You remember when you were removed from a box and placed on a shelf in an aisle that read ‘cooking oil.’ You remember that lovely yellow lighting that made your glossy colourful sticker shimmer. You loved the price tag beneath you for it made you feel important, how people would gawp and take a smaller version of you. You remember that day when they discounted your kind and people rushed to claim you. You remember the boy with spectacles that swept you off your shelf and then stuffed you in the back of his car. You remember the feeling you had, the thrill of a new adventure, a new home, and a new environment.
You barely lasted a week because they drained all of your oil since the boy that took you was graduating and African ceremonies are feasts. Drained empty, you were tossed to the top of the kitchen cabinets to meet others who had had the same fate as you. You did not stay there long either because Mama Wanjiku next door came to ask the boy’s mother whether she was ‘using’ you. You were given away, a slave going to exile to yet another foreign place you knew nothing of.
Mama Wanjiku scrubbed you clean, burning you with hot water and scrubbing you with rough nylon scrubbers until your sticker was no longer shiny. Then she filled you up with a liquid soap she made for sale and shipped you off to a new home where your new content was glugged out of you slowly and you spent countless nights on a cold bathroom floor. You remember when Mama Wanjiku came and took you, probably to fill you up and take you right back.
She kept you near the fireplace in her traditional kitchen where water was boiling to be used for scalding you in the name of cleaning before your next posting. She grabbed a piece of firewood and knocked you over as she shoved it into the fire beneath the sufuria. You fell right on the fire and a part of you melted to reveal a little hole. Mama Wanjiku was angry with you as if you had betrayed her for falling, for being where she kept you, so she threw you away.
The garbage collectors came on Friday and hauled you into the back of their truck with stinky wastes and you ended up in a dumpsite next to a river. There were others like you there, things that were disregarded because they could not perform as well as they used to. You would say to each other that the river probably led to the ocean and that you hoped one day it would take you there because you always wanted to see the ocean. But then again, you knew that you would be a pariah, a choking hazard to those lucky enough to have life.
You remember when they chopped you up and melted you down. They then moulded you into a pole with the bits and pieces of others. You became what they called ‘recycled’ with parts of you in other poles. You liked it this way for it meant you had a purpose. Your pieces now sit in the sun, faded by ultraviolet light, but happy nonetheless.