Photograph by Mdipak Photography
Tonight is rather cold. So when the scent of the night rose pulls into my nostrils, intoxicating me and evoking memories of Charm’s strong arm around my waist, it also bites my nostrils and I put the hot-water-dipped, warm face towel over my nose and mouth and press.
I got a tattoo. So now when I lean on the rails of the balcony, the skin of my gym-taut back caressed by tonight’s cold wind, it becomes visible the way the dimples on either side of the end of my spine converge at the skull tattoo in my cleft – right where Charm had suggested that it should be put. “You chose a skull. You could as well go all the way, you Ms. wicked, you.”
I know all the corners of Entebbe. Charm showed them to me; the streets with the largest growth of bougainvillea on the fences, the expat pizzerias, and the best place to kiss in the evening- when the music from the more distant parts of town were the faintest, the night the quietest and the smell of night flowers the most intoxicating.
Back when Charm could walk and he and I had laid on the sand at the beach, and he had seen my naked back for the first time, he is the one that had pointed out to me like no other person ever had that, “You have dimples at the end of your spine,” and later when we sat under the Kerosene lamps he had leaned forward to me and stared for a while before telling me “your eyes are grey”. He then quickly grabbed me and pulled me in for our first kiss.
That was the day I told Charm that I could ride a motorcycle. So we sailed across the tarmac on Entebbe road. The speakers were blasting loud Lewis Capaldi when we screeched off the road and there was the murmur of voices when I woke up to the sight of many men and women in green shuffling about in the room I was in. I thought of Charm. “Where is he,” I asked.
He was wheeled in to me, and I about lost my mind when I realized he had no legs from his knees down. “Charm!” I called out to him in horror, and I wished to say more but my own body arrested me in a sudden awareness of generalized pain.
I know all the corners of my body. As you can already tell by now, Charm showed them all to me. The birth mark under my breast that I thought I had lost, for example. I used to notice it on my chest when I was still young and then one day I suddenly could not find it, and had forgotten about it when Charm pointed it out to me. I reckon it is easier to see a birthmark from down under when you are confined to a wheelchair and your wife is now taller than you, so that when she straddles you, her chest is right above your eyes.
