Fiction

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The lady whom time forgot
By Annie Wanjiru About 1200 words
Tina reclined on the settee she sat on and let the joy course through her heart. She smiled pleasantly to herself. There was no one to see her smiling. She knew that they would say if they saw her smiling. Weirdo they called her. But what was weird about the joy she felt flowing in her heart. Inspite of the doubts she knew others around her had, she was absolutely convinced that there was a God who made her heart to leap for joy, like a little child would do at the sound of loving mothers voice.
This morning she had thought about her new business venture and she had felt the joy fill her heart. Her joy was despite the fact that in the past few years, she had known nothing but abject poverty. She lacked in basic needs and even had to move in with family because she could not raise the money for rent. Everything she had tried did not seem to work to her expectations. She had failed dismally in most of her ventures, but she had refused to give up her difficult struggles. Her pastor had advised her that consistently doing the right thing would certainly ultimately yield the right results and she had already decided never to give up her walk on the straight and the narrow. But she often underestimated how difficult her choices made her life.. She let her mind go back to that time a few months ago when she was doing the last month of tutoring students privately. The job had lasted one year, and paid just enough for her to feed and cloth her. She could not afford to shelter herself. She had struggled without success find another source of income as she did the part time tutoring.
In her final month tutoring, she had realized that she had growing quite discouraged. Thoughts of her impending joblessness brought to her a crippling sorrow. Most days during this month, she would lay in bed upto midday, feeling lost and destitute, sending silent pleas for intervention from Heaven. Her mind began to play tricks on her. She began to see night visitors in her room who would talk to her and in the process she would lose the results of her prayers, or so it seemed to her. Tina had felt helpless and hopeless when faced by this enemy. Something seemed to whisper to her that this enemy who sometimes took the form of a snake was impossible to defeat.
One day when it all seemed so bleak and all hope gone, she had the inspiration to take charge of her life. She started to talk to herself convincing herself that she was okay and that no evil power would touch her, let alone visit her in the night. In a few short weeks, her new altitude bore fruit. She got a project selling stuff online to work on. And this is what had led her to get a full time job at the local shopping center where she could make enough even to shelter herself.
Tina arose from where she had been sitting. She quickly locked up the door in the house and left. She walked briskly yet letting her mind dwell on the good that had come into her life. Poverty had robbed her nothing, she thought confidently to herself. She was a year shy of forty, yet she owned nothing in the world, and was still, so to speak, in the cradle. She often had moments when she felt time had forgotten her. The generations that they were babies in her teens were having families, yet she still lived with parents and struggled to make ends meet. Most of her age mates were well established, with families and stable jobs or thriving business. Time had put space between her and her age mates. When they had been building their careers, or businesses she had been battling phantoms. She had spent the better part of her thirties boxing shadows.
At twenty three, she had graduated from university. She had made it through university despite having had very little interest in her studies. She knew there was nothing she could not achieve if she put her mind to it. After graduating though, getting a job that at least paid well became a tall order. The disturbing frustration she had felt as a student, arising from disinterest in her studies grew to unbearable levels. Yet she could not identify the cause of her failures. At twenty eight, after a suicide attempt, a doctor confirmed a diagnosis of mental illness. She got the best medical attention, but still lost track of her life. She refused doctors and medicines and became reclusive after her first and only hospitalization. For six years she hardly spoke to anyone. She was on a downward spiral and moving fast. She would spend her days screaming at attackers unseen to others. In the seventh year, after becoming quite fed up with what her life had become, she took herself to see a doctor, if only to cooperate with everyone else around her, and started the slow climb back.
Tina opened the doors of the retail outlet she was managing and let herself in. The upward climb had not been easy and she often felt like quitting. But she could not let herself go and continue with the downward spiral. It was too painful a path. She would be in physical pain from her mental condition whenever it was left unchecked. Tina pushed back the metallic grill at the entrance to her shop. She had made such a turn around from her days of seclusion. She pushed hard the doors to her shop to fling them open.
A young boy, on his way to school got into her shop. He let out an eerie scream and then ran out of the shop hurting insults. Tina looked at him and then started dusting the shop. She had learnt to ignore much unwelcome attention directed at her. They could not do that to anyone else, but she knew she was not anyone else. She hated to feel critical of others, including the young boys who taunted her around the small town. All her youth she had been critical of others who were such ladder bottom losers. Then, it turned out that they were better of that she turned out. She could never describe herself a loser, or a failure but the words often seemed to hung around her, craving to be used.
Tina smiled again. A tear rolled down her cheeks as she continued to dust the boxes on the shelves in the shop. She could never be able to think of the schizophrenia and depression that was in her life as something to hate. The diseases had tormented and her reigned in her life until she needed a better master. Because she had been sick, she reached out to God and He did not push her away. He had given her strength that she had never envisioned she had. She could face the future, whatever that future did hold. She did not live her life anymore mourning her pointless brilliance and wasted years. She somehow knew it would all be alright, eventually. She knew she could trust that deity who reigned in her life and often made it all alright.
END

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