One Year of Blogging: Thank You

A year ago I started this blog. From that tentative first post and through the highs and lows of the year, it has become an ambivalent girlfriend whose ambivalence is only matched by mine. I have deserted and came back to it many times. One would think that it is always there, as I did at first, to be forgotten and remembered at capricious whims. It however has a trump card of its own – words. It is somehow in sinful collusion with the blank word document, mocking white, blemished only with that blinking, laughing, and pointing-a-finger-in-vindicated-mirth cursor. Inviting and mocking at the same time, quietly screaming, “look, I’m all yours, give me your best shot,” it dares and comforts, rewards and punishes, validates and fulfills, all in harmonious measure.

It is a journey that didn’t start a year ago, but from primary school days when the English teacher’s stringent “five minutes!” was a call to draw up speedy conclusions to those ubiquitous “compositions” written in surrendered and frenzied fervor. Remember them? Those in which you wrote of “adventures in forests”, two-headed ogres, and dips in local rivers that raised the teacher’s eyebrows as you and your friends had skived just a week earlier. Once in my final year I was tempted to write about a girl sitting in the front row (boys, we always sat at the back) who had taken to smiling at me as if saying she had waited for me for eight years, and once this charade of KCPE is over it’s you and me. I think I figured that wouldn’t have been appropriate.

I’m curious to read my compositions now, they always seemed full of outrageous and overblown similes, metaphors, and big (we called them “bombastic”) words intended to impress. They were repeated over and over again, I wonder why teachers never got bored with them. Yet we practiced them religiously, lest we forgot before the main KCPE show. We defensively covered our scripts from prying eyes. It was funny how the classroom bully would insist on sitting next to a composition champ during the tests.

Those challenged in this department made grand and alluring promises of “ice”, samosas and sukari nguru during lunch break in solicitation for help; others made offers you couldn’t refuse especially if they were good at something you weren’t (geometry and Business Education were particularly annoying for me). You could tell the challenged ones who, whenever you looked up from furious scribbling, you would find them staring at the ceiling or at those writing, as if in stupefying wonder where they got the words from. Eyes would meet at a terribly awkward moment, when one would wonder what exactly is the other writing so earnestly, while the other would resist a sudden temptation to burst out laughing. And it was gratifying when your composition was read aloud to the rest of the class, but annoying at the same time as you felt like you now had to come up with new tricks.

It was from this juvenile competitiveness that this journey started, and it’s a journey that is far from complete, like a self-perpetuating epic story. I can feel the echoes even now. Sometimes I catch myself staring at the ceiling as if I’m about to invent word mining from there, and I burst out laughing. Life comes full circle. Yet we are unable to escape the beauty words can paint, the emotions they can bring, and the stories they can weave. We read to appreciate and wonder at beauties painted; to go on a roller coaster of emotions created; and to be enchanted by stories weaved. And we write to try and do the same.

In this blogging episode I have made new virtual friends whom I have only met through the written word. Friendships whose lives crop out of a shared fascination with the written word are as good as any. I have solidified many more. I am still learning what works, and what doesn’t. But most of all, I am comforted by your readership and your comments, and by your virtual companionship in this journey under these starry skies.

So here’s to many more years of reading and writing, and to you the reader. Thank you for coming back again and again in the past year.

Picture credit: shesgotsystems.com