Five More Minutes

Your eyes fly open at the sound of the alarm. That damn thing still makes your heart skip a beat, or two, even though you decided to move it into the living room to help you manage your chronic snoozelosis.  Its 5.30 in the morning, that time when the witches are going to sleep. Your beetroot eyes betray you’re drunken with sleep situation. Lazily turning over, you gaze at him in his sleep, wondering how he could dare sleep through that goddamn shrill. 'He looks so peaceful. “What tale is weaving inside there?”, you wonder out loud. You place a light kiss on his forehead and pull yourself out of bed. You hear him stir. 'So now he wakes up'.
'Mmhhh. Baby. Five more minutes' he says patting the sunken spot in the bed you just got off of. It’s tempting really, five more minutes and you’ll need to conjure the gods to work the Moses magic and separate traffic for you to scoot across town and make it to work on time.  He’s lucky it’s his day off, so five more minutes or five more hours. He’s spoilt for choice. You pick the towel and walk into the bathroom and wash away any hopes of five more minutes.

He calls you at 8.13, to ensure you got to work, his groggy voice stirring pools deep in the pit of your stomach. You tell him youre just changing into your uniform, and you’ll be leaving your phone until ten, your first break. As you end the call, you grin sheepishly and thanking the stars for placing this pot of gold on your path. The day moves swiftly. He calls you for half your lunch break. And you waste away the minutes talking the usual nothing that couples do. From trying to figure out how tall Jesus was to things he would do to you if he walked into the locker room you change in.
It bends a wire in you. You bite your lower lip at the thought. Because like taxes and common folk, you will never understand how it gets to you. Every. Single.  Time.

It’s now around 4.30PM. Your shift is over. As you change back into your clothes, you notice that there are no recent messages from him. Weird.
You pass by the market and get some vegetables. You feel like blowing up someone's sons taste buds tonight. On the bus home, you try calling him up. He does not pick up. 'He must be busy,' you think.
It’s almost 7PM inn the evening when you get home. You take out your key to open the house. The bags weight you don as you maneuver our key holding hand into the small box. There’s no padlock. Weird. You swipe the 'konji' left to unlock the house.
'Baby'
'Hey'
You wedge the bags in the space left by the jerrican underneath the sink. You walk to the bedroom to change into those bum shorts he likes so much.
His phone is charging on the bedside table. He couldn’t have gone too far. He takes the damn gadget with him to the toilet.
But you check it and your messages from as early as 4PM and calls are unchecked. Weird. Where could he have gone for all that time?
He isn’t a heavy drinker, so runs to the local usually last an hour or two. But then he would tell you before he went.

By 10PM, the nagging feeling in your stomach is now full blown paranoia.
By 12PM, you have called his whole group of friends and family. Even his work place. No one has seen him.
You’re crying so hard now youre oblivious of it.
You have a bad feeling.
You pace back and forth. Tick tock. Tick tock.

 6AM. you call in sick and your distraught self, a sight for sour eyes, walks to the nearest police station, as you will for the next year, a drowning man catching at a straw, a leaf, bait, anything. You lose count of the number of times you drop by the mortuary. The dead don’t even scare you anymore. In fact, it would be welcome. Like those guests who come with embroidered cloths covering a well fed kiondo. In a verse sea of options, good or bad, it would be an answer. A source of closure. Something you’ve prayed for to God and all things Holy.
It is now three years. You still hold on to hope. But the light at the end of the tunnel is only as dependable as your country's power supplier.
You can’t bring yourself to touch his clothes, even the unwashed ones, but it worries you how they don’t smell of him anymore. It drives you insane how your senses overreact when someone is wearing his perfume on the street. The way the blood drains in your face and you stop in your tracks, frantically searching the faces for his. The cycle never ends. It’s like Dorothy in that house in the tornado except it never fucking lands in Oz.
You ask so many questions. Is he dead? Is he alive? Did he run away? Is he a merman that returned to sea? Was he kidnapped by aliens? Did he owe some cartel money and they made him swim with the fishes? Was he married and he returned to his family? Was i dreaming this entire time? Is the rabbit hole from Alice in Wonderland real? Why isn’t he sending me a sign?
Yesterday was the day of the disappeared. I don't know if it was forced disappearance or something, I just thought of general disappearance.
We remember children who went out to play and never came back. Guardians who turned to pay for ice cream and turned back to find space. Children who remember their mums going to get them a lollipop because a visit to the doctor requires bribery. Sons and daughters who left to find work in the concrete jungle, running away from the clutches of poverty. Others who got a one way ticket to a country with a different name than their own. Men seized by authority from their homes.
The fear of the unknown is torturous. It takes a small bite of your soul every day. One day, there won’t be anything to take a bite off of.  I pray you never find out what happens when that day comes. Maybe it will give you five more minutes.