked, my sleep long gone.
“I never joke, Sena,” she had replied.
“But why?”
Had the scales finally fallen from her eyes? Was she now clearly seeing his blatantly uncomfortable fetishism of her?
“He loves rap music,” she had explained. “Not the bubblegum version Macklemore likes to spew but real hardcore rap. He says Bone Thugs n Harmony are his favourite.”
There was a long moment of silence as I tried to wrap my head around what was being said.
“Okay but you love rap too so you both have something in common. Where’s the harm in that?”
“I don’t trust non-black people with a penchant for rap music. I know they say the n-word at least five times a week. I shall not be joined in holy matrimony to a closeted racist.”
The road to the altar veered off course over a cliff and into the ocean thanks to Kristian’s musical tastes.
Now, there is Fiifi Mills Mensah. The one she believes she will finally make it to the altar with.
I had the unfortunate pleasure of seeing Kiki and Fiifi succumb to the myth that is love at first sight. Kiki has a habit of dragging me to places and events I would rather not be seen at. Whereas I am a well-known homebody who considers a perfect night as one at home in bed, binge watching movies, Kiki is a quite the socialite who gets invites to everything.
This time it had been an invite to a slam poetry event. I was there for the free kebabs and beer while Kiki was leaning towards a night of scintillating spoken word. She got more than that when Fiifi took the mic. After introducing himself as an IT specialist by day, spoken word artist by night and a motivational speaker 24 hours a day, he launched into his work. It was a rather divisive piece about his ex-girlfriend whose womanhood he compared to a deformed scarecrow’s severed head. It was quite a harsh description and I found myself wondering where he had ever seen a severed head of a deformed scarecrow.
The whole time he spoke, Kiki hardly blinked, keeping her gaze transfixed on him. He too, somewhere in the middle of his R-rated piece, had found Kiki’s brown eyes in the seated crowd and had been dazed as well. He sought her after and they both ignored me as they became familiar with each other.
“Wow, he’s so poetic and eloquent and handsome,” she had said after he had kissed her hand goodbye.
Poetic? I will leave that to the experts; Eloquent? Yes but handsome was a little bit of a stretch.
The main problem with deciphering Fiifi’s level of handsomeness is you can barely see his face. It is lost in the throngs of his enormous uncombed afro and his equally massive connecting beard. Kiki likes to delude herself into thinking that he looks like a dark skinned version of Boris Kodjoe. That is a lie. Should he shave his hair, I am quite convinced he would look nothing short of a contorted wasp compared to Boris.
His height is a plus for him. In a country where the average man is 5’10/5’11, his 6’1 frame makes him a treasured deity in women’s eyes, a Shaquille O’Neal in the midst of dwarfs. He is, however, very lanky. He is so thin that I am happy his French is brilliant because I know one of these days the slightest whiff of wind will blow him away into neighbouring Cote d’Ivoire.
Fiifi lives to be validated by people. When I unfollowed him on Instagram, he actually showed up to my workplace and threw a hissy fit wanting to know why I hated him so much. On the verge of tears, he demanded five reasons why I did the unthinkable. I had only one reason: Fiifi captions his pictures with lengthy philosophical messages fit to be dissertations. Such incessant pretentious babble irks me. Who has time to read all that? Just post your picture and call it a day.
I couldn’t tell him that. He would have bawled like a teething baby and I am not one for comforting adults. I made up some unconvincing story about being hacked and promptly followed him again. He demanded that I do it in his presence lest I forget.
But whereas Fiifi is unhealthily obsessed with people’s view of him, on the other side of the coin, he is emotionally bankrupt to other people’s feelings to a point where it is almost sociopathic.
“Death is God’s way of exercising population control. Instead of mourning, we should be celebrating the fact that we escaped joining the heavenly census this time around. We should be thankful that the world has been rid of an extra mouth to feed, an extra person causing a strain on our already depleted resources. Besides, she was reaching Methuselah status. What’s there to cry about?”
These were the condolences Kiki received from Fiifi when she lost her grandmother. She was old, frail and ready for death. No one in the Adadey family was really crestfallen when she died, no one more so than Kiki who hadn’t really cared for her grandmother when she was alive. But she wept when she died not out of a sense of loss but as a way to manipulate her boyfriend into thawing his frosted heart and consoling her.
He didn’t even show up to the funeral, choosing to attend a spoken word workshop at the cultural center.
But beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder and love is blind and all that jazz we spew about the ridiculousness that is love because these two have been willingly going strong for two years and we have a traditional wedding in four weeks and a white wedding in five to celebrate.
I grab my phone from the pocket of my basketball shorts. 9:15 a.m. I am about to tell Kiki that we need to wrap this session up before I pass out when there’s a distinct rustling of fallen leaves behind us. Of course, we turned around.
I really wish I stayed in bed.
Before us is a man stark naked as the day he was born. Possibly in his mid-thirties, his hair is overgrown, conceals his entire face and is in dire need of a thorough wash. The visible brown patches of dirt have meshed his strands together to create unintentional dreadlocks. If you washed the grime that has taken over his skin, he would probably have a burnt butterscotch skin tone. The scent being emitted from his pores smells like he has been marinating in a cauldron of faeces, cat urine and the type of vomit you throw up right before you pass out from a night of binge drinking. He wriggles his junk at us and we reel back in shock and disgust. This is my first live action footage of the male genitalia and I am quite livid that my experience has been tainted by this man. I do take two lessons from this experience:
1. The male genitalia, seen in the flesh, is a viciously repulsive organ. Novelists love to describe it as if it were Legolas with his white golden locks brandishing his bow and arrow on a white horse but in reality, if the male genitalia were a creature in a J.R.R. Tolkien fantasy, it would be an orc, and
2. I am happy to confirm that my libido is not an equal opportunity employer; the fact that I am a full bodied heterosexual woman does not mean that I will be aroused by all genitalia presented to me on a platter.
My mind does a quick playback of the week’s news trying to remember if there was any report on a strike by the psychiatric nurses which is usually the case at least once a year. The government refuses to pay salaries for reasons unknown, the staff goes on strike and the patients are left unmanned and free to cause havoc on unsuspecting people on the streets. But I fail to recall such a report. This man may not be an escapee of the psychiatric ward but he is clearly either high on some substance or unhinged.
It’s in slow motion when he tilts his head to the left, observing us before letting out a piercing scream and lunging at us with the startling gait of a bull seeing red.
The fear that ignites my bones and courses through my bloodstream releases an abundant flow of adrenalin such that my feet have already started taking flight, leaving a trail of dust in the air way before Kiki screams “run!”
My eyes and my mind haven’t yet relayed the predicament we are in to my confused body. My body screams at me. What are you doing? We don’t run. We never run. Why are we running?
If this were a Hollywood blockbuster movie, some upbeat, high tempo song, preferably Lenny Kravitz’ Where are we runnin’ would be blasting loud in the background. We would be running as though the spirit of Olympic gold medalist sprinters have inhabited our bodies. For dramatic effect, we would parkour over cars, railings and embankments, not even breaking a sweat as our sinewy bodies performed these death-and-gravity-defying acts.
But this is real life and the only sounds that can be heard are our wheezing breaths, similar to the onset of a violent asthmatic attack, our sneakers squeaking on the ground and the occasional musical interlude my kneecaps entertain us with when my bones crack.
And just when I think my body cannot be traitorous enough, she gives me the final blow. A stabbing pain starts from the area I am pretty sure my appendix is located all the way up to the lower part of my ribcage. The severe ache is almost blinding and I feel my body slowing down without my own accord. I can almost see myself clutching my side with one hand and stretching the other out as I feebly tell Kiki to go without me, save herself but that is just the delusion brought about by intense pain talking.
“Why are you slowing down?” Kiki shouts. “I am not going to come back for you oh. This one is an every man for himself situation. I have my wedding that I would like to be present for and I paid a fortune for my Vera Wang which I would like to wear alive so pick up your feet and move.”
Everyone has some sort of motivation or reason why a certain moment in their life would not be suitable for dying. Kiki’s motivator is her upcoming wedding. My reason is simply that I refuse to go out like this, to be quite literally chased to death. I have long since made peace with the fact that death — my and everyone else’s — is inevitable. What I can’t reconcile is the way in which I will exit this life. There are a thousand scenarios I refuse to entertain and that which I find myself in is one of the ways I absolutely refuse to make my way to my Maker.
So I put on my big girl panties, grit my teeth at the pain and soldier on uplifting myself with the sage advice of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah: “Forward ever, backwards never.” Before, I was enthralled by this quote by he who led Ghana to independence because it connoted issues of African nationalism and liberation and the idea of never falling back into the hands of the treachery that is colonialism but now as I run on this asphalt street, I am beginning to decipher a hidden message in this quote. I am starting to believe that Nkrumah rallied behind this motto for times like this that I and Kiki find ourselves in, that when you find yourself running for your life with a naked man hot on your heels, it is always best to look forward to propel yourself faster and away from the threat.
Kiki doesn’t get the memo though; she keeps looking back. What good has looking back ever done for anybody?
Case and point #1 in horror movies, anytime someone, usually a damsel in distress, is bravely foolish enough to look back at her pursuing assailant, she usually ends up diced and skewed like a shish kebab.
Case and point #2, Lot’s wife while fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah looked back and she infamously turned into a pillar of salt.
I rest my case.
“Wow, this guy is not even breaking a sweat!” Kiki exclaims as she looks back. “Where is everyone? Can’t anyone hear us screaming?”
The true wonder to me, what really amazes me, is Kiki’s stamina. Her ability to run whilst looking back, speak coherently without gasping for air and throw out the occasional bloodcurdling scream simultaneously without passing out on the spot is a show of uncanny athletic prowess. Her box braids are viciously swaying from side to side in harmony with her movements and I am slightly relieved that she has a viable weapon should we get caught; there is nothing more painful than a whip from Kanekalon braiding hair.
But before I can even string up a few compliments to throw her way just in case they are my last words on earth, Kiki does the most inconceivable thing.
She suddenly stops running, turns to face Mr. Naked Man and starts chanting “Vera Wang” like a woman possessed before she unleashes her inner Lara Croft. She charges towards him and cleanly tackles him to the ground like a seasoned rugby player. She renders him immobile by straddling him, taking off one of her sneakers and hitting him on the head with it. All I am thinking as I make my way over to them is that should we make it out of this, we would have to pass by a pharmacy to buy Kiki a family-size pack of high grade antiseptic soap.
The man struggling beneath Kiki, in trying to block Kiki’s sneaker blows with his forearm, manages to brush his bushy mane away from his face finally revealing it.
Now, Kiki Adadey has a rich dark mahogany complexion. It’s the kind that glows in the presence of sunlight and shea butter, the kind that looks like it smells of carefully selected fragrance oils, the kind that easily but beautifully blends with the nighttime but even she at this moment is giving Nicole Kidman a run for her money in the paleness department. She is a few seconds away from vomiting; our nudist provocateur is none other than Fiifi Mills Mensah.
Who would have thought that Fiifi’s extensive professional resume included him moonlighting as an exhibitionist?
It takes all of about a minute and a few seconds for Kiki to snap out of the trance that she is in and what she does is scream, an action that appears to also break the spell Fiifi has been in. He shakes his head and looks up at Kiki and me, seemingly seeing us for the first time.
‘’Where am I?” he asks confused.
We don’t answer him because quite frankly we were running without really knowing where we were headed.
“Why are you naked?” Kiki asks. “What happened? Why aren’t you still in isolation?”
“What do you mean isolation?” I pipe from behind.
“He withdraws from society whenever he has a piece to write. He is brainstorming a poem for our wedding. He says it’s going to be his best ever.”
“Another poem?” I ask incredulously.
During their engagement party, we were entertained with not one, not two, but nine poems about Fiifi and his selfless love for Kiki, nothing really about the love of his life herself. They were nauseatingly descriptive, rife with narcissism and delivered in the fake Scottish accent he always adopts for his performance. He thinks the accent makes him sound sophisticated but he usually sounds like a constipated pirate.
“Yes, another poem, Sena,” Kiki chides. “He can’t help being this gifted.”
“If he is so gifted why is he scaring people in his birthday suit?”
We both look at Fiifi, awaiting an explanation.
“I couldn’t write, Kiki. I blanked out. There was no motivation whatsoever,” he starts. “So I decided to fast for inspiration. No food or water for 40 days because I reckoned that Jesus did it and right after He was able to start His mission and Moses did it and right after he received the ten commandments”
“How far along are you?” I ask.
“29 days,” he answers.
“Are you fasting for 24 hours straight?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Are you mad? Who does that? You know you take breaks right?” I ask. “No wonder you are in the state that you are in. You are delirious and dehydrated.”
“But Jesus did it.”
“Are you seriously trying to compare yourself to Jesus? That’s conceited even for a narcissist like you, Fiifi.”
“Who are you calling a narci-“
“Can both of you please shut up!” Kiki interrupts. ‘’First of all I am highly offended that I wasn’t inspiration enough for you but that’s an argument for another day. You need to get yourself together. I need you healthy and sane for the wedding.”
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I strongly advise that you postpone the wedding till he’s fit enough,” I say.
“Over my dead body! The witches in my family would love that,” Kiki says. “I refuse to continue to have the reputation of the girl who is always engaged but never married.”
“I’m not saying cancel it just postpone it. Look at him. He is a skeleton and look at how manic his eyes are. He needs to be hospitalized.”
“I said no! Can you just be a supportive friend and support my relationship just once in your life?” Kiki says finally jumping off Fiifi.
As we stand glaring at each other in heated silence, Fiifi chooses this moment to switch back into delirium, giggling manically to himself while rolling on the ground.
Kiki lets out a heavy sigh at the sight and starts chanting “Vera Wang” solemnly to calm herself down.
I think about all the money I have spent on Kiki’s relationships, the countless number of times I have acted as her shrink, chauffeur and wedding planner, the amount of poems I have had to endure and the pain I am currently putting my body through for her and I realize that maybe I should be more supportive.
I walk up to her, place my hand on her shoulder and start chanting to her :
“Wera Vang, Wera Vang, Wera Vang.”
