Black Coffee (Tara's Dream)|Dearest Diary, - Book 1 (unedited)

VII

Dearest Diary,

One month two weeks. That’s how long I have been in this country. It is also the exact amount of time remaining until I am finally kicked out of this house. Well, kicked out is a strong word but if I don’t get a job soon, I'll have to move out into a much cheaper neighbourhood and no, this is not me trusting you dearest diary. I just don’t have that many people to share this with; people who will take me seriously and you are the only other thing that’s been with me since I left home.

***

I woke up crying again. It’s all that I seemed to be doing these days. My morning ritual if you could call it that and made me appreciate the fact that I worked from home, that is apart from Wednesdays afternoons when I got to leave the house to go to the publishing house for our weekly meetings. Otherwise all this crying would have made me wind up with a lot of explaining to do. I was also grateful for my study, because it meant that I could avoid Maggie and Briella until my eyes had finally cleared and I was able to pull on my normal face. Other than that, my first kids’ book was coming well or at least that’s what Linda kept telling me and I was also almost through with the other two that followed that one. The first one was about some silly adventures of a toddler and amazingly they all liked it. Dr. Mwangaza said that the book resembled Judy Blume’s style of writing and I didn’t mind that since she was one of my favourite writers and for that reason alone, I decided to serialise it. So, now there was a book two and a book three which I was almost done writing since children’s books did not need to be that long. However, despite all those successes, I seemed to have developed a problem of coming up with endings. The main issue being that I was quite fixated with this new set of characters and it was really hard to finally part with them. In fact it as one of the main reasons why I hadn’t finished that last book, trying hard to come up with a feasible solution, but I was still not getting anywhere.

“Hallo?” I said, speaking into my phone receiver. It had been ringing silently for a while now, testament to the multiple missed calls that were appearing on the phone’s notice bar and even then, it was just by a stroke of luck that I had turned and noticed that the screen was glowing.

“Attara,” the all so familiar voice reached me.

“Troy! What a surprise? You're calling me! What do you want now?” I asked wrapping myself in a white gown to cover up my pink silky nightie dress.

“To check on you.” he told me softly.

“I’m fine Troy. If you wanted to speak to Bri, you could have used Maggie's phone or the house phone.” I told him quite irritably.

“Yes, I speak to them daily, but I wanted to check on you too.” I should have been moved by that. A normal person would have been moved by that, but I was not normal and it was already established that that was a feeling I was quite incapable of, especially where this man was concerned.

“Okay, so you’ve checked. Tell mum I'm fine - I have to go now, Bye!” with that, I hanged up the call. However, my eyes still remained fixed on the screen as my brain memorised the number for future purposes. You see, it was a foreign number. Foreign in that, it was really foreign and foreign because it was not Troy’s usual number; no wonder he caught me off guard. As my mind continued to wander, I found myself thinking back to my last comment and for a moment, I almost felt guilty for how I had treated him. However, after some serious reasoning with my conscience, I dismissed those feelings and told myself that he actually deserved it. I mean, only my mum could have put him up to do that, to mend fences as I was aware that he talked to Bri, but he never called me and to trick me by using a different number, I took that as a low blow that deserved another.

“Mummy…mummy!” My ever energetic daughter burst into my room and pulled me out of my reverie. The little fireball pounced on me and I was almost sent back falling into the bed, but I caught myself just in time before she sent the both of us tumbling back into the pillows.