The Grey Season

8. Wake up at 5 am EVERY DAY. Even Saturday. Early birds catch the worm and lazy people end up sleeping there life away.

I want to defend the twelve-year-old on one point, which is that she did wake up at five. I have witnesses. She swept the compound before the sun had properly committed to the day, she ironed her uniform with the charcoal iron, and she read her Social Studies notes by the light of a paraffin lamp. She thought sleep was a thing that happened to other people's children. She thought it was a choice.

I would like to introduce her to the woman who, at twenty-six, slept until two in the afternoon on a Tuesday and then lay there for another hour, awake, watching a gecko on the ceiling decide whether to move.

The gecko and I had a lot in common that year. Neither of us went anywhere.

I need to tell you about the bus first, because you are probably hoping I got on it.

The price came up on my phone that night: a little under a hundred thousand shillings, one way, Kampala to Mombasa, twenty-something hours if the border behaved. I looked at the number for a long time. I had about a hundred and forty thousand on Mobile Money, which was everything, which was the remains of a small consultancy that had paid me late and in instalments, like a debtor who respects you but not much. I opened the booking page. I filled in my name. I got as far as the passport number and stopped, because my passport was in a drawer and the drawer was across the room, and the room, at that moment, was very wide.

I told myself I would do it in the morning.

In the morning I slept.

That is the part nobody tells you about insight. I had sat at my desk the night before and understood something true and enormous: that the plan was a child's guess, that half the handwriting wasn't mine, that somewhere under all the borrowed capitals there was a girl who had wanted, simply, to put her feet in salt water. I had felt it land. I had cried a little, the good kind. I had gone to bed believing that a woman who knows this cannot possibly stay the same.

She can. She did. She woke up at two.

I am going to describe that season carefully, because when I was in it I did not have a word for it, and I suspect some of you are in it now without a word either. Depression, in my house, was something that happened in American films to women with big kitchens. It was not a thing that happened to a Makerere graduate with a Second Upper sleeping in her childhood bedroom in Ntinda.

So here is what it looked like instead.

It looked like the phone face-down on the bed. Not switched off, because switching it off would have been a decision, and I was not making decisions. Just face-down, buzzing, buzzing, stopping. I would turn it over in the evening and see eleven missed calls and a WhatsApp group with ninety-four unread messages, and the number itself would make my chest go tight, like a bill.

It looked like bathing at four in the afternoon so that when Mama came home at six I would smell like a woman who had been somewhere.

It looked like a cup of tea going cold on the bedside stool, the skin forming on the milk, and then a second cup beside it, also cold, because I had forgotten the first one and made another and forgotten that one too.

It looked like reading the same job advert seven times. Applicants must have a minimum of five years' experience at managerial level, a Master's degree, and be below the age of twenty-eight. I used to laugh at those adverts out loud. I used to read them to my friends in voice notes, doing the voice of the HR department, a sort of tired Anglican uncle. That year I just read them. Seven times. Then I closed the laptop and lay back down.

It looked like being hungry and not being able to imagine the steps between me and food. The kitchen was fourteen steps away. There was matooke from yesterday. There was g.nut sauce. (Even then, item 14 held.) And the distance between the bed and the saucepan felt like the distance between Kampala and Mombasa: technically possible, priced, listed on a website, and completely out of the question.

It looked like this, mostly: nothing happening, for a very long time, while I watched.

Mama noticed. Of course she noticed. Mothers in this country can detect a missing spoon from the other side of a wall. But noticing and naming are different crafts, and Mama had been trained in the first.

"You are sleeping too much," she said one evening, standing in my doorway with her handbag still on her shoulder. "Sleep is good. But too much of it makes the body lazy. And the mind follows the body."

"I'm just tired, Ma."

"Tired from what?"

There was no answer to that which did not sound insane. Tired from lying here. Tired from the ceiling. Tired from being the girl you pointed to at church. She looked at me a moment longer, and then she said she would bring me some porridge, and she did, and she sat on the edge of the bed while I ate it, and neither of us said anything else. I finished the porridge to make her happy. It took a long time.

I want to be fair to everyone in what follows, because none of them was cruel. They were giving me the tools they had. It is just that the tools were for a different machine.

My Senga, on the phone, after I failed to attend two family meetings: "You young people think too much. Thinking is what brings these problems. When I was your age I had three children and no time to be sad."

A woman from my mother's fellowship, who cornered me after the second service: "My dear, pray more. Fast, if you can. Sometimes the enemy attacks the ones with the biggest destinies." She squeezed my hand and promised to put me on the prayer list, between someone's land wrangle and someone else's son in Dubai.

A cousin, kindly, a doctor of sorts, over chips at Café Javas: "But you, eh? You're too educated to be depressed. You know better."

I have thought about that sentence for years. As if a degree came with a vaccine. As if there were a course unit somewhere in my transcript, SOC 2104: Not Being Sad, and I had simply forgotten to register.

And my favourite, from an uncle at a wedding, delivered with total sincerity while holding a plate piled with gonja: "Just be positive."

I said I would try. I meant it the way you mean "I'll come" to a WhatsApp invitation for a fundraising meeting.

The worst of it was not the sleeping. The worst of it was the hiding, and I need you to understand how much work it was, because from the outside it looked like rest.

Hiding is a full-time job with no salary. You wake up (late) and immediately begin calculating: who might call today, who might visit, what I will say if asked what I'm doing now. I had a script. "I'm doing some consultancy work, and I'm also looking at master's programmes." Both technically true. One consultancy, finished months ago, still owing me sixty thousand. Master's programmes I had looked at in the sense that I had opened the websites and closed them.

There were family functions, and they were the Olympics. My cousin's introduction ceremony in Mukono that year required, at a conservative estimate, the following:

One gomesi, ironed (by me, which took an hour, because I kept sitting down).

A face that had been washed, moisturised, and arranged.

A gift envelope with money I did not have, borrowed from the hundred and forty thousand, now the hundred and ten thousand.

Seventeen versions of "I'm fine, how are you?"

Four versions of "No, no boyfriend for now, I'm focusing on my career."

One full explanation of what consultancy is, to an aunt who then asked whether it was like working at a bank.

One laugh at an MC's joke about a Muganda man who was so stingy he bargained at a funeral.

That last item was the hardest. I used to have a laugh that turned heads. It was loud and it came from somewhere around my ribs and my friends used to say they could find me in a crowded hall just by listening. At the kwanjula I heard the MC's joke land and the tent fill up with laughter and I opened my mouth and made a sound. It was the right shape. It was the right length. My cousin Diana, sitting next to me, looked at me a half-second too long.

I spent the entire seven-hour ceremony performing a woman who was fine, and I was so good at it that by the end I was nearly convinced, and then I got home and lay down in the gomesi and did not take it off until the next afternoon.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, on a weekday I can't place, I took out the exercise book and the pencil and tried to do the ledger on item 8. I had been doing them, you'll remember, one item at a time, and I thought that if understanding hadn't fixed me, maybe method would. Maybe I just needed to be more organised about being sad.

I drew the four columns. I wrote, in the first:

PLANNED: Wake up at 5 am every day.

In the second:

HAPPENED: Wake up at 2 pm most days. Sometimes later. Sometimes I don't really wake up, I just stop sleeping.

In the third, I wrote:

PAID: Mornings. Calls. Diana's birthday. The bus. Mama's face when she comes home and I'm still in bed.

And then I looked at the fourth column for a long time with the pencil in my hand, and I could not think of a single thing to write in it.

This had never happened before. Even on the pregnancy chapters of my life, even on the item about making Mama proud, I had found something for REVISED, something smaller and kinder. But how do you revise "wake up"? What is the gentler version? Wake up at noon? Wake up at all? Every option looked like a joke or a threat. I sat there until the light went orange and then went out, and the column stayed empty, and I put the book back under the mattress, where I had started keeping it, as though it might be confiscated.

I want to tell you what I know now about why the insight didn't hold, but I don't think I'd be telling the truth if I made it tidy. Here is the closest I can get. When I understood that the plan was a child's guess, I took the weight off one shoulder. But I had been carrying it with both arms for fourteen years, and the arms didn't know the weight was gone. They kept clenching. They didn't have anything else to do. Knowing a thing in your head and knowing it in your body are two different degrees, and the second one has no fixed duration and nobody hands out a timetable.

The risk, when I finally took it, was small enough that you might miss it. I almost did.

It was a Sunday. Diana came by the house after church. She brought a Fanta for me and a bag of mandazi from the woman at the stage, and she sat on the edge of my bed in her church dress the way Mama did, and she didn't ask me what I was doing these days. She asked whether I'd been sleeping.

I had my script ready. "I'm fine. Just tired. Consultancy and things."

She waited. She is good at waiting; she is a primary school teacher and has outlasted much worse silences than mine.

And I said — I remember my voice sounding like it was coming from the next room — "Actually, I'm not okay. I don't think I've been okay for a while."

It was the first time I had said it aloud. Not to God, not to the ceiling. To a person with a face.

You want me to tell you that something opened up. Diana reached over and held my wrist, which I will always remember. Then she said, with enormous love, "Eh, but you? You're the strong one. You'll be fine. Let's pray."

And she prayed. Right there, her hand on my wrist, her eyes shut, a good long prayer that covered my job search, my future husband, my destiny, the spirit of heaviness, and the generator at her school, which had been giving trouble. I kept my eyes open. I watched the gecko. When she said amen I said amen.

She left at five, before the rain. She hugged me at the door and said, "Call me, okay? Anytime." I said I would.

I want to be clear that she meant it, and that I loved her for it, and that something in me went quieter after she left than it had been before. I had taken the thing out and shown it to someone, the way you show a wound, and she had looked at it and said, Strong one, and put it back.

I did not try that again for a long time.

The rain came at six. It was the heavy, sideways kind that turns Kampala's roads into rivers and makes the power go off in sympathy. It did. The house went dark and Mama called from the sitting room that she was looking for the candles, and I said, "Okay," and did not get up to help.

I lay there in the dark with my clothes still on. The phone buzzed once on the bed beside me and lit the ceiling blue. Diana: Got home safe. Love you. Remember you're the strong one. Then it went dark.

The money on my phone was a hundred and two thousand now. Enough for the bus, just about, if I didn't eat on the way. The passport was still in the drawer. The drawer was still across the room. The exercise book was under the mattress, under me, the fourth column blank.

I heard Mama find the candles. I heard her strike the match, and the small hiss of it, and her slippers in the corridor, coming to bring me light.

I closed my eyes before she reached the door.