WHEN A WOMAN CRIES, SOMEONE LISTENS.

It takes losing something important, to realize that it actually meant something. So, when a woman cries, someone listens. If it’s not you, then it’s the universe. Whoever listens, acts. Don’t let the universe act. For it’ll be against you.

The last time I saw eyes puffy was the day my mother buried my father. As she grabbed a fistful of the red upcountry loam soil and dropped it in the grave with resigned acceptance, I looked right inside her eyes and reacted with horror at the overt caterpillars, splashed all over her eyes like weeds on a neglected garden.

I was young when my father died. And naïve. It was back in the days when I was certain that crying was for children. Not grownups.

So when my mother turned up at the funeral with red swollen eyes I tugged at Elly’s arm and asked him, “Elly, who beat mother”

“What do you mean?” Elly, my elder brother asked, his eyes focused more on the hole our father was disappearing into than on the curious little boy whose appreciation of death was as non-existent as his appreciation of life.

“Her eyes”, I commented. “They are horrifying”

“It’s just what happens when people lose those they care about”

That day I learnt something I hadn’t realized until a decade later. You might not laugh with someone, hold their hand when their hand needs holding, pass them a hankie when the waterworks come calling, or empty vodka bottles with them, but when you wake up and find them gone, the waterworks will hit. And they’ll hit hard.

I’m saying that it takes losing something important to realize that it meant something.

And that forlorn look in my mum’s eyes is the same one I see when I focus on Cheryl’s eyes as she enters my car at 6:30 am and instructs me to drive her to Kiambu.

Her hair is muffed, her eyes are puffy, her clothes are creased and there is no evidence that she brushed her teeth, washed her face or generally took a shower this morning. I am left with two guesses.

1. She partied hard last night and something went wrong.

2. This is a walk of shame from a house that used to be of pleasure but suddenly turned into a house of pain.

The silence in the car bites. My radio is broken again, it is a little misty outside with a drizzle going and the stranger in the car looks like a magnet to the question, “Are you ok” So I ask.

She hits me with a sledgehammer of silence and stares hard out of the window. I ask her if I should drive her to a police station and she quips, “No, Just drive me home, OK?”

“Then what”

Excuse me.

“I’m sorry madam for dipping my nose into your business, but allow me to be honest and say that whatever it is that has you crying early this morning…”

“My boyfriend dumped me because I had my period and the blood got on the sheets, OK?” she spits.

“Can we go home now?”

“People do that?” I ask conspiratorially and she takes the bait,

“Weird, right?” it’s a period. Women get them all the time. He shook me up violently at five in the morning and went on about how I was disgusting”

I drive in silence for a bit. Considering the grey weather, it is still a little dark so I’m driving with the headlights on. “Look outside”, I tell her and she looks. “What do you see?”

“Kids running to school. People hurrying to work. A carpenter carrying couches from his showroom to the roadside for display”. She faces me. “Why?”

“Just as what you see outside is normal, so is a woman’s period. The problem hence is that periods have been treated as this mysterious and disgusting freak of nature that should be kept away from men at all costs. I wouldn’t be surprised hence that a man would kick his woman out in the morning for exposing him to the ‘disgust’ With her eyes puffy and shoulders slumped, she alights at Kiambu town and I travel back to the day my mother buried my father. I shudder at the thought of having to remember that day from the look in the eyes of a woman whose man couldn’t stomach the idea of menstrual blood on his sheets.

Later when I asked my mother about her eyes, she said, “Son, when a woman cries, someone listens. If it’s not you, then it’s the universe. Whoever listens, acts. Do not let the universe act, for it’ll be against you”.