Thanks for writing such a thoughtful analysis of my story. Thanks too for sharing, truly appreciated! :)

As the smoke settled over the busy round-about roads, I made my way through the small crowd that had formed around the woman. She lay on the ground, her right foot shifted ninety degrees and missing one half of her pair of heels. Her toenails painted red, some of them curved inwards, some of them shifted certain angles to the right and left. Above her left knee her thigh bone was peeking through a tear in her dress, from which blood leaked and collected in a thick pool around her.

One man was calling an ambulance. As he did, another man pointed a torchlight at the woman’s belongings. Her purse was torn open, spilling cash, lipstick and a rosary on the tarred road and into the thick pool of blood on the ground.

When the light hit her face, I saw her eyes.

They were wide open and showed hints of a final spark frozen in the pale of her face, like a firefly caught in quicksand. Her lips were parted slightly, little streams of blood falling off in quiet fluxes down her cheeks and neck. On her face registered an expression halfway somewhere between surprise and fright.

As people made their way in and out the crowd, flashlights blaring and tires screeching, my mind searched itself. The dress. The face.

Earlier that night I was at the balcony of my apartment. I was smoking a cigarette as I listened to the busy flow of the city’s night life. Halfway through, a woman in a black dress and a grey babushka walked past me to the third room from mine. I heard laughter, music, chatter.

After a while, silence. The woman re-emerged.

Through the smoke and the fog that hung over the air that night, her image peered. She had her face in her palms and was sobbing as she walked.

As I watched her, I wondered what the story could have been. I spun one hypothesis after the other.

But as I stood before her corpse on the tarred road later that night, I realized something.

As the woman walked past me earlier that evening, sobbing and clutching her face, a part of me had stopped. Amidst the gossip and chatter and the loud music, I’d stopped to watch her walk by, cigarette in hand, smoke drifting in thin clouds.

Everything faded to the background. Everything melted, dissolved.

It was pain.

A part of me had stopped because a part of me recognized something familiar. A kindred spirit. Her pain cut through the noise and fog that night, sent a beacon into the dark.

Her pain said: this is me, look at me.

And I looked for a while, then lit another cigarette.

My friend once spoke to me of insomnia.

We were having drinks at Matilda’s on a Tuesday evening, Sade Adu’s Smooth operator seeping through hidden speakers in a dimly-lit bar. The skin beneath his eyes bloated and sagging.

He said the city poisoned his mind with gossip and loud conversations. Every night he’d barely fall asleep when he’d awake again and again to the sound of his mind in a chatter with itself. He said he loved the city, but that the city betrayed him.

And so most times he’d talk about moving to a new place in a new city. A small town hidden in a quiet suburb, he’d say. A place where rent and sleep came cheap.

“Any luck sleeping last night?” I asked.

He was staring into space. I nudged him by the shoulder.

“Yeah?”

“Any luck sleeping last night?” I asked again.

He shook his head. “I need to stop coming to this bar. You know?”

I knew.

“You remember the drunk guy from two days ago?” He asked.

“The Victorian knight?”

He nodded. “Throughout last night I could hear his voice echo in my head.”

That night I accompanied him to his apartment. He had dark sheets taped over his windows and his record player disconnected.

That night we spoke about cities. About the culture and people that shape them. He’d been born in this one, but had gradually become disenchanted by it.

“There’s something about this place that has killed something in me,” he said, “nothing feels real anymore. It feels like deep down, there’s a corpse sitting inside of me.”

After a while, I fell asleep.

The next day, he didn’t show up at the bar. I called, texted. Nothing. Days passed and I thought I’d check his apartment.

He’d overdosed on sleeping pills. His corpse reclined on the sofa. Drink in hand, Sade Adu’s long hard road seeping from a lonely speaker.

As I stood over his body, I realized something. This city hurt him. I thought about the times he spoke about sleep and cities. I realized that in those times, he was speaking about pain.

His pain said: this is me, listen to me.

And I listened for a while, then changed the subject.

Weeks after his funeral, I ran into an old friend. We shared old memories over beer and suya at a dimly-lit bar.

There was a fight that night. One man refused to pay his bills. He claimed he was a Victorian knight, and that the queen had him covered.

That night I stayed awake to the ghosts of loud conversations and inaudible chatter. To shuffling feet, voices of drunk Victorian knights and angry bartenders.

Days bled into weeks and I found the skin beneath my eyes bloated and sagging. Every day I met the usual blend of civil servants, preachers and prostitutes. And every night, something from those encounters snuck into my head and stole sleep from me.

I taped dark sheets over my windows and had my record player disconnected.

Something about this city snuck inside me and was slowly chipping away at my core. I knew it was time to leave. But something about this place kept me from leaving. A strange blend of nostalgia, and a feeling deep down, that no other city would accept me like this one.

As time went by, I spent less of it in public spaces. I steered clear of bars, libraries and bus stops. Leaving the city seemed to me a delicate affair. One does not just leave a place one has known too long without consequences. There’s a certain type of ritual to it. A slow, deliberate rite of passage one must follow.

A few days before I left, I thought I’d visit the bar one last time.

The place was as before: dimly-lit, soul music seeping away from hidden speakers, drunk civil servants making a big deal about the new cost of rice.

I ordered beer and suya.

Halfway through my food the bartender walked over, placed a bottle of ciroc on my table, then pointed to the far left corner where a woman was seated. She looked middle-aged, was spotting a cream-coloured tweed dress and a red hat. When our eyes met, she raised her glass halfway to her face, then took a sip.

I did the same.

After a while she came over to my table.

She was of average height, with a thin face that looked in contrast to the hat, like a small animal being sheltered by a tree branch.

Her lips too were small and had a blackness about them that stood in sharp contrast to her face.

We were seated in opposite directions. Her hands covered in black gloves and resting quietly on the table.

A calmness floated between us for a while before it occurred to me to say a proper thank you.

“I heard what happened to Mike,” she said.

“You knew him?”

She nodded. “We were lovers,” she said.

“Lovers? He never mentioned.”

“Of course he didn’t,” she said, “he was one of the damned.”

“Damned?”

“All my past lovers fall into two groups,” she said, “the absurd and the damned. The absurd always tend to be detached. It’s as though they realize the futility of our affair and so refuse to commit.”

She searched her purse for a lighter and cigarette; she found and put a benson between her lips.

“And the damned?” I asked.

“The damned commit too much. Always ready to do anything for the relationship. So it’s no surprise Mike didn’t mention our affair to you. It was our little secret.”

“I see.”

“When was the last time you slept?” she asked.

I thought about that a while.

“About a week ago,” I said.

“And for how long did you sleep?”

“Three hours,” I said.

“Impressive.”

“Why’s that impressive?”

She shook her head. “Never mind,” she said, “let’s get out of here.”

We took the back door to a half-lit alley. The path was made even narrower by the parked motor cycles, refuse dumps and a small chain of mai suyas grilling beef and mutton on a make-shift charcoal stove.

In the middle of the road, one man was scrapping dead cats with a shovel and collecting them in a polythene bag. In their place, he put an egg.

We were close to the main road when we noticed someone running from behind us. As he ran past us, the man shoved the woman in the red hat to the corner of the road. Few seconds passed and a group of police men followed in pursuit.

Her left hand met one of the charcoal stoves, her glove and left sleeve catching a quick fire before the mai suya put it off.

She searched her purse, and on not finding what she was looking for, went back to the stove, put her left hand back in the fire until she recovered her lighter.

“Are you not hurt?”

She shook her head. “Let’s find a taxi,” she said.

We found one headed to her place. As the car swayed to a start, we passed underneath a streetlight from which light trickled in, casting quiet beams on the right half of her frame, before fading off as we drove by. At that moment, I wondered if the light was like a bird too scared to linger too long on a murky water. If pain and light were two parallel lines treading two lonely roads to an unknown place.

About halfway through the ride, she leaned sideways and rested her head on my shoulder.

We reached her apartment around past two in the morning. It was a one-room, self-contained apartment.

A large mattress sat on the floor by the right corner of the room. To the left was a large wardrobe, beside which stood a hat stand and a shoe rack. The room had a lingering smell of wine and burnt incense.

The woman sat on a plastic chair by the mirror and placed her face in her palms.

“You’re in pain,” I said.

She shook her head, got up and dimmed the lights.

“Pain is merely the friction between the world and our perception of it,” she said, then began to unbutton her dress.

She undressed down to her underwear, stockings, and hat. Her left hand charred and blackened, she started towards the bed, but stopped halfway to put her gloves back on.

I lay in bed, face turned upwards. She joined me, her legs spread in a squat, her lower half seated on my crouch.

With her right hand, she began twisting her left shoulder blade, until the full length of her left arm came off. She reached for the drawer by the side of the bed for a cigarette and lighter.

“This is me,” she said, “look at me.”

She put the cigarette between my lips and lit it. She unzipped my trousers, pulled my penis out and slid it inside her.

After a while, I came inside her.

That night I fell asleep.

As time went by, my mind drifted between fading dreams of a new city and one in which I’d slowly become disenchanted by.

I spent night after night in bed with the woman in the red hat. Each time, before sex, she’d detach the full length of her left arm, and each time, she’d let me come inside her.

Days bled into weeks and months. The monotony of the affair began to creep up on me. I longed again for a new life where sleep came easy, and free of coital consequences.

And each time we were together, I wondered where I was headed. I thought of her past lovers and her way of grouping them. I wondered where I stood. If for her, I was an absurd lover, or a damned one.

The Long Hard Road was originally published in P.S. I Love You on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.