She sat alone...
Her tears, they spelt out sadness
As they rolled down her cheeks.
Some splashed on her backpack,
A bag she held onto
Like her very life lay folded up within its worn fabric.
Its canvas soaked the tears up almost as fast as they splattered:
As though it hungered for more...
As though the tears would fix it's frayed fabric.
They say the tears of a woman come from the heart;
All I could see from three seats across was a broken one.
The one heart of a little girl facing the two realities of a grown woman:
Life and Love.
The little girl in every woman that aches for love,
But instead gets a serving of life.
The girl that once dreamt of sunshine and rainbows
Seeing rain and hearing thunder for the hundredth time.
How could life afford to ravage such beauty?
How could the harshness that defines our existence
Find refuge in such a tender soul?
She hid her face behind a book...
A book whose pages she hadn't flipped since our journey into the unknown started.
You see, I was running;
From the city and its never-ending cycle of despair.
From news of death and robbery,
From tidings of suicides and sadness.
Running away from the lemons I had served myself
Off the buffet life had laid out.
On a bus holding a ticket I'd paid for
With the last shilling in my worn pockets.
To the river, I'd said to myself.
Maybe,
Just maybe...the wild waters of the Nile
Would infuse life into this battered spirit.
Maybe its waters would wash away the pain;
That pain that I'd grown accustomed to.
That deep foreboding that came
Every time I dared to hope...
That feeling of futility
Every time I thought I'd figured things out...
And yet where I sat, my pain felt trivial;
My fears non-existent,
And my tears, worthless.
For in her, I saw a kindred spirit
Reaching out from the bottom of a hole she had dug.
For anything; a strand of hope,
A drop of faith in her now desolate world,
A ray of light for the darkness she found herself surrounded by...
I could tell, she was running.
From what, I didn't know.
To where, I couldn't say.
She looked up from her book.
Our eyes met.
And in that moment,
Before she veiled her emotions with a look of embarrassment,
And wiped the tears from her beautiful brown eyes
With soft hands that looked like they'd never done a day's worth of work,
A lifetime passed.
And everything was said.
I flashed her a smile,
One picked from the depth of my tattered heart.
For a while, she stared at me.
But before unease forced me to look away,
She chuckled softly and beamed me the most affectionate of smiles.
Amidst her tears, she gave me light.
Amidst her sadness, she spared time to bring colour into my life.
I didn't notice when she got off,
But i recall a beautiful scent,
A whiff of it as people scampered to get off at the bus stop,
The one along the bridge...
That beautiful bridge that adorns the source of the greatest river there is.
Later that evening at a local riverside bar,
My feet in the river, my hands round a beer,
I remembered her.
The woman whose tears touched my heart.
The girl whose smile made me believe again.
I prayed, a fleeting prayer...
That whatever she was running away from,
Would never find her.
That wherever she was running to,
There would be peace.
I asked the bar tender to turn on the news.
I knew it would be full of despair.
Not much changed in the day to day of our little nation,
But one could only hope.
The News Anchor looked sombre;
He always did.
Plastered on the top right corner of the TV was a picture;
Someone that looked familiar.
I'd never have known,
That the girl...
Whose smile brought colour back into my life,
Would willingly paint the evening news with sadness.
Or that the Nile, whose flowing waters
Had only just breathed life into my tired spirit
Could as well take the breath that defined life.
And snuff it out so brutally.
Rujumba