She should've warned me.

You don’t ambush people like that. No warning. No heads up.

The only thing I had set out to do when I stepped out of lockdown this morning was to buy hand sanitizer.

And while at it, get some circulation by walking briskly since the past several days have been solitary, indoors.

Some four hundred or so metres later, I was at the mall.

A bright neon sign beckoned me to this pharmacy. Unaware of any other outlet in this fairly unfamiliar city, I made a beeline for the entrance.

As I approached, the glass doors slid open. I stepped in and heard the motion sensors hum quietly as the doors drew shut.

“Sawubona, unawo alcohol-based sanitizers?”

The beauty spot just above her upper lip delicately darted about as she purred an audible “yes, we do.”

She motioned me to a shelf that was stacked with all tribes and sizes of what has become a most precious liquid over the past few weeks.

Like a patient on an operating table drifting out of consciousness as the anaesthesia sets in, I have no recollection of anything she said as she spelt out the prices and qualities of the different brands of the germ killer on sale.

The beauty spot lit up her face the way light rays give life to chandeliers.

I don’t know how many minutes she spent explaining the products but I regained my senses only when she held my blank gaze and asked, “how would you like to pay?”

Dumbstruck, my sheepish response was that “I think all of them are great so please make a choice for me based on your expertise as a pharmacist…I’ll take whichever brand you recommend. One portable, the other for a desk.”

I could feel the growing impatience of other customers waiting in line behind me so I quickly swiped the plastic and left.

It’s been several hours since but I am still trying to forget about that human lightning bolt which sent ten thousand volts of stomach-churning and knee-melting affection through me.

And even though Elizabeth Kemigisha warns that that airy feeling (“akajabiriro”) is a symptom of common sense leaving one’s mind?, there is arguably no beauty spot—save for Eva Mendes’s?—that remotely compares to the one I saw at that drug shop earlier today.

For now, ? omutima gutujja, gutujja, gutujja…?gukoona bweddu ddu ddu?!