You enter your room, possessed, shutting the door violently and locking it hastily afterwards. Right after that, you throw the key onto your single bed, which is covered with a floral blanket. It reminds you of home; it used to belong to your parents, who had it on their double bed—the one that creaked when you sat on it.You last sat on it on the day of your departure, the day you first saw your mother freely letting her tears stream down her cheeks without trying to hide them or wipe them away before they reached her chin. It was also the first day you had sat down with her as she poetically told you the dos and don'ts of life—the things you ought to do from the moment your feet touched the red, rocky earth of this alien place you're now in.
Now, as your eyes focus on that symbolic artifact, you suddenly recall all her sobs as she enlightened you on the facts of life—the ones you pushed far away to the back of your head and immediately forgot when you arrived. How silly of you. You are regretting, deep down cursing, the day you left your morally filled life for that filthy one you had chosen—a filthy one that has now led to those thoughts you're having.
Deep down, you just want to escape; you really yearn for peace, but according to you, you will only find it by boarding the bus of death. It's right there in front of you; its doors are wide open, calling you to enter for free. All you need are the means to get to it. And you're hastily looking for them now. You sit on your bed, sweat dripping from your stress-emaciated face, as your thoughts are ready to turn on their ignition keys. They're just waiting for your permission to start this race—all of them competing for the ultimate prize: for you to use them efficiently and effectively the moment they reach the finish line.
It's that cloud of shame hanging above your head that's causing you to think this way. It's that gossip that will spread in your village the moment they find out about those immoral, abominable things you did within that short space of time you've been here. It's all the other things that are at stake if you spend any more minutes above ground, so you'd rather be six feet under. You're ready to meet your maker, but you still don't have a logical explanation for the things you're about to commit so that you can meet him prematurely. But you encourage yourself by saying you'll think about it on your way there.
Your feet are sore. If the distance you've covered on foot today were to be calculated, it would be approximately the same as that between Chinhoyi and Harare. Angrily, you shake off your Adidas slip-ons, and they pad onto the floor, which you haven't polished for days, escaping your wrath. If today were a normal, joyous day, you would have taken the time to examine the blisters on both your feet and inform him about them, probably over a phone call in your girlish, cute tone—the voice you designed specifically for him. It has the right pitch, the right tone, the right rhythm, and articulation. You didn't design it consciously, but it just happened magically.
Men are trash; you finally understand that metaphor. Knife, rope, razor, or pills—which one is it going to be? Which one will make an appealing headline for a WhatsApp chain message, which will be forwarded many times by the survivors when you're gone? You grab your phone from the depths of your brassiere and immediately purchase a daily 20MB data bundle, which you plainly know won't last for even a tenth of an hour. You punch in the digits of the Econet USSD code hastily, omitting some characters, deleting, and correcting the wrong ones along the way, until they send you a message informing you that you have successfully purchased...blah blah blah...because you don't have a choice. That's the last airtime on your phone.
You switch on your data, and before it even reflects, you're already on your way to Google. "What is the best way to commit suicide?" you want to type in the search box, but the phone doesn't allow you to do that. It's freezing as you receive different notifications from your social media platforms: a friend request from someone you've never met, an awkward "hi" in your WhatsApp inbox from a guy who has been crushing on you, but you depicted that he wasn't your type, so you've never responded to any of his messages. Available application updates are lining up under the silent notifications panel. Reality finally strikes you as you realize that you didn't activate the data-saving mode, but before you can even rectify that mistake, you receive a message informing you that you have exhausted your data bundle, encouraging you to purchase more on the given USSD code.
You throw your phone, and you watch it make a bombastic impact with the hard walls, more cracks forming on the already cracked screen. By the time it meets the floor, you know its soul is already with its maker. It's dead.The urge for death is still burning inside you, unquenched.
And so, you ask yourself, what is it going to be? Knife, rope, razor, or pills?