Finding myself

I leaned over the bar stool and lay my head on the counter, my arm stretched, wine glass still in hand, and remembered how Bob had called me two years ago, to the back of the club- a sprawling lawn with beautifully disordered highlights of overhanging bushes and herbs that he had tended for years- to talk.

We sat under a fig, where he casually remarked that I was smart and all that but not all that. “You are both alive and dead; complete and incomplete; yourself and not yourself.” He said this as he pruned a herb nearby, taking off its dry leaves and branches and working them into the soil beneath its roots. I was torn between being offended and weeping from the relieving warmth of feeling known and seen.

Bob’s white overalls, his grey beard and placid disposition, while terrifyingly clean and regal, were also endearing. He was fatherly and smelled as floral and musky as the bushes he had now become an extension of- tending and making his own perfumes from for years. I had never seen a happier person with as little money as Bob had.

“What do I do?” I asked with tears welling up inside my eyes.

He flashed me a therapeutic smile, which was ushered to my senses by the cool wind beneath the leaves of his bushes. I felt peaceful right away.

“I’ll help you keep your salary for two years. You can live off your allowances, like I do. Get out of this place. Move, Travel, see the world.” “And do it alone,” he added.

So I took a bus to Buzeyo.

Bob had said that it was best to get out of the district as fast as I could- when I still felt passion burning in my heart. So I packed my things and left that very night when he handed my savings over to me. “Do not count it,” he had said. “It is more than enough.”

The bus ride to Buzeyo was warm when you did not slide the window open- something I did thirty minutes into the journey when I wished to breathe in a fresher air than the warm one of the bus. I pulled the window shut as fast as I had opened it, flinching from how rudely the cold wind stuck it’s edgeless head through the open space. It was a deathly cold gust that threw spikes of ice and cold rain drops onto my face. The hole at the back of my teeth started to ache almost immediately.

I called Bob when I reached Buzeyo, 14 hours later. “You are free,” he said. “Go right ahead and do whatever you want.” I felt over the bundle of cash in the inside of my jacket, its warm fleece meeting the back of my hand with soft reassurance. I also felt the rubber bands tightened over the notes -thick as a brick- meet my faith cold and real as facts. “It is more than enough,” I remembered Bob saying. I could feel that it was.

“Find out for yourself what freedom is, what life is, what your ‘yes’ is and what your ‘no’ is.” “Really, be free. If you’re not sure, call me and ask. I will tell you everything.”

I had never before tasted an alcoholic drink and in my imaginations, I had always fancied red wine. So I started from a bar with a sweet red wine that made my whole body warm; tasting and feeling for the first time, the intoxication of freedom.

When I woke up, I was shocked to find myself still lying over the bar counter, my jacket sprawled dejectedly on the floor. I quickly jumped off the stool to get it, fearing for the worst. I reached for the pockets to feel for the money Bob had given me and to my horror, there was none.

I felt my heart withhold a beat, and my thoughts ram into one another as they each tried to be an explanation to what happened. I pushed my hand violently in and out of the pocket once again and save for two rubber bands and a bus ticket, I felt nothing.

I scampered to the floor on all fours and swept my hand across it, and under the counter. When I found nothing there either, the reality of it began to sink in. I threw my legs to the floor in resignation, leaned against the stem of the bar counter, and started to cry. I was about to completely abandon myself to my sorrow when I heard a man’s voice behind me.

I turned, startled, to see a tall, slim, light-skinned man waving a wad of cash in his even lighter-skinned hands.

“Are you looking for this?” He asked.