The Rise Up

How do you live in such a world?

Its 7am. Am awake in the same world I was yesterday, and sometimes this routine clouds your judgment in the most horrible way. You get used to it as such, and you assume the days are the same but they are not.

There are days you will rise up and the world will send you to your knees.

Am on my way to the shop to buy milk. I notice that my friends’ salon is open. Am astonished, because she’s never this early but since I was with her the day before yesterday I assume that she had come back from Nairobi where she had gone to get more stock for her salon. She didn’t open yesterday so I assume she come early today to clean up.

The suburb stretch is still deserted. It’s cold and quiet. There are only three people on the road.

The door to the salon is slightly open; I push the curtain away ready to ask her how the journey went and what she brought back from Nairobi. Instead I am met with the most horrific scene. The shop is almost empty, there is a mess on the floor, the dryer is missing, the chairs, the hair stock on the wall is not there and pieces of a broken padlock lie on the floor. It’s a scene my mind cannot fathom.

I am shaken. And then shaken some more.

 I run out of breathe and my heart breaks in such a way that I have never experienced. This cannot be compared to even that time my X left me.

See, my friend is a single mother and she has struggled for almost ten years to get here. To her finally having her own salon – and she was thriving. Goddamn she was! This on her own for the very first time in her life.  We were even planning to get into business together so that she could expand.

But now the world has dragged her back to the pits of hell – a hell she had fought so had to exit. 

I had been encouraging her ever since, to open her own salon and she did. She took the risk, resigned her job, borrowed a few coins here and there then she started.

How was I to tell her that the world had killed her dreams overnight? How do you wake someone up to such a reality?

That her joy, her struggle, her livelihood, her dream – her salon is now a pipe dream?

How do you live in such a world, that has people who will take you to hell with them? Who will not shy or even pause to think about it before they make you cry a river of tears or blood…

How do you live in a world that rips your heart apart and drives you to madness, sadness and depression? To the very edge of suicide…

You stop. You breathe. You cry.

You fight.

You survive.

You have been doing so all your life.

The day they told you that you are not good enough or beautiful enough, you survived.

The day that boy or girl broke your heart so bad you wanted to die, that you wished the earth would swallow you, you survived.

The day you cried because your loved one died, because life took from you and you cursed God, you survived.

Here you are still surviving regardless of the number of times the world has dug a hole in your heart and buried you.

 You break, a thousand times over, but you rise because it’s the same world that gives you the joy and the delights you have lived by; and the same heart, full of bandages, still has more fire and power than it has given.

Hope is the light at the end of the tunnel, that no matter what train passes through that tunnel you will survive and if you cannot, you tried but you don’t give up without a fight.

You accept the fall; you stay down for a moment just to make sure that you were there then.

You bring the palms of your hands together, part the dust away from your hands, clothes, eyes and feet then,

You start again.

Always.