My Love Letter To 2021
My Dear 2021,
I gleefully write to you proposing a relationship that might result in a lasting friendship, or even marriage, if all goes well.
2021, as an odd number, as mathematicians call you, you don’t look so beautiful or appealing: Two, zero, two one—2021. But I hope that something good and beautiful might come out of you just like little Bethlehem which produced The Christ whose birthday we are celebrating now. As such, I’m undaunted by your seemingly unattractive appearance. After all, appearances could be very deceptive. Shakespeare puts it more succinctly:
“There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.”
Oh yes, appearances could be misleading. Your immediate predecessor was so beautiful at first sight but “behind that beauty lie the true colours that would destroy me in the near future,” as Lucky Dube puts it. 2020—Two, zero, two, zero or twenty twenty. Either way, she looked so beautiful. So I was misled to think her character would be commensurate with her beauty. And so on the midnight of December 31 of 2019, I received 2020 with open arms as a bachelor hugs or embraces his new wife. I caressed, fondled, kissed and led her into my abode.
Afterwards, I gave her the choicest and the most delectable dishes my income could afford. She drank the coolest and the juiciest drink in my house. She slept, woke up, ate, slept again. That was her perfect cycle. On the fifth day of her arrival it dawned on me that 2020 wasn’t as beautiful as she had initially presented herself to me and my family members. On that day, I received the disquieting news of the death of Inspector Kate Hawa Abban, a prosecutor at the Circuit court, Techiman. Kate’s was a sorry story. Her ailing and aged mum had been living with her at Techiman, the capital of the Bono East region. Kate’s mum was dear to her. A few minutes of being in Kate’s presence, you were likely to hear about her mum as the old lady featured prominently in her daughter’s conversations. Kate would “seek leave of court”, rush home to give her mum lunch before returning to court. She called me “our husband” and I addressed her as “our wife”.
Kate, her mum and Kate’s three children spent the 2019 Christmas at Ablekuma Fanmilk, Accra. While Kate was cooking on a Sunday afternoon after church service, the gas cylinder exploded (or leaked?), caught fire and caused the deaths of Kate and all her three children who rushed to their mum’s rescue when the fire engulfed her. On hearing the story, I wept like a child though Ngugi Wa Th’iongo, the Kenyan writer, says “Weep Not, Child.”
“Time heals”, our elders say. So I recovered from the shock of Kate and her children’s tragedy in a month’s time. I celebrated my birthday on February 5, which turned out to be a very eventful day: Donald Trump secured acquittal in impeachment proceedings, Kenyans mourned their second and longest-serving president, Daniel arap Moi, who died aged 95, former British Prime Minister David Cameron’s bodyguard was arrested for leaving a loaded gun and Cameron’s passport on the toilet of a plane, the First Lady of Lesotho was arrested on a charge of murdering her former rival, her husband’s former wife, a fake lawyer was arrested at the Techiman Circuit Court etc.
