Sean should be turning 20 today but he’s dead.

It came out angrier than I expected. My own tone shocked me. I wasn’t mad at my mum. I wasn’t mad at myself for forgetting to turn the burner off. Hell, I wasn’t even mad that my eggs were blackened on the bottom because I burnt them in what I can only describe as a zombified state of grief.

I was mad at the God Sean believed in. I was mad at him for ripping Sean from this world. I was mad at the version of myself from years ago that couldn’t stay with him in the hospital a little longer. I’m mad that I’m here and he’s six feet under.

My mums response made me even angrier. She quietly asked “Is today his birthday or the anniversary of his death ?”. That was the last straw bro. That question cemented what I already knew yet was still fighting so hard to ignore: the world really does move on. And it’s moving on without Sean. The world is moving on without me because grief has now paralyzed me.

Despite the days passing and the seasons changing, I’m still stuck on that day. I was standing under the old avocado tree that has long been chopped down and its roots cemented over when that phone call came in and those words crackled through the speaker: Sean is dead. I’m not being dramatic when I say color drained from the world the second I heard those three words. Almost as if on cue, the clouds rolled in, the sky started to hint at rain and the air turned grey from the exhaust of the school bus driving off.

I think it’s done as a grace in my family. No one uses the phrase “passed away” or any euphemisms that leave room softness in news that is anything but soft. We say people died because it carries a sense of finality that delivers you from the cruelty of facing grief as if it’s something peaceful. Grief is anything but peaceful. Like some kind of radioactive waste, it mutated me. I became a zombie. My mind had to trust my body to wake up and function as a student because I was mentally consumed by questions that I still have no answers to. Why did he have to suffer the way he did? Why was his story so short? Why did the author of his story cut it short? Why him? Why the sweetest boy in the world?

Another thing my parents have learnt not to say is “I understand”. No you don’t. This is nothing like when Babu or Nyanya died. While those were nonetheless tragic, those deaths were nothing like Seans. Old people die. It’s what they do. Sean was barely 18. He had no business dying. I always say that watching your age mates die shifts your whole world view. It forces you to sit with the fragility of life and that’s an uncomfortable presence. No one’s life is promised. In writing this I’m getting angry all over again and can feel the hot sting of tears burning the back of my eyes. I’m so selfish. Turning his death into philosophical drivel about life and death when Sean isn’t even here, let alone present in the conversation.

I’m so angry and I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t want people to say they’re sorry. You didn’t play a role in his death so what are you sorry for? I don’t want to be told everything will be ok. Nothing is ok as long as he’s not here. I especially don’t want to be told that this is just how life goes. Such cruelty shouldn’t be normal. But it is. And that’s why I’m so angry.

Grieving is tricky in this house because while there’s no right way to do it, I can confidently say that we all do it the wrong way. This house grieves through distractions and analogies that make you pray for deafness. An analogy my parents love but I detest is the stage one. “Life is like a matatu where no one knows what stage they’ll have to leave at. Na stage yako ikifika, lazima ushukie hapo”.

As per this analogy, the time and circumstances of your death are all predetermined and you’re helpless to them. Your stage could be at 103 of old age, or 54 of a heart attack. It’s all cast in stone by the universe and we’re all just sat in this metaphorical PSV waiting for our stages. This analogy paints death as an inevitability and tries to nudge you towards somehow finding comfort in that. But I don’t see what’s comforting in knowing that the universe and its powers sat idly by as Sean suffered and subsequently died before he could even make it out of teenagehood.

Remember how I said we grieve through distractions or analogies? When I said distractions I was talking about absolving yourself in your work/studies,alcohol/smoking and the most dreaded drug of them all: religion. The human mind, when faced with something as devastating as grief, is weak and as such, bows to whatever gives it pleasure or comfort.

I fell hard on alcohol after Sean died but somewhere between all the “alcoholism runs in the family” talks and the mornings spent clinging to the toilet bowl, Captain Morgan stopped filling the void. I was also thrown into boarding around this time and was blessed with a staunch Christian roommate so my religious psychosis was pretty much guaranteed. I say blessed because she really was a blessing in disguise. She formed an integral part of the lifeline that let me get through highschool. Without wines and spirits to cling to, I was left drowning in grief again until the holy spirit held its hand out. I grasped it and clung to it so hard that I left fingernail impressions in it.

Yeah, I’ve decided that this piece will now talk about a period of my life that I still struggle to accept was real. If it weren’t for the archived chats filled with passive aggressive “God bless you” messages and the Bible’s I was gifted resting dusty on my bookshelf as evidence, I would have denied this ever happened.

Please bear in mind that prior to Sean and Christians deaths, I was a hardcore atheist. The kind that would take any opportunity to refute the existence of a higher power. The kind that would stand at attention and with eyes wide open when everyone else’s heads were bowed in prayer. Yet there I was, broken and collapsing at the feet of an altar that I previously called “the opium of the poor”.

Before all this, I had always been able to make sense of death. They were sick. They were old. There was a diagnosis, an explanation, a logic to it, however cruel. But Sean was barely eighteen, sweet and full of life, and he died in one of the most painful ways imaginable. There was no comforting explanation I could reach for, no illness or old age to make it fit neatly into the order of things. His death felt like a violation of the rules I thought the world followed, and I couldn't rationalise it. I needed an explanation badly enough that I scoured the world for it and found it in the pages of a Bible.

The shift was almost instant and concerned anyone who actually knew me. That’s why it’s called religious PSYCHOSIS and why I get upset whenever anyone jokes about it. Overnight, I started praying, fasting and speaking in tongues. I deleted every single playlist that I felt didn’t honor God and replaced them with weekly posts of my favorite Bible verses. The church saw me more than even my own family. No,seriously. I was a weekly boarder but stopped going home on the weekends so that I could go to church with the rest of the boarders. I thought only old ladies went for Wednesday service, yet there I was, eyes pressed shut in prayer and surrounded by the Holy Spirit .

A lot of people celebrated my newfound faith but anyone who truly knew me was deeply concerned. The most concerned were my family. While everyone else saw a new member of the congregation, my parents and sister saw Adora coping with grief that was all consuming and an academic lifestyle that didn’t pause for the former. My parents in particular didn’t dare interject in my coping through Christ. They later told me that religion,despite being the most concerning, was the safest of all my coping mechanisms so they let me be.

In hindsight, I really was losing my mind. I was going insane and calling it faith. I would tell myself the things I wanted to hear and call it the voice of God. God told me that death had delivered Sean from worldly suffering. God assured me that Sean was finally at peace. God told me that the voices I was hearing in the dead of night were His messages. Which brings me to the only time my parents interrupted my religious psychosis: when I started hearing voices, seeing things that weren’t there and following the instructions of the dead people in my dreams.

I called all of this divine intervention. They called it symptoms that warranted psychiatric intervention. I had to be tricked into going to the hospital because the voices had already warned me that satan was coming in the form of medical intervention. I’ll spare you the details and only say that the appointment was lengthy, the treatment plan was never adhered to and the diagnosis was rejected as “satan beckoning me to stray from the Lords path”. (direct quote btw)

Drugs and alcohol could numb the emptiness, but they never kept me afloat. Religion did. After Sean died, grief felt like drowning, and religion became a life raft. It gave me hope, a sense of community, and something to believe in when I could no longer see a reason to keep swimming. In hindsight, I know that what I experienced was psychosis, and I don't want to romanticise it. But I’m still grateful for that period. The beliefs may have been distorted, but the raft was real enough to keep me alive.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when the psychosis started to crumble but I can tell you it came in the form of doubt. I started to ask questions again. Why would an all loving God subject Sean to all the suffering he endured? I fought so hard to ignore these questions but they got too loud and eventually resulted in me denouncing Christianity over a random Saturday morning breakfast with my family. The relief was palpable. It’s like whole house let out a massive sigh I didn’t know it had been holding. The relief didn’t last too long. I was back to drinking the very next day.

I went back to drinking, almost deliberately inviting chaos back into my life. There was something comforting about the noise—the blurred nights, the reckless decisions, the mornings I could barely remember. Chaos was easier to bear than grief because it was loud enough to drown it out. For a while, I could mistake that noise for relief. I wasn't healing; I was simply making enough noise that I couldn't hear myself hurting.

Sean’s death was not the beginning of my inability to cope; it was simply the tragedy that exposed it most clearly. I’ve always found ways to escape pain rather than sit with it. Through drinking, smoking, or seeking out men who wanted to use my body to satisfy their own sexual desires, and letting myself be used because being wanted felt easier than being alone with what I was feeling. The psychosis wasn’t some strange departure from that pattern. It was another form of the same impulse: when reality became unbearable, I found somewhere else to go. Religion just happened to be the most elaborate place I had ever escaped to. And the most out of character.

I’ll definitely dedicate a separate article to my descent into madness but I want to keep this one somewhat focused on grief. I might even write a piece on how alcohol simultaneously saved and ruined my life. Idk. But for now I’ll conclude this post by sharing something I wrote on one of the many days where all I could think about was Sean. I titled it “Salt”.

He was in the tears at my graduation

He was in the bitterness of my first heartbreak

He’s forever in the sweat of all my endeavors

He’s the brine that preserves what little faith I still have in humanity

His body may have parted

but his spirit is here

it’s abundant, it’s life sustaining

it’s salt

10/08/2025

I love and miss you bro. Happy heavenly birthday🤍

Authors note: I wrote this between tears and compelled by this overwhelming feeling that pressing “Publish” and littering cyberspace with this vulnerability will somehow purge me of everything I’m feeling rn and let me focus on studying for my exams😭I’m in a really bad place at a really bad time.FUCK

Another Authors note: Any comments that tell me it wasn’t psychosis but “revelation” or “the word of God” or anything like that will be deleted

One more authors note: Can you tell idk what an authors note is or how they’re applied?🤣

Authors note ya mwisho:

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For the longest time, I couldn't explain why interactions with men sometimes felt fundamentally different. I wasn't talking about personalities or values. There was simply a pattern I kept running into that I couldn't put a name to. Then I remembered Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory.

One of the dimensions proposed by Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede is the spectrum between individualism and collectivism. Broadly speaking, individualistic cultures encourage independence, personal goals and self-expression, while collectivist cultures place greater emphasis on shared responsibility, relationships and the needs of the group.

Hofstede used this framework to compare cultures, not genders. I'm borrowing the language because I think it offers an interesting lens through which to look at how many boys and girls are socialised, particularly in African households. This is a loose extrapolation based on what I've observed and experienced rather than a direct application of the theory.

I think girls are largely raised to think collectively, while boys are often raised to think individually.

If you grew up in an African home, you've probably watched this happen before you were old enough to realise you were learning anything from it. Girls spend time in the kitchen with their mothers, aunties and grandmothers. They learn to cook, but alongside the recipes comes an expectation. The family needs to eat. Guests might arrive. Younger siblings are hungry. Someone has to make sure everyone is taken care of. Even when nobody says those words outright, the message is repeated often enough to become instinct: your responsibilities extend beyond yourself.

Cooking is only one example. Girls are often expected to notice when something needs doing before they're asked. They help with younger siblings, remember birthdays, smooth over disagreements, anticipate other people's needs and gradually become the emotional infrastructure of the household. Whether those expectations are fair is a separate conversation. What matters here is the lesson they reinforce. Your actions are understood in relation to everyone around you, and the household works because everyone contributes to it.

Many boys receive a different set of lessons. They are encouraged to pursue achievement, independence and personal success. Study hard. Build a career. Make money. Secure your future. Even household responsibilities are often framed differently. A boy cutting the grass or taking out the rubbish is completing his assigned task. A girl helping prepare dinner is participating in a shared responsibility whose success depends on everyone doing their part. One experience centres on completing an individual responsibility; the other revolves around maintaining something that belongs to the group.

Of course, there are exceptions. Plenty of families divide responsibilities equally, and many boys grow up with a strong sense of communal responsibility. I'm talking about patterns, not absolutes. Socialisation doesn't determine who someone becomes, but it does shape the instincts they develop.

I think this helps explain why women often appear more comfortable in collaborative environments. Group projects, planning events, organising friends and coordinating responsibilities all require someone to keep track of how everyone's actions affect the whole. Many women have spent years practising exactly that. They have been conditioned to notice the needs of the collective almost automatically.

That conditioning has its downsides. It can easily become self-sacrifice, with women placing everyone else's needs ahead of their own until they struggle to recognise where they end and other people begin.

The opposite pattern creates a different problem. If your upbringing consistently emphasises your own goals, ambitions and achievements, it becomes much easier to overlook the invisible labour someone else is doing to keep everything functioning. You may never develop the habit of looking for it in the first place.

That's how relationships can end up feeling deeply unequal. One person notices the dishes before they're mentioned, remembers birthdays without reminders, keeps track of groceries, reads the emotional temperature of the room and instinctively thinks about everyone else's needs. The other person genuinely doesn't notice any of it because those instincts were never deliberately cultivated.

I think this is where a lot of resentment between men and women begins. One person has spent years learning to scan the room for what everyone else needs. The other has spent those same years learning to focus on personal goals and individual progress. By the time they enter adulthood, they're approaching partnership with entirely different instincts.

Again, this isn't universal. I know men who think about everyone around them before themselves, and I know women who don't. Socialisation isn't destiny. Still, the stories we tell children matter. The responsibilities we assign them matter. The habits we praise matter.

Maybe that's why this divide keeps appearing in adulthood. We spend years preparing boys and girls for different roles, then expect them to arrive at relationships with the same assumptions about care, responsibility and partnership. So it’s not surprising that they often feel like they're speaking different languages.

Anywaysssss, next week I'll be committing equally questionable acts of academic appropriation with Freud's psychosexual theory. Stay tuned.

(I’m kidding :))

(Am I?)

(I’m probably not;))

Nobody represents that better than Mordecai.

From the very beginning, it feels like he's less interested in Margaret as a person than he is in the idea of dating her. Every interaction becomes this huge, impossible event because he can't just... talk to her. He overthinks everything, imagines the perfect moment, then inevitably fumbles it because he's built the whole thing up in his head.

The show knows this, too. It constantly makes fun of him for it. Whether he's letting Rigby tell him how to act or trying to orchestrate the perfect romantic scenario, the joke is always the same: Mordecai is so afraid of reality that he'd rather chase a fantasy than have an honest conversation.

Even when he and Margaret finally get together, it never really feels stable. And when she leaves for college, he doesn't actually deal with the heartbreak. Instead, he jumps straight into a relationship with CJ while quietly dragging all of that unresolved baggage with him.

People often reduce CJ to "the rebound," or dismiss her as the "crazy girlfriend," but I think she's one of the most misunderstood characters in the show.

Maybe that's because I've been a CJ. (see previous articles for reference)

I've been the person who could tell something wasn't right long before the other person was willing to admit it. I've been with someone who insisted everything was fine while still emotionally living somewhere else. And when you react to that, people don't usually ask why you're upset. They just decide you're overreacting.

That's why the way the fandom talks about CJ drives me insane.

Her weather powers aren't just a cartoon gimmick. Every time she feels insecure, betrayed, or emotionally threatened, literal storms start forming around her. It's an exaggerated version of something incredibly human: the anxiety that comes from sensing you're competing with someone who isn't even in the relationship anymore.

And the worst part of it all is that she's right. A sign to all the girls to never doubt your intuition.

She notices what Mordecai spends an entire season trying not to admit. A part of him is still hung up on Margaret, and instead of confronting that, he keeps pretending everything is fine until it inevitably blows up. And what drives me insane is that CJ isn't irrational for noticing it yet people make it seem like she is. She's reacting to a reality that Mordecai keeps asking everyone else to ignore.

Could she have handled some situations better? Absolutely. But I think people judge her reactions while giving Mordecai endless grace for the behaviour that caused them in the first place. He gets labelled "confused." She gets labelled "crazy." That's a frustrating double standard, both in the show and in the way fans talk about it. AND in real life too.

Which is exactly what happens at Muscle Man's wedding. If you haven’t seen the show, PLEASE just go look up and watch this one episode😭

Instead of celebrating his friend, Mordecai turns the entire ceremony into a public crisis about his own love life. It's one of the hardest scenes in the show to watch and I still cringe at the memory of it. But props to JG Quintel for how layered the scene was. Mordecai wasn’t trying to be cruel, but because he's so emotionally immature, he doesn't realise how selfish he's being until it's too late.

That's what makes it (in my opinion) one of the best animated scenes of all time. There's no real villain. Just someone who mistakes uncertainty for honesty and ends up hurting the people who care about him.

And that's why Rigby and Eileen work so well as a contrast.

Their relationship isn't built on years of awkward pursuit or grand romantic gestures. They become friends first. They spend time together, learn who the other person is, and gradually fall into a relationship that feels normal. Most would even call it regular. (I’m so funny)

More importantly, Rigby actually grows up before things become serious.

One of the most satisfying parts of Regular Show is watching him slowly become more responsible. He starts taking accountability for his mistakes, deals with his insecurities, and puts genuine effort into becoming a better person. Eileen doesn't magically fix him; she's there after he's already started fixing himself. Btw that’s a trope I’ll definitely write about later: female romantic interests being deployed as tools for male character development. Stay tuned.

That's the difference between him and Mordecai.

Mordecai treats romance like the missing piece of his life. He seems convinced that finding the right person will somehow solve all the uncertainty he feels about himself. Rigby accidentally stumbles onto the opposite lesson: relationships don't fix you. If anything, they expose the parts of you that still need work.

For a show about a blue jay and a raccoon working at a park, Regular Show has a surprisingly mature view of love.

It isn't really interested in soulmates or happily-ever-afters. It's interested in timing, emotional maturity, and the uncomfortable truth that sometimes the biggest thing standing between you and a healthy relationship is YOU.

And maybe that's why I'll always defend CJ. Not because she was perfect and not because I’ve been a CJ, but because she was expected to quietly absorb someone else's emotional indecision and smile through it. That's a position a lot more people have been in than they're willing to admit.

People still argue about whether Mordecai should've ended up with Margaret or CJ. I think that's the wrong question.

The real question is whether Mordecai was ready for either of them.

For most of the show, the answer is no.

I can always put my clothes back on.

I can never peel your gaze off my skin.

Long before I ever laid before you without fabric between us, I had already been stripped. Nakedness had never been about the absence of clothing. It had everything to do with being seen by someone who mistook observation for ownership. Your eyes settled on me until they became another layer of flesh, another weight to carry. I thought I had chosen to let you in, but now I wonder if I had simply grown accustomed to being looked at.

There was a time when your touch felt like a covering instead of an invasion. Like the coat of a cheetah, the pattern of your palms wrapped itself around me. Every place your hands rested became another spot in the pelt I wore. I mistook those markings for protection. I believed I was safe because I had been claimed.

It never occurred to me that camouflage serves predators just as well as prey.

For a while, the illusion was beautiful. Everything looked softer through rose-coloured glass. Your hands felt warm, your voice reassuring, your gaze reverent. I wore your affection like armour and mistook its weight for security. The glasses didn’t fall all at once. They cracked slowly. each fracture letting in another sliver of light until the picture I had built of you could no longer hold itself together.

When they finally shattered, I looked down expecting to find myself clothed in love.

Instead, I found I had been branded.

Your eyes had punched perfect circles into my flesh, neat 0s pressed into skin that had forgotten what it looked like before you arrived. Your fingerprints burned the 1s between them, each touch another mark, another command written into my body without my permission. Together they reduced me to something that could be stored, processed, archived. Binary. A language of absolutes where there was only yes or no, keep or discard, mine or not mine.

To you, I became data.

A statistic.

Something measurable.

The irony is almost cruel. You could reduce me to numbers while no mathematics has ever been capable of measuring what I carried for you. There is no equation for devotion offered freely, no formula for trust misplaced so completely that it survives long after the evidence against it has become overwhelming. Love refuses quantification. Possession does not.

Looking back now, I can catalogue every mistake with embarrassing acccuracy. I confused the heat in your hands for passion when it had always been friction. I mistook the firmness of your grip for reassurance instead of restraint. I thought the gleam in your eyes was adoration because I had never seen hunger wearing such a convincing smile.

Your declarations of love were masterpieces of imitation. To an ear desperate enough to believe, they sounded almost genuine. They echoed with all the right words, settled into all the expected silences, arrived exactly when I needed them to. Counterfeit tenderness still sells, at least until someone looks closely enough to notice the edges lifting.

It was always your eyes that undid me.

You looked at me as though I were precious. As though I were a gem caught in your eyes, reflecting light that belonged equally to both of us. I carried that image with me because it was beautiful, because everyone longs to believe they have become someone's treasure.

Only much later did I understand what I had mistaken for reverence.

The glint I saw in your eyes was never admiration.

It was anticipation.

The same glint the lamb sees reflected in the butcher's cleaver before it falls. Beautiful things often shine brightest just before they cut. I had spent so long admiring the light that I never stopped to ask what was making it gleam.

By the time I recognized it, the blade had already done its work.

The person who looked back at me in the mirror wore my face, but not my familiarity. They carried your fingerprints where veins should have been. They searched their own skin for a version of themselves untouched by your gaze and found only echoes. Even after you were gone, I continued to inhabit the outline you had drawn around me.

Perhaps that was always your greatest trick. You never needed to stay. You had already taught me to see myself through your eyes.

Gemini.

People speak of twins as though they are inseparable, two halves destined to mirror one another. But mirrors only tell the truth until someone learns to manipulate the light. I knew only one of your faces. I loved the one that smiled softly, that cupped my face with careful hands, that spoke of forever with such effortless conviction.

The second face revealed itself only after the harvest.

Only after you had gathered everything you came for.

Only after the person staring back from the mirror had become someone I could scarcely recognize.

Only after the butcher's cleaver had already fallen.

And perhaps thats the cruelest thing about predators.

They rarely arrive looking like monsters.

Sometimes they arrive looking like a home, and by the time you realize they were only ever hungry, you have already mistaken your own blood for belonging.

But not in the way the church intended.

No one collapsed in the Spirit. No heavenly language descended upon us. Yet there was something undeniably spiritual about the way our mouths abandoned their ordinary duties. Words became secondary. Sentences arrived breathless and left unfinished. Meaning shifted from spoken language to the spaces between our bodies. Consonants softened. Vowels stretched. Desire mangled grammar beyond recognition.

I remember thinking that this must be what possession feels like.

To have your mouth occupied by something larger than yourself.

To discover that desire, much like the Holy Spirit, has very little respect for language.

I deadass used to be terrified of the deep end of the pool as a child. We trained at Nyayo Stadium and the water was never fully clear. It was a murky green at best and an opaque sage at worst. The knowledge of its depth, coupled with the uncertainty of how truly deep it was, petrified me. That’s why I always sprinted the first twenty-five metres regardless of the set pace. I did not care for instruction when the goal was survival. I had to get out of the deep end.

From the second I touched the water, my only objective was to get to the serenity of the shallow end. Where my feet could touch the bottom. Where I was no longer at the mercy of whatever the darkness beneath me housed.

The deep end represented everything I hated: uncertainty, vulnerability, the possibility of being swallowed by something larger than myself.

I got over that fear much later than I like to admit.

Years later, I would discover that lust has a remarkable ability to rewrite childhood fears.

The terror of depth evaporated the moment I laid eyes on your skin.

Onyx in the warm evening sun.

Not because you made me feel safe.

You didn't.

You simply made me forget that safety had ever been the point.

The church calls it anointing when oil is poured over someone's head and they emerge changed. Marked. Claimed. Set apart.

I remember hearing from my churchgoing friends about how the oil would run down their foreheads.

The way it refused to stay where the priest placed it. Crawling from forehead to eyebrow. Eyebrow to cheek. Gravity dragging blessing into something messier.

Years later, I watched sweat perform the same miracle on your body.

Gathering at your temples before beginning its slow pilgrimage downward. Tracing familiar paths. Disappearing beneath fabric. Reappearing lower. Demanding to be followed.

Perhaps all forms of worship require a liquid medium.

The body leaks evidence.

Chlorine trapped in hair hours after practice. Sweat drying into salt. Pool water escaping from your ears long after you've left the pool. Your taste lingering on my lips. Every fluid insisting on its right to remain.

The church understood this long before I did.

Why else would baptism require water?

Why else would anointing require oil?

Transformation is difficult to believe until it leaves a stain. In our case, a mess.

Maybe that is why I feared the deep end for so long.

Not because I thought it would kill me.

Because I knew it would change me.

Because there’s something terrifying about surrendering yourself to a depth whose bottom you cannot see. Something even more terrifying about enjoying it.

As a child, I spent years swimming away from the deep end. As an adult, I found myself drawn toward depths of a different kind. Not because they had become less dangerous. Not because I had become wiser.

Because desire had convinced me that immersion and invincibility were the same thing.

I mistook appetite for revelation.

The body has always been susceptible to this confusion.

The slick sheen of sweat mistaken for holy oil.

A racing pulse mistaken for certainty.

A trembling knee mistaken for devotion.

A mouth mistaken for a prayer.

The funny thing about anointing is that the oil never stays where its placed. It runs. It spreads. It stains collars and fingertips. It follows you home.

So does chlorine.

So does lust.

Long after the water has evaporated. Long after the sweat has dried. Long after the sheets have been stripped and the prayers have gone unanswered, something remains.

A sheen.

A scent.

A trace.

Proof that I entered the depths willingly.

Proof that I emerged carrying part of them with me.

Perhaps every meaningful transformation leaves the body wet.

Baptism.

Swimming.

Desire.

Different names for the same surrender.

Meanwhile, I will go to the pool.

Not because I believe in healing, but because I believe in punishment.

I will kneel at the edge of the water because the weight in my chest has grown too heavy for my legs to carry. The same legs he once wore around his waist like a cincture now buckle beneath the burden of remembering. It seems unfair that they should pay for the mistakes of the heart, but bodies have always been made to settle debts they never incurred. The church will ask him to confess. The water will ask me to endure. By sunset, he will have absolution. All I will have are sore muscles and the memories, like chlorine, that linger long after you've left the pool.

The mzee in lane three has been spared from our usual one-sided races. Today's opponent is the memory of last night and its speed terrifies me. Every lap begins with me ahead and ends with it at my hips. I push harder, lengthen my stroke, burn my lungs raw, but memory was never interested in fairness. By the time I surface for air, it has already reached the other side of the pool and is waving me toward the parts of myself I am trying hardest not to revisit.

I hate butterfly because it makes breathing feel obscene. Every stroke forces my body upward, chest first, mouth open, desperate for something it cannot keep. Theres no elegance to it. No restraint. Just hunger. The kind that strips a person of dignity.

The water punishes need immediately. Reach too greedily for air and it rushes in to fill your mouth instead.

I think thats what unsettles me most. How familiar the motion feels. The arching toward relief. The brief satisfaction of having a craving answered. The certainty that whatever fills you will not stay. By the third lap, my lungs ache with the same embarrassment as my heart: both ashamed of how badly they wanted something, both furious that wanting it was not enough to make it stay.

"Long, shallow dive" becomes apparently contradictory whenever you stop and really think about these instructions. My coach loves hollering this at me whenever I take to the starting blocks.

“You want to dive into the water far enough to cover a few meters but not deep enough to bog you down.”

It sets you up for the perfect start.

Maybe that's why coaches love it. Maybe that's why we do too.

The trick is not avoiding the water. The trick is touching it without letting it keep you. Entering just enough to claim you've been there, leaving before the depth can make demands of you. Your body slices through the surface, stealing distance from the pool while denying it the chance to pull back.

Sex, too, asks for depth. It’s difficult to imagine a more literal form of entering another person. Yet somewhere along the way we learned to perform long, shallow dives into each other. To slip beneath skin without sinking. To move through bodies the way swimmers move through water: quickly, efficiently, always with the intention of coming up somewhere else. The perfect hookup, like the perfect dive, leaves no room for lingering. No room for the weight that comes with staying under.

The shower after a hard swim feels almost religious. Head bowed. Eyes closed. Water falling from somewhere above. For a moment, I understand why he went to church.

We were both looking for the same thing.

A way to leave that night behind without having to carry it home.

The difference is that his God promises forgiveness. Mine only promises chlorine and hot water. So I stand beneath the shower until my skin is boiled raw and my fingers prune, waiting for some small miracle of forgetting.

When I finally emerge, the changing room is empty. The mzee from lane three has already gone home. Tomorrow he will return and swim his lengths with the quiet determination of a man whose greatest concern is shaving a few seconds off his time. He will never know that while we shared a pool, I was trying to outswim a memory.

None of it works.

The water drains away. The pool closes. The evening settles. And still I gather my things and carry that night home with me, heavy and dripping, absolved of nothing.

The following story is an exposition for the point I want to make and is sponsored by Chrome Gin. I wouldn’t have had the experience I had if it wasn’t for them. (pls don’t send me PR, you guys almost killed me). A co-sponsor for this piece is the GOAT himself, Gideon. It was during our long talk on Thursday that he said, “death is freedom,” and it prompted all these thoughts.

Ok, so picture this. It was a Friday evening and, after a particularly long day that featured a lecture on how we needed to lock in as candidates after receiving some ugly math results, I wanted nothing more than to go back to the dorms and sleep. The same dorms, MIND YOU, that I had been sent to because I needed to get serious with my studies. The following events are proof that this change in residence didn’t do anything to curb my un-candidate-like behavior.

I was gathering my things and getting ready to go take a nap when a friend, who I will call Orange for the purpose of this story, suggested that we go for a polite drink at the shithole next door. I knew this script all too well and had indulged in this hooliganism enough times to know that the drinking would be everything but polite. I also knew that the guards at the school gate had become really strict and wouldn’t let a known boarder leave school premises without written permission from the boarding mistress and a parent. That second bit of knowledge was really comforting because I really didn’t want to go get shitfaced drunk, yet didn’t know how to tell Orange no. He’d bulldoze me into going out no matter what I said in protest.

So, instead of having our usual back and forth where I’d say no and he’d ignore my pleas for sobriety, I simply told him that the guards wouldn’t let me leave even if we tried. Instead of taking this as finality, he took this as a challenge. I can’t tell you how because all the ethanol eroded my memory, but he ended up getting me past the school gates and into the shithole next door.

Anyone who’s read the other pieces I’ve written about high school, or knew me during that horrific time in my life, knows about the shithole next door. It was a pub/bar that was right next to my school. I call it the shithole next door for multiple reasons. Most importantly because I don’t want to disclose its real name and have people who respect me discover the cesspool where I’d routinely abandon all my self-respect and dignity. Least importantly because that’s exactly what this place was: a shithole.

I talk about it in the past tense, not just because this was literal years ago, but because, last I heard, they’d been shut down over a land dispute. RIP to the shithole next door. Anyway, I’ve digressed.

Remember how I said the proposed plan was to indulge in some “polite drinks”? That was intentionally misleading. Drinks suggests cocktails, crafted shots, and anything else a reputable bar might have on its menu. This place didn’t even have a menu, and you might have been thrown out for requesting a single shot. What it did have was a wall of bottles that were probably all counterfeit, a single fridge for chasers and water, and a sound system that only knew reggae and dancehall.

My newly found self-respect is preventing me from painting a picture of this dungeon of debauchery, yet the writer in me wants nothing more than to take an entire paragraph to describe this place to you guys. I’ll abide by the former and only tell you guys that the floors were dirt, the tables were permanently sticky, and the clientele would make you hide your phone.

Anywayssss, I’ve digressed yet again. So we sat down and got in the same argument we always did. To get a mzinga or a quarter, that is the question. Or whatever the hell Hamlet was asking.

I always wanted to get a quarter because I somewhat valued my liver and needed to maintain its resale value. Orange, despite us being only 2 people, always wanted a mzinga. And, to my liver’s despair, Orange always got his way.

As if it couldn’t get any more hazardous, the shithole next door never had what you wanted. It was always organ-damage roulette. And, as fate would have it, they didn’t have any of our poisons of choice, so we ended up settling for Chrome Gin.

So there we were: me, Orange, and 750 milliliters of ethanol that was probably distilled in someone’s bedsitter. The counterfeit alcohol problem has always been very real, but that didn’t matter when the stories flowed just as fluidly as the drinks. We yapped and laughed from 4 p.m. to sundown. I can’t even remember the contents of our conversations, but I do remember how hard I was laughing because Orange was, and still is, the funniest person I’ve ever met.

Between the laughter and choking back that pesticide, a bad feeling told me to check my phone. It had been hidden in my bra ever since we got there. I produced it from my shirt and my screen lit up with 10+ missed calls from my fellow boarders.

My blood ran cold, and that’s saying something given how drastically Chrome Gin will increase your body temperature. I called back the last person to call me and he picked up on the first ring. There was no time for pleasantries as he went straight to telling me that I might have already been locked out of the dorms.

I panicked, and it’s like the Chrome Gin sensed this and mixed itself with the adrenaline to form the most sickening confusion. My brain was struggling to keep up with what I was hearing from the other end of the call, so it just picked out the key words.

You. Come back. Locked out. Quickly.

It was all too anxiety-inducing for my drunk self to deal with, so I just handed the phone to Orange and went to piss for the 5th time that evening. Hovering over the hole in the ground that served as the ladies’ toilet, my thoughts screamed at me. What the hell was I going to do if I was locked out of the dorms? What if we went back to school and I ran into a teacher in my heavily intoxicated state? Why the hell did I leave the school compound in the first place? Why did I always let Orange get me in these situations?

My thoughts and pissing were interrupted by banging on the stall door. I shouted back that the stall was occupied, but the banging persisted. I concluded my toilet time and swung the door open to the surly barmaid telling me that Orange was looking for me.

I staggered back to where I’d left him, and he didn’t even let me sit before telling me he’d already spoken to the boarders over the phone and knew how he’d get me back in my room. I was too drunk to question him and wayyyy too drunk to remember how I got into my room.

If this story isn’t a massive warning against excessive alcohol consumption, I don’t know what will convince you. The lapses in my memory are huge. I don’t remember how I wound up in my bed, but I do remember lying on that top bunk, staring at the plate of food that my roommate had brought me and silently cursing Orange and East African Breweries Limited.

While I was laying on that top bunk, smelling like a distillery and provoking my roommate to pray for my soul that I’d left behind in that shithole, I had a realization. I didn’t want to be this person anymore. I hated who I’d become. Not just because of the drinking, but because, when I looked at almost every facet of my life, I hated what I saw. I was slacking where it mattered most, I’d grown distant from people who genuinely loved and cared about me, and, when I looked in the mirror, I couldn’t honestly say I loved or cared about myself.

I didn’t know it then, but the reality was that death was the only thing that could save me.

There was no amount of healing or therapy speak that could undo the damage I’d done to myself in those 2 years. Key features of my personality were mutilated beyond recognition and, as such, needed to die. The point of repair had long passed, and now redemption could only be sought through death. There was no going back, only through, and that meant through fire and up from ash.

I needed to kill the part of me that so deeply needed Orange’s approval. I needed to kill the part of me that let his word be law. Most importantly, the version of myself that put others’ wants over my own needs needed to die.

I wish I could say these parts of myself died a peaceful, natural death, but if I wanted to lie I’d go over to Twitter. These things died a very instant death on a day that I don’t think I’ll ever have the strength to talk about.

It was during one of these drunken escapades with Orange that something tragic befell me, and it instantly killed a part of me. The incident that resulted in that death was a direct consequence of my own intoxicated recklessness. I stopped talking to everyone after that and poured all my thoughts into my notes app instead. My notes became, and still remain, a documentation of that death and the thoughts that came with it. Maybe one day I’ll share them. During that period, Orange’s calls went unanswered, my friends’ texts went unopened, and I basically only spoke to my family.

I needed to be alone because it was only in this death, this solitude ,that I could find peace and alignment. I needed to sit in the ash. Rebirth was self-discovery, and with that came self-respect and a sense of direction that I’d been missing for so long.

Once I knew what I wanted in life, how I wanted to be treated, and what I wasn’t willing to tolerate, the version of myself that Orange liked so much died a natural death. And with that came so much freedom. The freedom to finally say no to people. The freedom to pursue my passions. The freedom to put my wants and needs above everyone else’s after doing the opposite for so long.

I felt free for the first time in a long time and continue to feel that way to date.

I think the perfect example of this death and rebirth is how I fell back in love with swimming after I stopped hanging out with Orange. Now that I wasn’t always intoxicated or being dragged around on side quests like a pet, or reeling from the effects of being intoxicated the day before, I was free to actually get back in the water.

And I loved it.

It was during one training session where my eyes were fully opened to just how hectic my life had been before that death. I was resting between sets and thinking about how boring my life had become when I realized that I was confusing peace for boredom and that I should appreciate it rather than complain about it.

Peace had become a freedom that I could now enjoy after having been robbed of it for so long despite being entitled to it all my life.

I don’t want this piece to seem like I’m hating Orange. No. If anything, I’m grateful for the short time we spent as friends.

I’m not even hating the version of myself that was so easily manipulated by him.

This piece is me saying that death, as traumatic as it was, was necessary for me to enjoy the freedom that I now revel in.

Prior to this conversation, I thought I was crazy and bitter for still thinking about some of the terrible experiences I had in high school. I’ve accepted that me writing and talking about these experiences years later isn’t me dwelling in the past. It’s me taking authorship of it.

Seventeen-year-old me didn’t have the language, vocabulary, or understanding that I have now. She only had the feelings. So I’m not reliving the past. I’m translating it. Translating it in honor of the girl who only knew how to cry.

Ok, let me set the stage for what’s going to be the second of many horror stories.

We were sitting through an afternoon French class. It was a really small class, made up of only four students, with me being the only girl. I hated that class for a multitude of reasons and would often use refilling my water bottle, going to the nurse, or visiting the washroom as a way of escaping. But that stopped after the teacher reported this behavior to the head of academics who threatened to tell my dad.

So there I was, sitting through the hundredth lesson we’d had on conjugating in the conditional tense because none of us had gotten the hang of it. Well, none of us except this one guy who was a native French speaker. I hated him for it, but he’s not the subject of this piece, so I’ll spare him for now.

Anyways, class was dragging on, and I caught a glimpse of my reflection when my laptop’s screen went black from inactivity. I noticed that my lip gloss had escaped the borders of the lip liner in the corners of my mouth. So I used the reflection in my laptop and my thumb to remove the excess.

I sat next to this one guy who I’d known for a couple of years. He fit the snarky nerd archetype PERFECTLY. If you’ve watched Total Drama Island, this guy was comparable to Noah before his redemption during World Tour. He’d said a few mean things to me in the past, but nothing that I hadn’t heard before. But nothing he’d said to me in the past compared to his latest insult.

He looked at me fixing my lip gloss and let out that all-too-familiar snicker I’d hear before he said something cruel. I asked him what he wanted to say.

“Have you ever heard of the lipstick on a pig idiom?”

I was genuinely stunned.

My default, whenever he or anyone else joked about my appearance, was to laugh it off or just sigh and shrug it off. But this was different. Something about this insult made it feel like a punch to the gut. It knocked the wind out of me and left me unable to react.

Our local francophone had heard the entire exchange and immediately jumped to my defense. He told him off in his thick French accent while I just sat there in muddled confusion, embarrassment, and shame.

I can’t remember the rest of the class, but what I do remember is the relief I felt when the bell rang, signaling the end of French class. Instead of walking to my next class, I went to the girls’ washroom and cried.

I only stopped crying because I got a text from my classmate telling me that our literature teacher was looking for me. He knew I was in school, so my absence from his class meant that I was skipping his class—a crime that was punishable by calling my father.

I couldn’t deal with being a pig in lipstick AND facing my father’s wrath, so I wiped my tears and went to learn about the motifs in Shakespeare’s Othello. I couldn’t think about anything for the rest of the day other than that comment made in French class. The thoughts haunted me until I went back to the dorms and fell asleep on a tear-soaked pillow.

I was so used to my appearance being picked apart and ridiculed that I was genuinely shocked at how hard that comment hit me.

I was made fun of practically every day for something I couldn’t control, so why the hell did this comment in particular hit me like the steel tip of an arrow? I didn’t feel this way when my complexion was targeted. I didn’t feel this way about the thousands of jokes made about my forehead. I didn’t even feel this way when I forgot to cover my mouth when I laughed and someone commented on my teeth.

This quite literally hit different because he’d unlocked an insecurity I didn’t even know I had and exploited it, all while I couldn’t even name the insecurity.

Why the hell did being called a pig in lipstick hurt me the way it did?

I’d been called worse, so why did this hurt like that?

I asked myself these questions for days after he said that to me and couldn’t arrive at an answer.

It hit me one morning while I was struggling with my edges in the chipped mirror in our dorm.

The sun had barely risen, but it was one of those days where I had to get up and start my day early because lying in bed with my thoughts would drive me to bad decisions. Doing my edges was always a struggle and still continues to be one. There’s not a gel, brush, or method that I haven’t tried. My hair just does not want to be tamed. I now realize that that’s okay, but it used to drive me insane back then.

I’d look at my friends and their elaborately swooped edges, and the envy would consume me. The green-eyed monster would tighten his grip around my neck every time I saw my friend from the dorm next door arrive at breakfast with edges that looked like something off of a Pinterest board.

I’ve digressed.

I was doing my edges in the dim lighting and chipped mirror when I realized why the pig in lipstick comment had stung the way it did.

Being called a pig in lipstick stung not just because of the cruelty, but because of the confirmation. I already knew I wasn’t as effortlessly pretty as the girls I was friends with. But that comment opened my eyes to something even more hurtful: that even trying, even performing femininity didn’t make me close to being desirable. It made me laughable.

I could live with not being as naturally and effortlessly beautiful as other girls, but to hear that even effort didn’t redeem me broke me. That putting on beauty like a costume didn’t transform me. It just exposed me.

That’s why that insult was so dismantling.

Being a pig in lipstick meant that no amount of effort could bridge that gap, and that femininity on me was a joke.

Bro, that comment and the realizations it led to fucked with my head for so long.

It might sound dramatic, but I wasn’t the same for a long time after that. My already low self-esteem plummeted and only picked back up after I graduated.

Btw I want to point out that I no longer think like this😭I’ve grown and healed since then. This is just me giving my 17 year old self a voice.

Anyways, stay tuned. Next time I’ll write about how I’m still reeling from being ridiculed in public then lusted over in private.

I’m writing this while feeling the all-too-familiar sting of hot tears that are about to burst their banks. There are nights where I will lie awake with a dark pit where my heart should be, crying not because of the pit itself or what caused it, but because I can’t run to my mother with the pit in my chest and expect her to fill it with gentle words.

My mother is not a bad person. She’s just been hardened by her own life experiences—hardened to the point where she can’t offer softness to even herself, let alone anyone else. So I don’t blame her for being emotionally unavailable. But this understanding will never undo the fact that I still wish I didn’t have to nurse my own wounds ever since I was old enough to sustain them.

My emotions were like a burden to my mother. And being the very emotional child that I was, I imagine that this burden became so heavy that she chose to leave it for someone else to carry. An example of this is the “don’t cry challenge” she instituted when my age was still a single digit because I “couldn’t go a day without crying”. I was a very sad child, for reasons that I’ll delve into in subsequent pieces. All you need to know for now is that I was constantly crying. If I wasn’t crying, I was on the verge of crying or enduring an experience that would make me cry later.

For reasons that I couldn’t understand at that age, this disconcerted my mother—so much that she told me she’d pay me at the end of the week if I made it from Monday morning to Sunday night without showing her my tears. Writing this out for the first time is making me realize how truly bizarre this treatment was.

This lasted for a single week, and I remember how proud I was to reach my hand out for currency on that Sunday night and proclaim that I hadn’t cried that week. I’ll forever point to this moment as the beginning of my self-isolation as a means of coping with sadness. Because it’s not like I didn’t cry that week. I did cry. Plenty. Just not in front of her or anyone I felt would report back to her.

I cried in the washroom when I’d excuse myself between classes. I cried while getting showered. And I cried most in the evenings before she came home, while I pretended to do my homework. She falsely believed that she was conditioning me to stop crying, but all she did was reinforce the belief that my emotions were an inconvenience that needed to be hidden. Rather, that my NEGATIVE emotions were deserving of hiding.

Whenever I would come home with any accomplishment of sorts—which, not to brag, was often because I was an academic juggernaut—all she wanted was to hear about my success. She suddenly had all the time and patience in the world. This disparity taught me from a very young age that I was only wanted when happy and an inconvenience when upset—something that I’m still struggling to unlearn today.

Another example of this is the day she was driving me to school after another concerned email regarding my truancy, and grief seized me in the middle of traffic. I’d been having one of those days where I couldn’t stop thinking about how my cousin’s life was cut short—how he had so much more to do, love, and experience but was robbed of that. The tears fell silently but were accompanied by not-so-silent sniffling that prompted her to ask what was wrong.

I said plainly that I was thinking of Sean, and she didn’t even look away from the traffic ahead before saying, “but you do realize people die?” I wasn’t even shocked or upset because this was her trademark response to every single tear I shed over Sean and everyone else in my life who’d died. She continued her monologue while I prayed for the traffic to relent so that she could drop me at school and I’d be free to cry and hug myself in the solitary refuge of the girls’ washroom.

“Everyone’s going to die eventually. I’m going to die, you’re going to die, everyone will die, and that’s just life. It’s just that some people go sooner than others.” I tuned her voice out and spent the rest of the ride daydreaming of a reality where my mother would instead hug me and tell me the words that I instead had to tell myself while I sat crumpled on the closed lid of the toilet. I used to naively tell myself that she was just stoic. This was until I realized that being cold-hearted doesn’t just happen—things happen that freeze that heart. Freeze that heart and make it unavailable to me and my buckets of tears.

Sean died 2 years ago, and only two of my friends know about it—and that’s only because they found out from my sister. I fought so hard to grieve in silence and isolation because I didn’t want to burden anyone with the version of myself that was falling apart, because I couldn’t understand why he had to go so soon or why he had to suffer the way he did. Both of these are questions that I still ask myself.

It hits different when your age mates die, and even harder when it’s someone you were practically raised with. We were supposed to watch each other grow, but now even the flowers on his grave won’t grow, since they’re long dead and wilted. I still believe that, to some extent, I haven’t even fully processed his death, because a good chunk of what I’m calling grief was just suppressing my reactions to every time I remembered that he was actually gone and never coming back.

It didn’t help that I couldn’t attend his funeral because my parents ruled that studying for my exams was more important than the closure that only a funeral can give you. I passed my exams and tied for second highest in my cohort while Sean was wrapped in a kafan and rested in the soil—just another experience that conditioned me to think that emotions were an inconvenience that could be put aside if you were serious enough.

All this to say that a lot of my childhood was spent being sad and wishing that my mother would comfort me instead of being cold and “logical.” I don’t know if it was naivety or desperation that led me to once try and teach her to be there for me. Instead of expecting her to know what to do as if it was hardwired into all mothers, I told her that I wanted her to say something to make me feel better about a terrible situation.

When Christian died and she inevitably found me crying, I told her that all I needed in that moment was for someone to sit with me and tell me that it was going to be okay. She did sit with me on the cold linoleum floor. But her presence felt so forced and robotic that I could practically feel the cold emanating from her skin while she talked about how everyone will eventually die and get eaten by maggots in the soil. I told her she could just go, and she said “thank you” before standing up and going to take a phone call in another room. I spent a depressing amount of time after that calling Christians number in hopes that he would pick up and tell me that none of this was real.

I really want to emphasize that I do not dislike or resent my mother for any of this. She was never cruel, just cold. I love my mother to bits. I now understand why she is the way she is. That doesn’t justify it, but the understanding softens the blow just a little bit.

Life hardened her in ways that are not mine to share, and I cannot fault her for not having the emotional bandwidth to deal with a child that turned out to be deeply troubled and profoundly grief-stricken. She’s a human being, after all. Human beings feel things, and sometimes feel them so frequently or so deeply that it petrifies the organ responsible for feeling things.

I can’t be mad at her for not being able to accommodate my sadness along with hers, especially since she tried to support me in ways she knew how. She drove me to every psychiatrist/therapist appointment and started to ignore the emails from my teachers asking why I was skipping so many days of school. She started saying “it will be okay” instead of launching into monologues about how the world will move on with or without me. She did what she could with her limited emotional capacity.

I just wish I could have talked about some of these things with my own mother instead of strange men and women under white fluorescent lights in rooms that smelled like sanitizer and sometimes had a homunculus on the desk. I need you to look up a picture of a homunculus so that you can understand how strange I felt talking about how grief was giving me literal headaches while making eye contact with that strange little figure. Do it. Open Google. Stare into the eyes of the homunculus.

I’ve acknowledged the impact that this all had on my relationship with sadness, but that’s not to say that I’ve done a good job at remedying it. I struggle with my own sadness in ways that deserve their own piece. What I will say now is that I self-isolate whenever sadness consumes me because a part of me that I’m yet to nurse back to normalcy still believes that my sadness is an inconvenience to the ones I love.

What I need to talk about is how all this has affected how I interact with other people’s sadness. It comes in extremes. Sometimes, when my friends come to me when they’re sad, I’ll treat the problem as my own and internalize their feelings because of an overwhelming urge to be there for them in ways that my mother wasn’t there for me. I’ll be the therapist friend and more. Your sadness is now mine, and I’ll wallow in it with you so that you don’t feel how I got so used to feeling.

This will always be to my detriment—and to anyone’s who does the same. You should be able to be there for people without adopting their problems. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, there are times when my friends will come to me with their sadness and I’ll peer down at them through the rims of my glasses and ask myself why this person is dumping all their sadness on me.

I’ll think to myself that they need to thug it out and keep it pushing, just like I do. I’ll think that their feelings are killing the vibe and that they should deal with that shit alone. I’ll think that everyone gets sad and that yours is nothing new or special. I’ll think that they’re being an inconvenience. I’ll think like my mother.

Unfortunately, I catch myself way too late, and the guilt devours me from the inside out. I truly want to be there for the ones I love when times are dark, but sometimes I don’t know how.

This is why I can’t raise children. My tumultuous relationship with sadness is proof to me of how easy it is to unintentionally fuck up your kids. It was never my mother’s intention to hurt me the way she did, but that doesn’t change the fact that it still altered me in the worst way possible. I can’t bring children into this world or be responsible for any after having experienced firsthand how devastating the effects of your parents’ personalities and traumas can be.

I’ll parent vicariously through my friends and family whenever they ask me to babysit or bring their kids with them to brunch.

In my next article, I’ll talk about all the other reasons why I don’t want kids. Does Substack have a word limit? I hope, for the sake of that upcoming 1-hour read, that it doesn’t.

(I wrote this when I was 18 years old btw😭I wish I could go back in time, hug that sad girl and tell her that things did indeed turn out alright🫂)

I miss him when the sun’s rays pierce through my bedroom window and warm me in their glow. His bedroom had these massive windows that he never closed. He claimed that nature was never meant to be kept out. Everything from the singing of birds to the rustle of leaves would join us in his room.

I loved how the sun would shine through the open window and its rays would cast shadows of the tree outside his room onto the walls. The warmth from the sun, the warmth of his skin, the warmth from my head simmering after the argument with my mum that led me to his house in the first place. Sometimes it became too warm, and he’d let the box fan whir to life and draw the blinds, asking the sun for a moment of privacy and for the warmth in the air to stop suffocating me.

I miss him now that I’m preparing for another moot, and I keep catching myself pacing around my room talking to an imaginary bench of judges.

He helped me prepare for my last moot. Saying he helped me prepare is a bit of a stretch because we did everything but actually practice, but that’s not to say that he didn’t try to help me. He sat propped up in his bed and listened to me stumble and lisp my way through my poorly written submission.

He waited for me to finish before smiling at me and asking a question that he already knew the answer to: “You didn’t do any research, did you?”

I just laughed and sat down with him before he pulled me into a hug that smelled like sandalwood and felt like home. His beard tickled me while he talked about how he would never trust a lawyer that was reading off their phone and wouldn’t make eye contact.

My only response was that I wouldn’t trust an engineer who couldn’t set up a curtain rod.

We laughed at the memory of him needing a YouTube tutorial to install a curtain rod and his adamant refusal to accept any help. Then we laughed at how unprepared I was for the moot and laughed even more about how reluctant I was to do anything about it.

The moot was mere hours away and I knew virtually nothing about the subject matter and couldn’t even speak on the legal issues without my eyes glued to my screen. The old me would have been frantically rehearsing or hidden away in a dark corner of the library memorizing my arguments and lost in the world of legal research.

Yet here I was wrapped in his arms, wondering why he was always so warm.

Something about his room made me slow down. I don’t want to say it made me lazy because that wouldn’t do that feeling justice. It would be lazy of me to just call it lazy. It felt like the rush and worry of real life couldn’t touch me when I was in his room. His bedroom was impermeable to reality.

I miss him now that I’m back in my Fela Kuti phase.

I still remember how fast he jumped up to turn on his speaker when I first told him that I’d never heard a Fela Kuti song. I remember getting distracted by how animated he was while talking about Fela’s marriage to 27 different women and what a bold revolutionary move it was.

I remember the urge to sleep possessing me three minutes into Yellow Fever and him looking like I’d just shot him after I suggested that we fast forward the song to when the actual lyrics start.

That prompted an entire tangent about how people don’t savour things anymore and how instant gratification is killing the arts.

It took hours of listening and lectures that spanned over months for me to finally be able to appreciate the masterpiece that is Fela Kuti’s entire discography. Fela himself would commend this man’s determination to make me appreciate his work.

I miss swinging my head to Zombie and hearing the beads in my hair clack against each other while smoke danced in the air and his phone lit up with texts from his sister begging us to shut up.

I miss him now that I’m itching for a sweet treat.

He has the worst sweet tooth of anyone I’ve ever met. A good 60% of every word this man ever said to me revolved around chocolate or cookies. He would fill moments of silence by asking if I wanted a treat.

Almost as if part of a script, I would joke back that he’d start to decay if he got any sweeter. This and many other jokes often led to play fighting, which then led to something even sweeter than chocolate. After which he’d sit up in sweat-soaked bed sheets, propped up on his elbows, and ask if I wanted a sweet treat. It was like a tradition of sorts.

I REALLY miss him now that I’ve caught myself writing all this when I should instead be working on my oral submissions for tomorrow’s moot.

It’s reminded me of one thing I used to dislike about him but can now appreciate, even if it’s too late. He was a true ambassador of “brutal honesty.” Not that fake shit where it would be insults masked as criticism.

No.

He was brutally honest in the true sense of the phrase. He would tell me truths that I didn’t want to hear yet desperately needed to be told. One of which being that an inability to focus is one of my biggest weaknesses.

If he knew I was writing this right now instead of working on my arguments, he’d threaten to come confiscate my phone, then dive into a speech about how it kills him to see me waste abilities and opportunities like this.

I used to think that he was being dramatic but can now see that he was being one of the biggest blessings in my life.

Anyways.

This would be longer, but I can hear his voice telling me to go lock in.

We once had an incident where I considered calling 911 for my friend because he genuinely lost his mind after falling asleep and waking up kama bado zimeshika. This is that story.

So this all happened in our last few weeks as high schoolers. We were working on our last big community service project and it involved a lot of construction. Every day for about a week, we’d come into school but go straight to the workshop and lumber yard at the back of the property and slave away. We spent days measuring and sawing all the timber we’d need to furnish the library that we were building in what turned out to be the middle of nowhere. A very noble endeavor, but all the sweating and splinters made me wish we could just make a hefty donation and call it a day. Anyways, I digress.

After a particularly long day of hauling wood around and fighting with rusty saws, my friend and I decided to go out afterwards. And our definition of going out was walking to the shithole pub next door and getting aggressively intoxicated, then seeing where the night took us.

As per usual, the second we sat down, we were greeted by the sassy barmaid who wore a resting bitch face painted in the kind of makeup you’d see in an old Nollywood film. She asked what we’d be having and we asked for a minute because we needed some time to engage in our ritual. And by ritual, I mean the argument we’d have every single time we walked into that shithole.

“Can we please just get a quarter this time? I don’t feel like going too hard.”

“A quarter would just be warm up and a waste of money. Mzinga or nothing. You can even pick what we drink.”

“It’s only two of us. A mzinga will finish us.”

“Tufanye hivi basi. Let’s get a mzinga. Then you can get an unlimited chaser of your choice and we can eat whatever you want after.”

“I hate you.”

“I love you too. What chaser do you want?”

This health code violation of a pub never had what you wanted. You just had to drink whatever they had stocked on that day. I wanted Captain and Coke but the barmaid just snickered and told us to settle for Bazuu and Chrome vodka. For those who may not be familiar, Bazuu is RedBull if RedBull never made it out of the hood and instead, turned to a life of crime. I’m not sure how much caffeine is in it but it’s enough to make your heartbeat sound like Eminem’s legendary Rap God verse. But not even the biggest Bazuu could make Chrome vodka go down easy.

We spent a couple of hours choking back that poison and laughing. We used to laugh at everything. And the laughter only got louder after every shot. I remember practically falling out of my chair because he said his physics class could be compared to a field of grazing goats because of how clueless they always were.

We hooted and hollered until the bottle ran dry and the pub started to fill up with the kind of men you clutch your belongings around. The sun had set by now so we decided to head back to his place since he said he didn’t live too far. But not before we sparked up.

I used to get a hankering for smoke every time I drank and that particular night was no different. His whole face lit up at the suggestion and he dragged me outside of the pub to what looked like a duka except it was painted black and the ka window thingy looked like it was welded shut. The cold was biting at me so I asked him what the hell we were doing out here. He didn’t even look back at me. He just went up to the welded window and tapped on it.

I heard a voice come from inside the mabati but couldn’t make out what it was saying because of the booming dancehall coming out of our local. My friend said something back and the window flew open. Almost like a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat, he stuck his hand inside the window and pulled out a long skinny joint. He inspected it briefly before opening his phone and putting it inside the mysterious black window. The window regurgitated his phone after a few seconds then slammed itself shut. I had so many questions but none were as pressing as where the nearest lighter was.

He tapped the magic window again but the voice from inside had grown angry now and didn’t open up this time. Cold and impatient, I spotted the nearest smoker and asked him for a light. He fumbled in his pocket for a bit then handed me a lighter, not knowing that this was the last time he’d ever see it. #RetiredLighterThief

We smoked on the walk back to his place, still laughing. He told me that the man inside the blacked out duka was called Fundi and that his shit was THE shit. My tolerance was insanely high at the time so I thought nothing of it and just laughed at the nickname “Fundi.”

We were having a great time giggling, telling stories and staggering out of the way of traffic. We crossed the road and were hooted at by several vehicles but paid them no mind because we were too busy gisting over how we were both sleeping with people we shouldn’t even be talking to. The only thing that halted our merrymaking and expedited our walk was the sudden burst of rain we got caught in.

We hastened our pace and got to his place damp and reeking of sweat and smoke. We stood outside the gate for a bit while we caught our breaths and I waited for my vision to stop blurring.

Once the world stopped spinning and we could both breathe normally again, he said he’d have to slip inside first, unlock the doors from the inside, then let me in. The instructions were simple yet unclear because of all the substances in my system. He saw the confusion written all over my face and just gripped my wrist before looking me in the eyes and telling me, “I need you to be as quiet as possible.”

The seriousness of his voice cut through all the fuzziness in my brain and even sobered me up a little. Still holding my gaze, he told me to take off my shoes because they’d be too loud. I obliged and carried my shoes in my hand as he led me through the gate and into their compound.

We tiptoed across the damp cabro blocks until we got to where the cars were parked. Sandwiched between a pickup and another unidentified big vehicle, we crouched down and he whispered in my ear to stay there and not move until I heard his voice. I wanted to ask where he was going and how long he’d be gone but his figure disappeared into the black of night before I could even open my mouth.

My joints began to ache from crouching so I knelt instead. The cold on my knees was instantly sobering and it hit me that I was hiding in this man’s compound knowing only that I should keep quiet. A silent terror washed over me and was amplified when I heard a rustle in the bushes across the compound.

I tried to steady myself with the reminder that their family kept livestock. This was probably just a sheep grabbing a late night bite. That comfort shattered the second I heard footsteps walking towards my hiding spot. Footsteps that were too slow and heavy to be his. He always walked like the world was falling apart beneath his feet; his steps were quick and urgent. But these footsteps sounded like the stepper was pleading with his feet to move with each step.

My mind immediately leapt to all the stories you’d hear of intruders being hacked to pieces by homeowners or torn to shreds by watchdogs. As if sensing my panic, the footsteps stopped and changed direction. They were now moving farther across the compound, becoming lighter and lighter. The danger moving farther and farther.

I thought to call my friend’s phone and have him come collect me from between the cars. But I remembered that his phone was never on mute or vibrate and his phone ringing would risk waking up the whole house. And so I sat there for what felt like hours.

Just as the terror had begun to subside, I heard footsteps again. Except this time, they were coming from overhead. Despite being an atheist, I clasped my hands in prayer and told God that I would never smoke again if He stopped making me hear things that weren’t real. In that same breath, I cursed Fundi and the joint he’d given us because it was now making me hallucinate.

The fear of the earlier set of footsteps was overtaken by the fear that I was now losing my mind by hearing someone walking on the roof on top of me. I gathered all my courage and craned my neck to look up. And that’s when I saw my friend on the roof, climbing onto the balcony of what I now know was his room.

My heart stopped racing and I watched him silently maneuver his way onto his balcony like a drunken spider monkey. He made it into his room and I watched the light flicker on. In less than a minute, I heard a door next to me open and I froze until that familiar voice called my name.

I tiptoed inside and the warmth of that house felt like a hug. He gestured for me to remain silent and he walked me through the house, up the stairs and into his room.

Once in his room, I was still too scared to even breathe. That was until he sighed loudly and let out a laugh that shook even his bed frame. His laughter was contagious so I also found myself laughing at how bizarre the past few minutes had been.

Between laughing, I asked him if we would wake up the whole house with the noise we were making and he said not to worry about it. So I didn’t. Then I asked whose footsteps I’d heard outside and he said it was probably his uncle.

We laughed some more before lying down on his bed and turning on the TV to watch Madea’s Family Reunion. I say we watched Madea but in reality, the movie was just background noise to our giggling and storytelling. I think the relief we both felt was enough to properly activate what he had smoked earlier. Everything became ten times funnier and then the munchies hit like a runaway train.

I rolled over and told him that I was hungry. He said there was leftover pizza downstairs and he could make us both some tea. I love tea and he knew this. I got up and asked if he had a T-shirt and shorts I could wear before we went scavenging for food. He rummaged through his closet and threw me a red T-shirt and some checkered shorts. The shorts fit more like underwear and felt like they would rip at the hips but they were the biggest pair he had so I made do.

The shirt was just fine except it had “TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT 2016” plastered across the front in big yellow font and “MAGA” inscribed down the back. We saw this and died of laughter once more. He’d gotten the shirt from a friend as a gag gift and now just wore it as pajamas.

We composed ourselves and began the perilous journey to the kitchen. The stairs sighed under our footsteps and his bare feet sounded like hot slaps on the cold kitchen tile. Once in the kitchen, I perched on the counter and watched him switch on the kettle then microwave enough slices of pizza to satiate the entire NYS.

I knew the munchies were in full swing because he grabbed a pan and fried up some eggs that he eventually put on top of the pizza. The water boiled and we let our tea steep in silence. Once the tea was done, we gathered our bounty and trekked back up to his room.

The door hadn’t even swung shut behind us before we started devouring our feast. The pizza-egg monstrosity he’d created was reduced to crumbs within minutes and we spent the rest of the night sipping lukewarm tea and yapping while Tyler Perry acted in the background.

The fatigue and intoxication eventually caught up with us and we fell asleep with no alarms set despite us needing to be in school the next morning. He woke me up a couple of times in the night to complain about me being too warm and going on brief tangents about how women’s bodies generate so much heat. But other than that we slept soundly.

I remember waking up in his room at about 5am and panicking when I saw the time. I shook him awake because I had to be home before my mum woke up otherwise she’d lose her shit.

This man sat up in his sheets, squinted at me, and asked me if the nurses had been paid.

I thought this was some stupid joke and told him to stop fucking around because I needed to get back home and didn’t know the way out of his house since we’d snuck in like a couple of bandits. He just continued looking at me with his brows furrowed and asked again if the nurses had been paid.

I put my hand on his knee and asked him what the hell was wrong with him. He threw my hand away and told me to get serious. He asked me again if I had been paid. I just stared back at him incredulously. Then he called me a name that wasn’t mine. A woman’s name that I had never heard before.

It was at this moment that I realized that he was still under the influence of Fundi’s goods. I calmly asked him if he knew who I was and he just called me that woman’s name again and told me to stop fucking around. Then he told me to hurry up and get dressed because ward rounds would be starting soon and the doctors would be looking for me.

For the second time in less than 24 hours, I clasped my hands together and begged God to return my friend’s sanity and swore that we’d never smoke again if He did.

My friend must have picked up on my panic because he told me to calm down. I thought he had finally snapped out of it and was relieved for a second. I watched him calmly pick up his phone and call the first number in his call log. The number wasn’t even saved but whoever it was picked up the phone and had started to ask who was calling but was cut off by my friend saying, “Hello, yes, I have one of your nurses here. Don’t worry. She’s coming soon.”

I plucked the phone out of his hand and apologized to the number and asked who they were. It was a boda guy from the previous day. He hung up and I was left alone with this mad man who’d forgotten who I was.

We sat in silence for a bit while I thought of what I was going to do. I needed to get home ASAP but was sat in the room of a man who’d forgotten who I was and I didn’t know my way out of his house. I thought of who I could call for advice on what to do but no names came to mind. Only a number: 911. Because this was slowly starting to feel like an emergency.

If I had Fundi’s number I would have called him and asked for instructions on how to reverse the effects of that joint. But I didn’t even know how this man looked, let alone his number.

Being the overthinker that I was, I panicked at the thought of this being drug induced psychosis and cried at the thought of it being permanent. He saw my tears and hugged me. I once again thought that he’d regained his sanity but continued crying after he said, “Don’t cry, I’ll call the hospital so that you don’t lose your job.”

I feared that this man had actually lost his goddamn mind.

I picked up my phone and dialed a mutual friend’s number. This mutual friend was a veteran stoner so I figured he’d seen his fair share of chizi cases. The phone rang and my friend asked who I was calling. I told him the name of our mutual friend and he snatched the phone out of my hand and ended the call. He then looked at me angrily and said not to call that specific person because he was a gossip. Which was true.

Finally! A glimmer of hope. He could remember one of our friends. Now I just needed him to remember me.

It took half an hour but he slowly began to remember who I was. He stopped calling me a nurse and finally understood that I needed to get home before my mother woke up and all hell broke loose. I called an Uber to his house, changed out of the Trump pajamas and he led me to the gate where it was waiting for me as the sun rose. We hugged and he made me promise to call the second I got home.

The drive home was silent. The Uber driver was an older lady and I could see the judgment in her gaze as she snuck glances at me through the rearview mirror. This would have bothered me on any other day, but on this day, I had bigger things to be worried over. Things like my friend losing his mind to Fundi’s shit and my mother’s wrath if she woke up before I got home.

I got home and found my mother watering her plants. She looked at me with confusion. Confusion that quickly turned to anger when she realized that I was still in yesterday’s clothes. I didn’t even wait for her questions. I told her that I’d just come back from a night out and that I was sorry for not coming back. She sighed and just told me I was lucky my dad wasn’t home.

I was glad she didn’t ask for an explanation because I didn’t want to start explaining how I had just come from dealing with a case of Fundi induced psychosis. I crawled to my room and texted my friend that I had got home safe before promptly falling asleep.

I woke up at noon and called my friend to check if he had fully regained his sanity or if I needed to go down to that blacked out duka and demand that Fundi give me an antidote to the shit he sold us. He picked up on the first ring. I never thought I’d be so happy to hear a man say my name.

He proceeded to explain that in his intoxication, he had confused me for the last woman he’d had in his room. That’s the woman whose name he had called me. He’d been sleeping with a nurse. A nurse who had been complaining about not being paid and her strict superiors. So he wasn’t going insane, he was just confused and concerned about his hookup’s unpaid wages.

I could lie and say that this was the last time I ever indulged in Fundi’s flower. But if I wanted to write lies, I would hop on Twitter instead. Fundi and that shitty pub were the backbone of most of the stories we’d laugh about. Stories we’d laugh about until our friendship eventually dissolved.

All this to say that I am severely physically uncomfortable. Yet in spite of all this, I am so fucking happy.

Unfortunately for my mother and everyone else involved, I stand on everything I say these days and did exactly what I said I’d do. She said relatives would be coming over and I told her I’d leave if they did. I heard the eardrum-shattering screech of my baby cousins cry all the way from the gate upon returning from training.

So now I’m sat in a Creamy Inn drinking the worst latte I’ve ever had, with my phone on do not disturb and my laptop open to the web version of Substack.

Last year I sat down and asked myself why I still felt crossed despite setting what I thought were boundaries with the people in my life. A thorough introspection revealed that my boundaries were actually just suggestions because I never followed them up with consequence in the event that they were violated. I’d tell people not to do something around or to me and explain why I didn’t like it. Too many people would nod in understanding and say they wouldn’t do the thing, then turn around and do exactly that.

Instead of following up with a consequence or sanction, I would act like a Sunday school teacher and smile while reminding them not to do it again. This vicious cycle would repeat itself and wear me down with every rotation.

The perfect example of this is when I politely asked my smoker friend not to smoke around me. A request I made because cigarette smoke, at the time, made me feel sick and I felt like the smell clung to my hair and clothes. He agreed to my humble request and understood the rationale behind it.

However, every time we’d hang out, he’d wait about an hour or so before inconspicuously producing a lighter and a single cigarette from his pocket. He would time my laughter because we had the kind of connection and conversation that made me laugh with my whole body whenever he’d crack a joke. He’d then light one so quickly that it made me wonder if smokers’ hands move faster than the speed of light.

The whole motion was so fast that it felt like a disrespectful magic trick. I’d remind him that he agreed not to smoke around me and he’d fake some remorse and say that he didn’t want to waste it, so he’d just smoke the one that he’d already lit and remember not to do it again. I’d choke out some words of forgiveness between clouds of smoke because on top of smoking, he lacked the etiquette and skill to not blow the smoke in my direction.

Watching each cigarette burn down to its butt felt like watching our relationship slowly reduce to ash. He did this about four times before I finally caught on, and that realization was the beginning of the decline of our friendship. The smoking thing opened my eyes to so many other boundaries that he would repeatedly cross and I couldn’t shake how disrespected I felt.

For so long, I’d felt a growing resentment towards him but couldn’t put my finger on why. This eye opener and the eventual expiration of our relationship is what prompted the introspection that led me to realize that my boundaries weren’t actually boundaries. Let me repeat this for everyone reading this: a boundary without consequence upon violation is just a suggestion!

Fast forward to today and I run a strict regime. Sanctions and penalties are swift and harsh over here upon any violation of an established boundary. Second chances are a foreign concept these days. This policy extends to my family too, and my mum is currently struggling the most with it.

Over the years, she’s gotten so used to repeatedly crossing me and apologizing her way out of it, and she’d get away with it because she’s my mummy. But even my mummy can’t be spared from the resentment that festers in me when I feel disrespected by someone who claims to love me. It’s a hard lesson but one that must be learned regardless, and that’s why I’m now sat in a stuffy Creamy Inn while she and the rest of the family are at home hosting guests.

Last night my mum mentioned that my aunt, uncle, and cousin are coming over for brunch despite the fact that they were here just last weekend and left a mess in their wake. My sister and I made our discontent known because our tolerance for relatives has long expired since our uncle is still occupying the guest room despite saying that he’d be gone by last Saturday.

My dad, sister, and I hate sharing space. We’re all very introverted and only truly enjoy each other’s company and even then, we still each require intermissions spent in solitude. So having company over is a nightmare for the three of us.

Despite knowing this, my mum still repeatedly opens the door to relatives who bring over their pissy screaming babies and stay to eat and drink until 1am. It’s important to note that once the pissing, eating, and drinking finally conclude, it’s my sister and I who have to either stay up late or get up early to clean up the hurricane of a mess that’s left behind, often when we have classes and training the very next morning.

Washing a mountain of dishes to the ambient noise of my uncles snoring has done irreparable damage to my blood pressure this year. You don’t know true rage until you’re waiting for water to boil at 2am so that you can go to war with the grease and fat coating what feels like every single plate in the house.

We honestly wouldn’t complain if this was happening once a month, but this bad behavior has extended to every fucking weekend. This behavior drives me insane for a number of reasons. I’ve already talked about the fact that having relatives over forces me to perform, but another reason I hate having company over is because I feel like these people abuse my mum’s inability to say no.

My mum practically has a degree in people pleasing and has refused to address or even acknowledge it, especially when it comes to her letting our relatives walk all over her. She’s literally raised other people’s kids because of this, but that’s a story for another essay. One that I will hopefully embark on today if my bubbling bowels allow me to.

Last night, my auntie quite literally declared to my mum that they were coming over. She didn’t ask. She didn’t even open it to dialogue. She simply said that they were coming over, then stopped responding to texts and phone calls, then appeared at the gate today at noon.

I was more than prepared for this eventuality because this script has been rinsed and repeated so many times that I can predict the exact minute my mum’s phone will ring, signaling a call from my auntie to go open the gate. I spent a few minutes before leaving for training packing all the things I’d need to run away to a cafe or library for the rest of the day, which ended up only being my laptop, chargers, and headphones.

I couldn’t even focus on the sets and drills we did because my head was pounding, enraged by having to plan escapes from the place I call home because of my relatives’ disrespect and my mum’s inability to say no and stand on it.

As soon as we got back from the pool and I heard my cousins crying, the vein near my temple popped out and I took the kind of heaving breath that prompts my sister to tell me to relax. Walking into the house and seeing my auntie, uncle, and their naked baby shamelessly eating the watermelon that I had marked as a snack almost drove me to insanity, but I composed myself with the reminder that I was leaving within the next five minutes.

Seeing that my uncle had also brought along a man I’ve never even seen before felt like the biggest “fuck you” to have ever been delivered. Passing standard greetings to these people who now looked like bloodsucking leeches to me was a task that felt like trudging through wet cement.

They asked how training was and I gritted my teeth through a brief conversation about the pool’s location and if they had a baby pool that could accommodate their naked, screeching little shit. I escaped the conversation by saying that I needed to quickly dash to the supermarket to pick something: phase one of my carefully crafted escape plan.

My mum interrupted phase two while she caught me locking my bedroom and topping up on lotion, things I’d never do just to run to the Naivas 300m away from home. I explained that I wasn’t staying and would be back when those things downstairs left, regardless of however late in the day that might end up being.

She instantly began negotiating with me, saying that they had promised to only stay for an hour, that she wouldn’t let me wash the dishes, and that she’d even pay me to stay. All her efforts were in vain as I’d already made up my mind and had already packed my shit.

She asked me how she would even begin to explain my absence to the guests and I told her she could tell them anything, from me going to a neonatal appointment with my ex-convict boyfriend to telling them that I had spontaneously died. I didn’t care. I was leaving.

The pleading and apologizing continued until my sister joined us upstairs and she finally conceded because she didn’t want to expose my sister to the tirade that would have unfolded if she persisted. She offered to drive me to wherever I was going to seek asylum since she was leaving the house anyway.

I asked her why she was leaving the company that she herself had let into the house and she said that she wasn’t leaving but was instead stepping out to buy nyama choma ingredients and materials for later in the evening. Dear reader, it was at this point that the short fuse I had been nursing finally exploded.

I revoke what I said about the random man in the living room being the biggest “fuck you”. Making nyama choma for the parasites waiting downstairs was a massive middle finger to the face. I sighed, gave my sister the key to my room, grabbed my shit, and just walked out.

Any other reaction would have resulted in an argument filled with words that wouldn’t have been appreciated as additions to my cousin’s vocabulary as he’s currently in the parrot stage of infancy. I blew right by the melon eating leeches in the living room and only stopped to tie my shoes and tell my dad that I was stepping out.

The only reason I informed my dad of my departure was because he reported me to the police the last time I disappeared, and no amount of rage could make me forget that experience and the precedent it set, a story that I can’t wait to share on here.

I’d left in such a tsunami of rage that I hadn’t even stopped to calculate my next move. I didn’t know where I was going or how I was going to get there. I just knew I was mad at my mum.

I was mad because she’d straight up lied to my face about them only staying for an hour in an attempt to make me fold on my boundaries. I was mad because she was now going to spend money on grilling meat for people who wouldn’t even toast a slice of bread for her. I was mad because she saw no fault in any of this.

The rage simmered a little after I’d walked out of the estate and was faced with the realization that I was broke and needed somewhere to sit until nightfall. I considered going to my favorite cafe, but my empty pocket pinched me to remind me that I didn’t have the assets for that.

I thought of going to the school library but didn’t know if they even opened on Saturdays and remembered that I wouldn’t even be let through the gate because I was dressed for the gym. In what felt like a lightbulb moment, I remembered the Creamy Inn near home where my sister and I would partake in the sin of gluttony every time I got paid.

I also remembered that they had free WiFi and a menu that could accommodate a broke uni student if said uni student called their dad for money and he complied. My dad did indeed comply and I’ve now been sat in the corner booth of this ice cream shop for the past three hours, nursing the same watered down latte while I alternate between writing this and reading the judgements prescribed by my Civil Procedure lecturer.

My voluminous ass has grown sore from how long I’ve been sat down here and the sun has long set, but I’m grateful for this time. In these hours, I’ve been able to calm myself down, rehearse the argument I’m going to have with my mum upon my arrival, and get in some quality reading and writing time.

I’ve had so much time to just sit, ponder, and people watch. I’ve discovered new things about myself and rediscovered elements that had been buried by my crowded schedule. One interesting realization I came to was that one of the reasons I stopped writing in the first place was because I was in an environment that was forcing me to write about inorganic matter.

I wanted to tell stories and write poems but was at a point in my life where that energy was better spent writing about how Sigmund Freud’s obsession with sex explains the dynamics of personality development. I did IB in high school and anyone who’s suffered at the hands of the International Baccalaureate will tell you how all consuming it is.

Between doing practicals for the sciences, conducting studies for psychology, writing millions of essays for literature, and crying my soul out in math, I simply didn’t have the time or energy to do what I’m doing now. And when I did have the time to engage in personal writing, there was this invisible pressure to write about things of actual external importance.

There was an unidentified voice that convinced me that I should only write think pieces. This felt just as inorganic as manufacturing the hundreds of prompted essays that I wrote in those two years. It’s no wonder that I began to associate writing with labor and began to loathe it.

I’m so thankful that I’ve gotten to a point where writing is not just enjoyable again but is now therapeutic.

Anyways, I’ve once again digressed.

I’ve decided that there’s nothing I can do about my mum opening both the literal and figurative door of this house to leeches. But I’ve grown enough to know that time spent thinking about what you can’t do is time better spent thinking about what you can do.

And the only thing I can do in this situation is to continue to stand on business for the sake of my own peace and in hopes that my mum will one day realize what she’s trading for the entertainment of a few leeches. Actually scratch that, I’m giving her too much grace here. She realizes exactly what she’s trading and made the decision that it was still worth trading.

I’ll establish a tradition where guests enter right as I’m leaving, and we don’t cross paths again until I’m returning as they’re departing. It’s also worth mentioning that I won’t wash a single dish or even glance at the mop and its bucket when it’s time to clean up the mess that no one saw coming while they were six beers deep.

Despite how “un-African” this is of me, I will make it known that that’s not my cross to carry, mahn.

I’d just come from a long day that started with an 8 a.m. class (that bounced after I’d already gotten dressed) and ended with a 5 p.m. training session. Business as usual, except I hadn’t slept the night before and had forgone breakfast and lunch because two rats were having a boxing match in my stomach. I was quite literally sick and tired all day.

The class dragged on for what felt like hours, and I couldn’t focus on any of the statutes being mentioned because my bowels were punishing me for eating from the shawarma spot that I swore I’d cut off after they got several food poisoning complaints. Training wasn’t any better because anyone with a brain will tell you that swimming on an ill and empty stomach with only two hours of sleep is a recipe for disaster. My check engine light came on after the first 500 meters, but I ignored it because there were new additions to the team and I couldn’t let them think I was the weakest link. Every muscle in my body is sore now. Hadi eyebrows zinauma. But at least I asserted my dominance and didn’t drown.

To call it feral would be to understate the manic state in which I raided the kitchen when I got home. Usually, I would have the patience to think about protein intake and go about the ritual of boiling two of the six eggs I eat on most days. However, there was nothing usual about the day I had just endured. The rats that had previously been wrestling in my stomach had put their differences aside and were now staging a protest against forced starvation.

I was searching for sustenance just as desperately as your hopeless friend searches for reasons not to leave that cheating bastard. Unfortunately for me, I live in an “ingredient household,” where stocking snacks is a sin second only to homicide. My mother’s idea of a snack is a quarter-inch cube of cheese paired with a single raisin. It’s this knowledge that led me to have an emergency packet of Indomie stashed in the darkest crevice of the kitchen for situations as dire as this one. I don’t think anyone would be reading this if my gluttonous beast of a little sister had gotten to that packet before me. Said gluttonous beast would have had to log into this account to announce that I had succumbed to acute starvation.

The water couldn’t boil fast enough, and the strength needed to tear open the packet of seasoning was fleeting, but I eventually ended up with a bowl of noodles. The first bite of those aflatoxins and first-world pesticides tasted better than an orgasm. A tear almost trickled down my cheek as I couldn’t believe that such a blessing retails at only 45 Kenya shillings.

Now that you have some context, you can imagine how quickly my blood turned to venom when this man, who should have left for Kakamega two days ago, opened his mouth to say Indomie causes cancer. I’m the kind of person who gets irritable when hungry, but irritated doesn’t even begin to explain the rage that coursed through my veins when the man who smokes a pack a day chimed in with his expert opinion on cancer and its causes.

Every transgression he had committed rose to the forefront of my memory the second he completed that sentence. I was suddenly inexplicably angry over the fact that the guest room, which should have long been vacated, still stank of tobacco and the sweat of someone who was hard at work doing cancer research and definitely not just sleeping till noon then watching the news at an obnoxiously high volume. I was suddenly ready to go to war over the leftover chicken that he had reduced to a pile of bones. Leftovers, mind you, that are typically reserved for me and my sister as an unspoken rule because we don’t really like red meat.

That one utterance was enough to erase all the laughing we’d done over the weekend and instead mark him as an enemy. Hearing that anti-Indomie propaganda in my ravenous state was enough to remind me why I don’t like relatives and how sinners judge other sinners for sinning differently.

I don’t like having my relatives over for more than a couple of hours at a time because I don’t like performing, especially not in my home, where I routinely walk around both figuratively and literally half naked. I hate adorning a mask that looks nothing like me, and that’s exactly what having company over forces me to do.

A huge part of 2025 for me was spent on ceasing any ongoing performances. I’m finally at a point where being anything other than myself feels just as inorganic as it was intended to feel. Prior to this point, I didn’t even know myself because I was busy playing into whichever role I thought was most palatable to people.

I no longer choke back shots in the name of liquid confidence. I don’t laugh off misogynistic “jokes” anymore and instead adopt a disgusted scowl followed by an interrogation on why they thought it was funny in the first place. I even abandoned using “my mum said no” as a cop-out and instead just flat out say that I don’t want to go because I don’t like the vibe I’m sensing. And I sure as shit don’t fake it anymore (I could write a whole article about this one, but people get so weird when you write about sex). These are but a few examples to illustrate how done I am with acting.

Having company over forces me back into a cocoon that took so much time and effort to shed, and I fucking hate it. Now I have to bite my tongue when my uncle’s comments while watching the news make me wonder why we allow certain people to vote. I have to pretend I don’t talk to my dad like we’re homies rather than father and daughter. I have to play the role of a productive member of society on a Saturday when I’d want nothing more than to wake up at 2 p.m. and spend the remainder of the day scrolling on Twitter and ingesting half the fridge.

I quite literally have to adorn a costume because, on any other day, I’d be walking around in microscopic shorts or half a shirt. But the presence of aunties and uncles introduces an unspoken expectation that I go put on the only pair of sweatpants I own and smile like my legs aren’t begging to be released.

As for sinners and judgement… weuh.

How are you going to tell me these noodles will give me cancer when you don’t give the nicotine stain between your fingers time to fade?

I’m not even saying this to sound morally superior. This is an admission that we all have our vices. Some people indulge in glucose ya mapua, others smoke like an old chimney, and I’ve been friends with people whose coping mechanism demands that they change their bedsheets after every time they “destress.” I’m just eating noodles, mahn.

The way he pointed out the cancer thing made me think back to one of the biggest reasons I couldn’t get behind religion, specifically Christianity. A lot of Christians pick the sins that they’re comfortable committing, then judge those who commit the ones that fall outside of that selection. My short stint as a Sunday school attendee taught me that all sins are equal, but kwa ground there’s clearly a hierarchy, and it’s unfortunately shaped by shame, traditional gender roles, and self-righteousness.

People are too quick to forgive the belligerent drunk, the adulterous, and the deceitful swine we often vote into office, but that same grace is never accorded to that gay boy already struggling with crippling religious guilt and shame. The wife beater on Twitter arguing with the LGBTQ activist and citing the Bible is the same as my uncle telling me my noodles will give me cancer right before he hacks out that all-too-familiar smoker’s cough. Maybe an update dropped saying that gay hell is hotter and indomie cancer is worse than money launderer hell and cigarette cancer. Who knows..

Anyways, I’ve digressed so much. My point is… tupunguze advice, please. Kila panya na sumu yake, or whatever the hell the wahengas would have come up with in the face of such hypocrisy.

I really should have prefaced this, but I love my uncle to pieces, fr. He just so happened to provoke me to anger on this terrible Monday evening.

You know the one.

The one where grief is like a pin in your pocket.

Most days, you go about your day not even remembering it’s there until you randomly sit on it

and the pain sears through your body all over again,

the sorrow just as fresh as when you first held their obituary in your trembling hands.

Sadly, the analogy doesn’t work when you’re grieving someone who’s still alive.

What should be a tiny pin prick turns into the of a slash of a scythe

when you hear your song on the radio

and it’s not accompanied by their horrible singing voice chasing the beat,

when your neck snaps at the scent of their cologne in a crowd; drawn like a hunting dog at the scent of prey,

when your mum asks how they’re doing and the lump in your throat turns into millions of pins, all with their pricks turned out because you no longer have the privilege of knowing.

When grieving someone who’s still alive

what should be a pin prick, a subtle reminder of what once was,

turns into the stab of a steel blade.

The wound being the realization that their heart still beats, just not for you as yours once did for them.

They still go to our spots.

They still listen to our oldies playlist.

They still rave about the depth of their culture.

Just not with you

The wound made even deeper by the realization

that your perfume has long faded from their jackets, your favorite color from their memory and your smile from their vision

Your name, once like birdsong to my ears is now a pin and each utterance of it a prick.

Grieving someone in the grave grants you the peace of knowing that they’re living on in eternal paradise.

Grieving someone who’s still alive devours you from the inside out because you must live on knowing that their idea of paradise is living without you.

My sister and I once spent two long months in Meru with our talkative grandfather, and he’d mention all his sons at some point (whether in good light or bad) but never once uttered Uncle X’s name. The only time my dad mentioned Uncle X was when he made a joke about how me and him would get along because we both write and like to argue. He took a long sip of water after he cracked that joke and refused to elaborate when I pressed him for an explanation.

Today, I was getting live reports from the funeral planning when I found out what egregious act Uncle X committed that got him exiled. He had apparently gotten into a spat with one of the brothers over some funeral logistics and was asked how he even dared to show his face after the book he wrote.

I asked the person who was narrating the encounter to me what book was being talked about, and she immediately looked like she had made a mistake by mentioning it. This was the first I’d ever heard of Uncle X’s book, so my first assumption was that he had written a book and failed to give credit where credit was due, or something trivial like that, since my dad and his brothers seem to go to war over the smallest things. The truth was far more sinister.

My narrator caved and told me that years ago, Uncle X had written a book about my grandfather and how he raised him and his brothers. I asked for the title of the book and immediately searched it up, eager to read about my grandfather’s heroic exploits, ambitious business endeavors, and the parenting that raised my brilliant and loving father.

So you can imagine my horror when the Amazon book overview described it as a tale of “parental brutality, autocracy, and neglect.” To see the man I revered so highly described as a “patriarchal autocrat” drew the contents of my stomach to my mouth. The image of the hero I thought my grandfather was collided with the reality I was reading in the form of Uncle X’s confessional.

As I read the overview and searched desperately for the full book, my narrator went on to indirectly admit that my grandfather had been abusive by sliding in comments about him “having a strained relationship with some of his kids” and “his first marriage being a difficult one.” As I dug deeper, I was exposed to the full extent of my grandfather’s abuse and, for a second, couldn’t believe what I was reading. I couldn’t believe that the fragile old man I had in mind had once brutalized his wife and subjected his sons to what I can only describe as torture. The sweat I had worked up ran cold when I read that my uncle had once had to draw a knife against my grandfather during one of his frequent fits of unbridled rage.

I finished reading the little that I could find about the book and asked if this was fiction. If what he wrote was truth. And if truth, was it inflated? My gaze couldn’t be met when it was admitted that everything my uncle wrote was truth and not embellished for the reading experience. Following this admission, she immediately jumped to say that Uncle X had no right to air the family’s dirty laundry, as such practices are just “cultural.” The rage that washed over me in that moment was enough to power a small village for fourteen days.

“We deal with things internally, as a family. That’s the African way.”

To whom was my uncle to run to if, instead of open arms and listening ears, he was met with the lashes of a whip and voices that would coldly say that this is just how things are done?

“He should have just silently left.”

How could he even begin to plan his escape from this torture if he was conditioned to think that doing so would violate the moral code set by his ancestors?

“He had no right to air the family’s dirty laundry.”

If it’s so widely accepted and is as normal as you claim, then why are you so upset at him sharing the norms that you so fiercely protect and uphold? Surely you’re not ashamed of what you claim is the manifestation of the thing you’re calling culture?

To say that I’m ashamed would distract from the sympathy I feel for my uncle, forsaken for doing what no one else had the courage to do.

Part of me wishes that the knowledge of my grandfather’s tyranny had been buried with him. The grown part of me appreciates that this unraveling has brought to light a much darker problem within the culture I call mine. Why do we so viciously defend abuse under the guise of culture and condemn those who speak out against it? To call such cowardice culture is an insult to the beautiful tapestry that is hundreds of years of tradition passed down through generations.

Culture is me being one of hundreds of Mukwanjerus. Culture is the respect we have for the Njuri Ncheke and their authority. Culture is the burning smell that rises from the bottom of the blackened githeri sufuria. Culture’s name mustn’t be sullied by using it to defend barbarism.

The irony is not lost on me that in writing and posting this to Substack, I’m doing exactly what got my uncle excommunicated and what my father considers to be one of the greatest betrayals his family suffered. Even more comedic is the fact that my debut post on here was written out of reverence for the man who I now know terrorized an entire household.

The first post I ever made on here was about speaking out and resilience and was dedicated to my grandfather. This post retains that theme but is now dedicated to the uncle whose name was treated like a curse. To the man who had the courage to break the chains that were forged in the name of culture.

My grandfather is being buried next week. As per strict tradition, two grandchildren are obligated to speak at the funeral. The eldest grandson and granddaughter must prepare a speech in honor of our patriarch. Despite being the eldest granddaughter, I will not be speaking. My silence will commemorate that which he forced onto my father, uncles, and late grandmother. I yielded my slot to any cousin who’d want it.

The oldest grandson would not be speaking either had I not forsaken my slot—not out of disdain but rather out of imposed silence. It was ruled by the elders that his English isn’t good enough to address the mourners. Dear reader, I’ll ask you what I want to ask the elders: in what language does grief speak?

They instead opted to have our established wakili cousin speak on both of our behalves. The rightful eldest grandson cared for my grandfather during the worst parts of his decline, yet was being muzzled over an accent—an accent that all those elders have but mask with learned intonation and big words from the Oxford dictionary. It’s almost comical how that which is an actual token of our culture is quickly painted over for external validation. Even funnier is how the paint is almost always white.

Fortunately enough, the eldest granddaughter has refused to speak, so there’s a vacancy—because having only one grandchild speak will invite more whispers than a tribute laden with a Meru accent. And if there’s anything that this family has taught me, it’s that village whispers will always be louder than the cries of the abused.

My grandfather’s death opened my eyes to older generations’ tendency to conflate culture with going to harmful lengths to protect an identity and has complicated my grieving process in ways I don’t know how to articulate. What I do know, however, is that I must invite Uncle X over for a cup of coffee and ask him to bring me a signed copy of Flight from Fate.

I had a great time in high school. Only because I was ignorant to the hurt I subjected myself to and let others inflict upon me. Those years were the definition of “ignorance is bliss.” That last year in particular was such a roller coaster of negative emotions, but the rose-colored glasses only let me see the roller coaster bit, so I had a lot of fun despite my soul actively rotting. The reality is that I can only see things clearly now because I’m not shitfaced drunk or high out of my mind, but the former sounded way more poetic. My goodness, I endured so much shit in high school, and so did my vital organs.

When I say I was a whole different person back then, I truly mean that shit. If anyone I graduated with and haven’t hung out with since then claims to know me and attempts to speak on me, I will sue for defamation. Yet, while I despise the loser that I used to be, I’m still fiercely defensive of her and won’t let anyone speak ill about that version of myself. No one knows what she was actually going through.

Funnily enough, my favorite high school memory is from the day I cried so hard that my teacher offered to call the deputy head to sign me a pass to go home. It was some time in the first half of my last two years. My then psychology teacher found me skipping a school event in her room and, instead of telling me to rejoin the rest of the students, asked me if we could have a chat.

Something about the tone in her voice and the fact that I was her top student told me that it wasn’t about grades.

She’s a very blunt woman, so her opening statement was that she’d noticed a drastic change in my character and didn’t like it. I couldn’t even take a sip of air, let alone defend myself, before she went on to say, “That boy you’re hanging out with is a cancer.” That’s a direct quote. Her stone-cold tone cemented that prophecy deep into my memory and made it so that I didn’t delude myself into thinking that she was talking about his star sign instead of warning that our joint destruction was written in the stars.

When she invited me to chat, I assumed it would be a dialogue, but this woman went on to dictate all the disturbing trends she’d observed in my behavior in great detail until the bell rang, signaling that 15 good minutes had passed. The only form of input I gave in those minutes were the confirmatory nods I would give when she’d ask questions that she already knew the answers to.

“You’ve been skipping literature, haven’t you? But you love literature?”

“You left school with him yesterday, didn’t you?”

“You’ve skipped three days of school this week. Am I right or am I wrong?”

Typically, an interaction like this would have made me feel like a criminal having their charges read and prompted me to defend myself like a wild animal with its back up against a wall. But instead of bearing fangs and growling, tears trickled because I was so grateful that someone had noticed my descent into madness and cared enough to ask. I wasn’t devolving into an unrecognizable hooligan because I wanted attention, but there was some comfort in knowing that someone saw it and recognized that this wasn’t the real me.

When she finally asked me what was going on with me, the floodgates opened and I cried so hard that all that could escape my lips were bursts of unintelligible babbling punctuated by gasps for air. I remember feeling like my throat was closing and panicking, thinking that this undressing had triggered my childhood asthma. It took me half a packet of pocket tissues and several minutes of breathing exercises to compose myself and convince her not to call the nurse or deputy head to send me home on grounds of nervous breakdown. The last thing I wanted was to draw even more staff attention to the fact that I was losing my shit.

I collected myself after what felt like an eternity and told her that I simply didn’t know what was going on. She asked investigative questions that led nowhere because I’d miraculously transformed from a fountain of tears and mucus to a broken record that was stuck replaying the phrase “I don’t know.” I wasn’t trying to be secretive or stubborn; there was simply so much going on that I didn’t know how or where to start.

I think she understood this, and we sat in silence for a minute before she assured me that I could go to her when I was finally able to talk about it. One of my classmates skipped up the stairs to pick his bag and tell her that Baringo (blue team, aka worst team) had won the school event that we’d skipped. He raved on about their win for a minute before noticing the pile of tissues on my desk and the red, puffy eyes that I was trying so desperately to hide.

As one of the self-appointed “big brothers” of our cohort, he asked if I was okay, and any crybaby will tell you that that’s the one thing you don’t ask someone who’s just finished crying because you’ll reopen the floodgates. The tears trickled once more and I muttered some bullshit about being stressed over failing math, because an inability to solve equations is easier to explain than how I went from Jekyll to Hyde in a matter of months and was now unable to explain why.

I say this is my favorite memory because it was a reminder that someone still cared about me despite me not even caring about myself. That evening with my psychology teacher opened my eyes to my own self-destruction, but I shut them back closed when I walked down the stairs leading out of her classroom and met the boy she had foreshadowed against. The cathartic crying I’d done minutes before was soon forgotten in a night of what I can only describe as alcohol-fuelled debauchery. The sobbing I’d done earlier in the day wasn’t the only purgative experience I had that day because the shots came back up just as fast as they’d gone down.

I could go on and on about the high school experiences that make me want to rip out my hair when I look back on them, but that would take too many paragraphs. I’ll definitely detail them all the day I fully confront my fear of the characters involved finding my posts and doing something bad. I couldn’t tell you what that something bad is, and that should tell you that this fear is entirely irrational. I have free will, plus they can’t do shit to me.

When I finally decide to start writing my high school short stories (horror stories), I’ll start with what really happened the day I woke up in an unknown neighborhood with a phone full of hundreds of missed calls and texts telling me that my dad had reported me as a missing person. Like and subscribe for that tale. ;)

I can’t be too upset about how I spent my high school days because all the bullshit I endured made it so that I can truly appreciate the post–high school life that I built for myself. Now, I wouldn’t tolerate even an ounce of the bullshit I took back then. I finally love and respect myself enough to say no and stand on it, and I can’t tell you how much joy and peace this has brought me.

I’m also grateful because the experience gave me the ability to recognize when someone is self-destructing and steer clear instead of playing savior. Seventy percent of the misfortune I endured was because I was hanging out with people who were self-destructing or just hated themselves, and both of those conditions are highly contagious. My advice to all my small sisters on here is to realize you don’t have blue overalls and a toolbox and are therefore not Bob the Builder, so stop trying to fix people because you will demolish yourself in the process.

Uuuwwwiiii ,the way I’m praying that no one outside my list of approved former classmates finds this 🤣

It’s a shame that you eventually grew to be just as cold as the aforementioned deaths.

No — calling you cold would understate it. Like a dagger forged from ice, you pierced my heart, yet melted at the warm touch of genuine love.

I let you rip my heart out because it beat for you anyway.

Each beat of my heart was in hopes that yours would echo back.

It never did.

What I did hear, however — the rhythm that kept me hooked — was my own pulse reverberating through the empty cavern we both pretended was still the love story we wrote at nineteen.

The haunting rhythm of my own heartbeat became the soundtrack to my delusion and your disenchantment — disillusionment that soon morphed into amusement that I can’t even blame you for.

Anyone would be entertained — fascinated, even — if they saw the lamb dance for the butcher.

Despite this, I can’t say that I regret having loved you.

Love is not a finite resource.

Hell, it’s not a resource at all, since if genuine it cannot be quantified.

And mine was real — raw, uncut, and unfiltered.

All this to say that I wasted no love on you. What I had for you can never be wasted.

As for the hurt: pain is the best teacher.

Mtoto akilia wembe mpee, and this razor cut me back down to the child that would pull her thumb from her mouth to ask why the other kids would only stay over if she had all her toys out.

My only regret in all this was having witnesses to this descent into insanity.

People had to watch their friend, sister, and harshest critic devolve into this mad woman who wore scrapes on her knees, with knuckles brandishing bruises from pummeling the earth and pleading with the painted stop sign to turn green.

All these words dedicated to you, and you still left.

Left me with a jacket I can’t find the strength to discard but will never wear — and in it, a pack of Dunhill double switches that I will never smoke.

The jacket is frayed and still reeks of your cologne. The pack of Dunhills has been crushed out of its rectangular form and only has three deformed cigarettes left.

So typical of you to leave things with subtle yet persistent traces of your ownership.

Part of me hopes that you will one day come take your jacket and cigarettes so that I can finally be rid of you.

The part of me that you liked so much, however, hopes that I will be in that jacket when you take it away.

I’m going to set these pages alight when this notebook inevitably grows full of tears turned art.

In that blaze, I will throw in one of the three cigarettes and let the smells of tobacco and menthol dance in the night air just as we once did.

The second I will light but not smoke — let the cigarette burn down to the butt and singe my fingers to commemorate the last pain you will ever cause me.

The third will remain tucked in the pocket of your jacket for when the urge that provoked me to write this inevitably strikes again.

Art by @sho_nobi on X

My father’s mother died of throat cancer.

Every house within a 20km radius of my ancestral home has at least one grave stained with the name of a cancer patient.

Every pack my uncles smoke comes with a cancer warning printed on the back when that label should instead be emblazoned on the State House gates.

Cancer is formally defined as a disease in which abnormal cells divide uncontrollably and destroy body tissue. The people of Meru county define a cancer as unchecked power that festers uncontrollably and destroys everything but itself.

We reminisce and speak fondly about maziwa za nyayo but solemn speak about the tumor filled esophagus’s of those who could not relish in the gift that was free dairy. He’s always been loudly praised for birthing the 8-4-4 system but never condemned for silently killing counties 008 to 014.

Ask a stranger what Meru is known for and he’ll tell you about miraa, tea and coffee. Ask my grandfather and he’ll tell you about the men with skin like that of swine, who turned his home into a valley of death.

If you ask google why Meru county has the highest number of cancer cases AI Overview will prattle on about pesticides and use big words like “aflatoxins”. Google will show you pictures of marked graves and pie charts but won’t show you the picture of the man who let foreign companies dump toxic waste into our soil and waters then refuse to build hospitals for the dying.

Shallow is the mind of the man who says “politics aren’t that deep”.

What word other than “deep” can one use to describe something that penetrates not just every facet of your life but every cell in your body?

My grandfather has lived to 102 years of age.

When asked about his wife, he tells people that she got sick because she drank her tea too hot despite his caution. When asked about his brother he says he loved miraa more than life itself.

He answers like this because with his youth went the vigor he used to speak about Moi, the Italians and River Kathita. Age robbed him of the energy needed to speak about how greed turned a river that symbolized life and renewal into an ebbing flow of death.

So I write.

Not to evoke pity.

Not to blow whistles that have long grown tired.

Not even to shed light on graves cast into darkness.

I write because my Babu is tired but his story doesn’t deserve to grow old. The injustice that his people suffered will never be buried with his wife for so as long as I can still hold a pen and open my mouth to speak.