20th June 2021
"These days are numbered like pages in my book of rhymes."
Marshall Mathers
Music has always inspired me into a profound amount of self-reflection, one iconic story telling masterpiece by Immortal Technique (Felipe Andres Corone, more than just an underground hip-hop legend – he's an activist, humanitarian and a revolutionist) has countlessly had me multidimensionally face to face with my former and future self in a juxtapositional bliss of regret and dreams, despair and hope, emptiness and belief, a painfully familiar unfamiliarity with the person I have been, the person I am, the person I should be and my present self somehow always remaining stuck in the middle of this existential crisis.
In moments of deep-set search for meaning, "the man" in the mirror gets tougher to watch as pangs of abdominal butterflies tie my intestines in knots, to mirror my fellow Gemini Kendrick Lamars prognosis on our Zodiacs plight, I guess he was right, "we suffer a lot."
Blessed with the gift of the gab and a duality that sabotages the former trait is a beautiful but self-consuming way to be, the main cause of my inherent overthinking seemingly being fueled by a natural pessimism and the constant need to always be right, yes its complicated...I am a walking cocktail of an observant, indecisive, obsessed with details, into self-parody, introverted-extrovert who is smart enough to feel stupid kinda person.
Some times there's too much on my mind and it overwhelms me into ink spills.
Sometimes the more I spill the clearer i see, the clearer I see the better I think but since the "Letter about Nothing" and the piece i wrote before it, I seldomly write.
With every drop of ink I bleed onto this canvas the deeper I have to cut myself, thirty articles and counting and I am yet to dissect the core of lifes truth into its minute details and if this is the only route to root out the rot then the bittersweet truth is that my technique is Immortal, now back to Immortal Technique.
Technique was a street thug, robbing from people like you and me, part of a gangster crew that had gang-raped and even killed the mother of one of their new gang members who later on committed suicide.
Technique sold cocaine to fellow thugs and hanged out in dangerous areas like all criminals do. He was great at rap and was relatively well known in the New York underground amongst the Hip-hop heads, druglords, strip clubs and every filthy and vile hood due to the crime reputation that had earned him fear, respect and admiration from his peers.
Once in his life, he fell in love, fell for one of those rare "principled, disciplined, straightforward, intellectual beauty whose love money could not buy" women. Her love was never for hire, infact talking to her was hopeless, she was on a class of her own and out of everyones league.
She was a young Puerto-rican who came from an upper middle class, on her way to becoming a College graduate, the kind of woman you must contemplate marriage with, no wonder she did not even talk to the average people.
Broke guys knew better to stick to their lanes afraid she would not pay them any attention, rich guys had no charisma to charm her with neither was she fazed by their possessions so eventually everyone gave up because no matter how good you were, she would never be into you.
She kept to her own style, respectful and pure.
Ladies in the neighborhood were embarrassingly jealous of her but would never admit it, they would speak ill of her and deny it because most of them regretted the long list of men that they had slept with, their promiscuity was known so no one gave them any attention any more. They would usually gather gossiping about her with envy as they smoked weed trying to imitate her intelligence but any time they tried using her vocabulary they sounded sloppy.
Her eyes were brown and beautiful yet empty and sad, she seemed to live a lonely life and seemed a little glad whenever someone would occasionally say "hi" and gradually Technique was able to exchange more than greetings with her and since his energy was genuine and he was not one of those guys trying to sleep with her they ended up as friends, talking more and more often so minutes turned to hours then hours turned to hang outs and on her birthday he gave her a poem and flowers then took her out to dinner after her cousins baby shower.
They would hang out and talk about everything, even about races, history, religion, politics and power to the people, the more time they spent together the more it forever changed Techniques expression of thought as she bought him a new book after every three weeks.
Technique never faked a feeling or sneaked a touch, they spent a lot of time together but it was never enough, he was only interested in keeping it real, honest, perfect and complete.
She used to call him "Carino" and even made him cut off all his thug friends and whores, made him put an end to his drug and crime life, he even stopped hanging out in the streets and they would visit parks and museums at The Apollo, The Bronx and The Metropolitan too.
However, your excitement is about to get tarnished just like your jewelry will, cause everything goes wrong just like how this story will.
One day, Carino faced his fears and confessed to her that his feelings were true and that he could not live without her but her response was just a face full of uncontrollable tears and she would not speak until he left sight.
Carino could not fathom what he had done wrong to cause her to cry and she probably could not understand how much courage it must have taken a cold-hearted man to open up to a woman to such a hopeful extent, both their hearts broke and as she stood crying painfully, Carino left and turned cold after that night.
Carino went on with his life without her, continuing his college and hiphop career before relapsing back to his criminal life, ending up arrested and jailed.
Almost a year into his sentence, Carino was put into solitary confinement where all one has is an enveloping darkness, food as cold as the floors, deafening silence, empty walls, a painful wishful longing for anything else apart from the loneliness that leaves you only in the company of suicidal thoughts.
Isolation does not always bring solace, sometimes it is maddeningly torturous enough to break a man.
Truly, being extremely alone for long periods of time forces one into a spiritual awakening or further self-destruction, the past rushes back into the present as the future inwardly collapses inside ones conscience bringing ones nightmares and subconscious fears to the surface as every thing hidden from ones self begin to suffice a denied internal restlessness.
Traumas from his past life, the pending karma of his evils, and thoughts of this woman kept Carino awake in the night and tortured in the day.
Everything looks differently worse after doing a bid, it is no surprise that Carino remained trapped within himself even after being released from prison on state parole.
He would still feel cold even when his mother hugged him, he would still be absent-minded even when his friends talked to him and they would oftenly catch him blank caught up in his own zone, roaming around brothels sleeping with different women but the more he did to get rid of the cold he felt inside, the more he felt alone especially when he would fantasize about the sound of this particular womans voice and the smell of her hair.
This reminds me of a line in a song by The Weekend featuring Drake " I'll be making love to her through you/ So let me keep my eyes closed" where The Weekend confesses physically sleeping with a lady while imagining his soul making love to a different woman. I guess am guilty too and so are many others too, probably even you, that's how I ended up moaning the wrong name in the ears of a lady I was making love to. Anyway, back to what concerns you.
Carino increasingly longed for her until her absence became too much to bear so he decided to visit the house she used to live in.
Her mother answered the door and hugged Carino but her wrinkles deepened when he asked about her daughter.
With tears swelling up her eyes she told him that there was a note that had been left for him on her daughter's bed for a long time, Carino made his way in assuming the worst.
"Nobody loves you more than me Carino" is what the letter said.
"By the time you get to read this, I'll probably be dead,
But when you left in '97 a part of me went to Heaven,
I thank God at least I got to know what love really was,
But it hurt me, to see what true love really does,
'Cause even though we never made love, you were all that there was,
It was because I loved you so much that I had to make you leave,
You made me doubt the way I thought, you made me want to believe,
And then I slipped up, and I let you get close to me,
It was hard to not be open when people spoke to me,
This was not the way I thought my life was supposed to be,
Baby don't you see, I had a blood transfusion that left me with HIV,
Hoped the end exists for me since late in 1993,
I died a virgin, I wish I could've given myself to you,
I cried in the hospital because there was no one else but you,
Promise that you'll meet me in paradise inevitably,
No matter what, I'll keep your love forever with me"
Quoted from "You never know " by Immortal Technique.
What happened to Carino after reading the letter was too vague to disclose, in his own words he said "to this day, it's still a blur."
She was buried on August 3rd that year and the story ends without a sequel though with Carino never again falling in love but at least having shared his conclusive wisdom.
"Hold the person that you love closely if they're next to you
The one you love, not the person that'll simply have sex with you
Appreciate them to the fullest extent, and then beyond
'Cause you never really know what you got, until it's gone"
For the umpteenth time I've sat down to listen to this song; the soft, harmonic flute always seems to bother me in the same exact familiar manner every time, the softness of the melodious pitch on the chorus always makes me take deep breaths, the tone and tune of delivery of the lyrics always leaves me unsettled...since am cleaning out my closet I guess am safe to parallel Marshall -"i have trouble with the snare."
What starts as an enjoyable effortless nod to the bassline irreversibly morphs into a stare into the blank, dying to discriminately identify the name and cause of every small emotional wave welling up and down inside me in tandem with the rhythm as the musical atmosphere creates a sonical and cinematic effect in my heart and mind as my humming tangents off to an off-beat pattern.
Every single time the same melancholy that was evoked on my first listen gets evoked every time I hear this song, always arousing a restlessly uncomfortable curiosity within me.
The unknowable potential future had she lived, the unpredictability of her pending death to Carino, to me and maybe to you too, the untimeliness of Carinos prison sentence, the possibility of infection to Carino, the pain of not knowing all these mysteriously dangerous yet promising situations, the tragedy of wishful thinking and the strikingly peculiar unsolvablilty of lifes mystic nature...all seem to conjure up in me an incessant urge to delve into the agony of trying to demystify my own pending tragedies and opportunities, the gnawing and ever growing pervasive question then begs?
How much time do I really have?
In life and in everything, how much time do i really have with it all?
What if this lady who died is a metaphor?
A metaphor for my next loss,
A metaphor for my final opportunity,
A metaphor for my chances with Christ, Salvation, Heaven.
A metaphor for you...
Maybe I'll lose you tomorrow, maybe She's a metaphor for me, maybe you will lose me.
I mean who is to say which character depicts which possible reality.
There's a million correct ways to look at it, to me though, it looks more of a forewarning, like a from-the-future beforehand expiring amnesty, a call to caution, some sort of foresight to alert me into a higher intuition in order to enable me to timely avert a consequence, it's criticallly the time for affirmative action....feels like am racing a clock, running out of time and not knowing what am being timed for.
Maybe "she" is my family...
How much more time do I really have with every single one of them?
Maybe "she" is my dreams, talents and potential...
How much longer can I procrastinate pursuing them before missing out on the last opportunity meant for me?
Maybe "she" is my health...
How much more alcohol can I drink before my liver fails?
How much more can I smoke before my lungs give in?
How many more women can I sleep with before...
How much junk...
How much more self-neglect...
How much more carefreeness...
Just how much more damage am I allowed before tripping over the tipping point?
Maybe "she" is the parts of me that need taking care of.
May be my subconscious.
May be a million other maybes, I can not be sure, all I know is there's a big chance "she" might be my next loss.
But what does one do when having more questions than answers...I guess, I'll just be guessing my way through life I guess.
Seems like I have too many guesses to go, but maybe that is really the thing with life...guessing, cause who really knows what is coming, what is staying or what is going, all we know is we are all on our way out...sometimes I feel like I have been clandestinely living in serepinditous hope...and sometimes I feel like I am not the only one.
Suicide is not only killing oneself, it's also not putting effort into proper living and the only thing worse than death is dying unaccomplished.
Maybe my issues apply to you too...
Maybe we have two more hours, a week maybe, perhaps another month, hopefully several more years, may it be decades but who knows really...whatever the metaphor represents...all I know is these days are numbered like the pages in my book of rhymes.
On the dawn of concern, thought and worry, one is forced to contemplate an end because truthfully everything has a mileage and one can only be as good or as effective in anything but only for a given time.
...some times there's too much on my mind and it overwhelms me into ink spills. Sometimes, the more I spill, the clearer I see, the clearer I see the better I think but since the "Letter about nothing" and the piece before it, i seldomly write....
While this piece might be my last release in this line of penmanship, a few people are concerned that my currently-no-longer-so-frequent now-and-then article publications are sadly inconsistent and too far apart thus damaging to my viewership traffic, I agree.
Stubbornly I have sought for depth over views and am contented bearing that burden while pursuing my personal summa cum laude in this field and in life while feeling laden traveling irredeemably onwards while in the direct trajectory of this incoming inevitable coup de grace missile, a head-on collision is imminent.
I learned that the secret to contentment is being happy with not achieving more than you already have, also greed is the fuel for ambition and ambition is the precursor to greatness, greatness though is as you choose to define it, if more can be achieved then by all means go for it, nevertheless if your fulfillment comes from contentment then the inner reward of peace can derive more happiness than any tangible material can.
Lately every article I write has felt like "this is the last article I will write", probably because I am totally fine with ending it all here, maybe it's because nowadays writers are becoming as lazy as readers and listeners.
Do not be offended by how I rationalize, my point is we have had a decline in our reading culture and inadvertently a possible decline in the writing culture.
I always have and still do thoroughly put effort to punctuate my thoughts and letter every alphabet as honestly as it comes to me and at the very beginning of my writing practice I would be a bit appalled when a reader commented "nice" or "beautiful" to a piece of writing, to date I still find it dismissive and for the sake of the art, artists do appreciate the constructive criticism on our writing but what actually inspires artistes more than compliments is feedback on the content subject matter.
Do not get me wrong, compliments are great rewards but a lot of times compliments are sweet-nothings. Compliments get too oftenly used in evading the needed engagement on the raised issues or sometimes they are a way of pretending to have read something.
Essentially though, I swear I just want a dialogue.
A discussion on what my thoughts inspire in yours and what your thoughts inspire in everyone else's thoughts including mine, the same way the sad song evokes these feelings and thoughts in me is the same way I envision the reality and chance to provoke certain thoughts and emotions in you because energy is transient and certain dialogues, rhetorical or not, need to happen.
Fortunately, i still oftenly get the urge to write and when a surge of energy occurs we end up with such moments.
I must confess though, apart from always recapturing the vicious cycle reflected in this psychological tussle in my mental muscles I have just one or two more extra things that are worthwhile to say...I mean, what haven't I already said?
Am not saying that this is goodbye but you might be right taking it as one because honestly speaking I don't actually know what exactly this is, then again, "I still don't know and that's just the way I am, actually I never know and I never will know, not even tomorrow ."
Until i reconnect to a higher level of consciousness and stop relying merely on thought then all I have left is introspection and more introspection till it drains the will out of me and the reading interest out of you.
I turned 27 today, it's a norm to celebrate such a day with pleasantries but at the same time it is a call to search for meaning too.
A birthday anniversary is a good day,
To all, a symbol of increase in age.
To most, a celebration of life.
To some, a regular day.
To a few, a day of reckoning.
To me, a growing concern.
A concern to do more, give more, be more.
After the music stops and after the reading and writing ends, what inspiration or energy are we left with.
The pertubing question defiantly remains...
As time goes...what am i truly gaining and what am I actually losing?
...am I growing?
Wiser or just older...
Mature or just aging...
Braver or just more indifferent...
Conscious or just existing.
What of you?
Whatever it is, I thank God for the time thus far to have had what I have had and experienced what I have experienced as I endeavor to;
Give more of myself.
Do more for myself and others.
Be more of myself...and to live life fully cause time waits for no man and truthfully...
...you never really know what you got, until it's gone...
...you never really know what life was worth, until you are gone.
Wishing myself an eye-opening birthday and a meaningful read to you.
THE END.
Oh before I ...here's a birthday present, a challenge to win 1000 ksh /= simply by tying this piece to the photograph herein and describing 5 major visuals painted in this piece that are also at the same time figuratively pictured in the photograph....what do the different parts in the photograph represent that is also visualized in this piece...click on the photograph and study it.
All the best, meet me in the comment section for your commentary.
Become a site member by subscribing through the icon right below this article.
Victor Mafusa
On my way...