It’s about 6.26am and I’m awake. Like fully so, with no hopes or intentions of ever falling asleep again. I mean, till 10pm tonight that is. :|

Yes, 10. Shameful. A whole me. Internet jaywalker, series watching, skype convo having, phone calling ass me. And I’m asleep before 10, waking up by 4 and feeling like a grand old lady doing it all. As I type this, I can hear my househelp singing some ‘tunes’ downstairs. I’m actually bothered by it; I find it quite distracting. I think she is trying to harmonize or something. Whatever it is, I hope she stops it soon. 

So I’m awake because of my Summer Internship/ Community Service thingy shin-dig down in Cantonments/Labone/Osu there somewhere. It’s an NGO called Right to Play, opposite Flair Catering. I don’t know why I can’t actually say for sure which neighborhood I believe it to be in. I think it’s because here in Ghana we don’t really know with too much certainty where one neighborhood ends and another begins. Africa, third-world, HIPC… yea, it’s our excuse for everything.

I have a time table though. I’m not sure when I will be needed at the office today. I’m supposed to visit one of the project sites with a team leader, who doesn’t really know when she is leaving yet. So my cell phone is on and beside me. It’s waiting for the call that will tell me when I need to hop up out of bed yeaaa, turn myy- ahem- out of bed, take a shower, dress quickly while my niece and nephew play a game of something I’m sure they call ‘Who can trip over Aunty Jessica’s legs sooner?’, run out of my house onto my untarred road, and be quickly picked up by a taxi which will demand about 5GHC for my trip from here to Cantonments/Labone/Osu there somewhere. So yea, until the call comes, I’ll sit here and type. 

I’m doing this thing where I share my stream of consciousness, you know. I’ve read books like that and I quite enjoyed them. It’s hard not to pause and re-read what has been written but I feel like that’s the key to getting thoughts all mumbled up and just tossing the whole thing in the trash. Summer can do that to you. And by that, I mean the fact that my writing has gotten so rusty and I don’t read near enough books anymore. Damn you, internets. (What? red squiggle? ‘Internets’ is not a word yet? Now that is just unfair! Clearly, I know injustice when I see it.)

My phone. It just caught my eye. It’s the same one I use when I’m back at school. It’s been unlocked for my Summer in Ghana. Just a couple of days ago it started acting like quite the ass. Refusing to let me read my very own text messages and such. How very dare! I contacted the manufacturer and all they did was give me some damn resetting instructions. Clearly, I lost all text messages and numbers :| Luckily, I save all the photos I take on my trusty memory card. Also, my numbers are synced with the T-mobile website so I can retrieve those. That’s all. But bye, bye text messages though. I’m not really a text message deletey kinda person. I’m the kind of gooey emotional text message re-reading wreck that wants to shed a tear after she’s lost hundreds of text messaging memories. I especially enjoyed the re-reading cos my phone’s one of those that gives you a neat little thread so you can go back and forth  and see what who said to who and when and whatnot. Such fun. 

Anyway, they’re all gone now. Basically almost a year of memories. Let me tell you about my theory. And by theory I mean I think this definitely happens to me and so it best be happening to you too or you are the crazy one. Erm. My Theory of Finding a Secret Coded Message Within a Text Message if Read the Same Number of Times as the Longest Word in the Text Message. This is the truest fact of all truest facts, and if you don’t believe me you’re boring and I actually don’t want to be friends. Bye. You can leave now.

I painted my room a dark red. Did you hear the joke/corny message about don’t be scared blah blah if you wake up in a room with all red walls, just know you woke up in my heart blah blah? :| Yeaa.. I kind of feel like that some of the time, but I just look to my right and I come out of that daydream. One of the walls is a pale orange. Fancy huhhh. Lol. Yea, I am. I’m the fanciest you’ll meet for miles.

Why does Love have to be a game? I actually don’t want to play. I wanna like a guy and call him or text him when he crosses my mind and there’s a phone in my hand, I want to say what I’m irritated about if I’m asked. I don’t want to lie and say it’s nothing. I don’t want to play by the rules of the game and govern ‘what base we get to if we make out and it’s not past the 3-month mark.’ I don’t know. I just want to live and live with abandon. Use the mind and the gut… do what feels right, in moderation. Here I am and the world tells me, wait for him to call you, don’t text him too much, leave him alone, don’t always be available, make sure you don’t start really liking him till much later. See, now I like to be pursued as much as the next female, and at the same time, if I care for someone, I think they’ll know by the way I’ll be. Even the guys with the coldest exterior loove to be loved. Especially if it’s a girl they reciprocate these feelings towards. It feels gooood. And I do know the reasons why society teaches us these cues for maintaining distance. I’m aware necessity is the mother of invention, and if there were no men who’d taught women the need for this caution, these measures would not have been adopted. I just find it a fat waste of time sometimes though, really. People waste so much time playing games, when they could’ve both realized their feelings for each other ages ago, and felt the comfort of being loved, by each other. Candidly and without any ‘games.’

The things I google will make… wait. STOP. squiggly red line underneath ‘google’? Oh come on. Dictionary gods, I’m going to need you to do better! The word ‘google’ is not in the dictionary as a verb yet? To google and be googled? You google, He/She googles? squiggly red lines under all of them! That’s a damn shame. in 2010. Ugh, disappointing. Be ashamed dictionary gods, be EMBARRASSED. The things I GOOGLE.

Earlier today (before I fell asleep at 10pm) I googled ‘How does cancer pain feel?’ I don’t know what I was looking to find, really, but I just sought to understand the disease better. I think I’ve seen more people die from that that were relatively close to me than any other disease. (Also because I’m watching Grey’s Season 5 and Izzie just found out she has it. Yes, yes I know I’m behind; no spoilers, por favor)

But really, I want to know what happens. I know the cancer cells grow and they spread and it hurts, but how does your heart stop? What happens to make you actually stop breathing and let go of life? Friend lost his mother on Friday evening. And when I say friend, I mean a bunch a friends. It’s a really close-knit family, siblings all close, and so are their kids. So when I say my friend’s mother passed, I mean like 20 of my friends lost their mother. It’s a sad note to end this rant of mine on, but I think it’s also a hopeful one. I had a long convo with my nice friend Yanfo, about how death puts everything into perspective. Yes, he’s one of her nephews. It’s sad that we ‘need’ death almost, to show us what matters and what does not; it so powerfully draws us closer to the people in our lives. Makes us realize what losing them can do, how short and fleeting life is; how quickly it can be gone. I know her pain is over, and she is in a way better place and state than she was in for the past 7 months or so. Yes, we feel the pain of knowing our loved one is no longer here, it takes a lot of selflessness to see that them leaving, especially while in such pain, is better for them. We get angry and might even blame God, and envy others in our lives because they haven’t lost a loved one like we have, but the thing is, all men are equal. We are dust and to dust we shall return. I gave my mother a huge hug when I got home. No explanations, no questions. Just grabbed the woman I have been irritated by for 70% of my Summer back and thought of as a giant pain in the ass more times than I can count, and engulfed her in the best hug ever. I was coming from talking to my other nice friend Derrick. He too lost his father, back in our second year of high school, and me and him never really had a good ol’ heart-to-heart about it. So he told me. He told me about the before, the during and after. How he found out, what it is was like and he tried his best to even articulate how he felt, though I could tell it was difficult to express. I know I’m not ready to face death squarely. But who ever is? It comes like a thief in the night, like the devil himself, and steals the ones that we most care for. I myself lost a sibling, my only full-blood sibling. We were only a year apart. A lot of people don’t know this about me, and when they find out, they apologize profusely. I don’t know if I deserve any apologies, but my mum and father probably do. They were much older and felt the pain more than my 4year old self could ever have. And I think if there’s anything that hurts, it’s probably the pain of losing a child. But I do wonder what life would be like if I had my 20 year old sidekick Michael Alvin by my side. I wonder what he’d have grown up to look like, which girls he’d have told me about, how much I’d make him drive me around. haha. I see us in my niece and nephew, and also in my nice friend Emelia and her brother. I feel like our relationship would have been really similar to both of these. My brother and me. Haha. Anyway, like I told Yanfo, this could have really broken me if it’d happened and I was older than I was. I cheated Death and escaped the intense pain. Where the memories we should have made in our formative and teenage years should exist, all I have are unanswered questions and empty frames. I don’t even have that many pictures. I do miss him, and I feel very strongly for anyone who loses someone they love. But I can’t hate Death. I can’t hate Death for taking away my innocent blameless brother who suffered as a child, convulsed, was in pain and total discomfort. He has rest now and his pure childlike heart is definitely in heaven, smiling down on Sister dear :)