What it is…
Unfulfilled desire is… the smell of downy fabric softener on cotton sheets. Like the faint smell of fabreze on curtains and comforters. It smells like my perfume, my body spray. It looks like a bed that’s creased only on one side. The left side. My side. It looks like me. Unrumpled, un-molested, and mussed only by 6 hours of a dreamless sleep. It sounds like 2-hour phone conversations. Like text messages sent on Saturday night. Like an e-mail that says: “I’m thinking of you”. It sounds like voice messages replayed on the metro, over and over again. It feels like endless stretches of miles of bed. It looks like eye-rolling from your girlfriends when you interrupt every movie with “OMG!!! Muthuri is just like that. Yo! That’s crazy….” Quickly countered with the sistas’ “Even you Muts, ma gũ-gũthikĩrĩria, mũndũ no auge kanda ĩno yaku nĩyo ĩkamaga mĩruthi gana thamaki cia Githumu. I mean— he’s sawa and all lakini… (“Listening to you, Muts, one would think this jamaa milks lions ama fishes in Kisum-City. He’s a’ight and all but still….)
