I woke up early today as usual. A quick morning routine to prime the body: a bit of running, a bit of jumping, some frog jump squats. Standard routine bbefore showering and dressing up to step into the world and face another workday.

The thing about routine, though, is that muscle memory can betray you. As soon as I stepped past my gate, I briefly forgot that the terrain outside my house is no longer flat land. It’s currently a construction zone, effectively a mini-cliff, off which I have to leap down like a contestant on Ninja Warrior just to reach the road. Bea chuckles daily and hopes I fall so she can laugh lightly and enjoy her day.

To make matters more interesting, it had drizzled overnight.

I almost wore my Puma ballet speed catflats this morning. Almost. Instead, guided by some ancient tactical wisdom, I laced up my black brogue boots. I have this core belief that Irish soles are engineered to handle whatever sticky, swampy situation you find yourself on—because, well, it’s an island. It proved to be the best decision I’ve made all week. So far.

My original plan was to ride a boda boda all the way to work, but lately, I’ve been trying to treat my body with a little more grace. I’m leaning into a slower-paced life, which means opting for the local taxi for the main leg of the commute. But first, I had to get to the taxi stage. Enter: the morning bike ride.

We didn’t even make it 50 meters before the heavy, wet mud tried to claim us.

The bike lost balance, but we didn’t go down. Why? Because I am built like a builder. Michelle Ivy the Builder. Michelle the Mechanic. Exactly 30 years, 10 months, and 10 days old—and equipped with long legs, strong knees, and a core forged by morning frog squats. I basically grounded myself and held the bike upright with sheer willpower and quad strength. Well, the bike and the bike rider.

Once the dust (or rather, the slush) settled, I looked at the rider and asked, "Are you okay?"

It’s simple math: he’s the one navigating us through the trenches. If he’s not okay, neither of us is okay. Standard rule for safety, take care of the driver.

He looked back, a bit surprised, and said, "Yeah, I'm good."

We dusted ourselves off and tried again, but about ten metres into this mud-churning saga, reality set in. The mud was just too thick; the tires were slick and heavy.

"Look," I told him, "your tires are weighed down. Go do a roundabout up ahead, clear the wheels, and come find me. I’ll walk."

So there I was, tiptoeing through the mud in my trusty brogues, making ridiculous toot-toot sounds at myself, laughing out loud, and exchanging knowing looks with the locals and other bike riders perched sliding through to drier embankments. It was absurd, sticky, and completely lovely… a spontaneous little moment of shared community in the middle of a morning commute. I love being part of the machine.

As I was walking, I passed another bike parked on the side. Sitting on the back was a little girl, completely splattered in fresh mud. She’d clearly taken a spill, too. My heart ached for her. Every instinct in me wanted to reach out and help wipe the dirt off her face and clothes, but in today’s world, you hesitate. You wonder how parents will perceive it. Is it crossing a boundary? Will it look strange? Not wanting to impose or make anyone uncomfortable, all I could offer was a soft, sincere, "Sorry, sweetie. So sorry."

Eventually, my rider met up with me at a stretch of road that was actually rideable. I hopped back on, made it to the stage, and caught my taxi.

I arrived at the office safe, sound, and carrying half the neighborhood's topsoil on my clothes. It took a good chunk of time to wipe everything down, but sitting here now, I’m just filled with gratitude.

Grateful I made it safely. Grateful for the kindness of strangers on messy mornings. And deeply, profoundly grateful for strong legs at 30 years, 10 months, and 10 days old. A true silly goosed spinster. Or is it old maid now?

Anyway. Happy 30 days and 10 months and 10 days to me. Can't believe I've stayed alive this long.

Nothing in the landscape remembers.
But, I do.

Last year, I watched a crowd kill a man with astonishing speed, the kind that reminds you how thin the veneer of civilisation really is. One accusation became two. Two voices became twelve. Before anyone could ask what had happened, bricks and stones had already become evidence, judge, jury and executioner.

By the time the crowd dispersed, there was almost nothing recognisable left of the man’s face.

But that is not what returns to me most often.

It is a child.

No older than five. He stood among adults who had surrendered themselves to the momentum of the crowd. He bent down, picked up a stone almost too large for his hands, and threw it at a head that had already been broken open.

No one stopped him. No one looked surprised. I stood peering over the fence in shock.

The gesture lasted four seconds. And I have spent many moments trying not to think about it.

The blood remained outside our gate for months. Rain diluted it. Dust covered it. Tyres rolled across it. Eventually people stepped over it without noticing.

I did too.

That frightens me almost as much as the killing itself. Violence does not become less violent because it is repeated. It simply becomes familiar.

Months later, I heard that Sydney Gongodyo had been beaten to death by a mob around Bukoto. He was a great player on a team I support heavily.

I had met him only briefly after a Black Pirates match at Kings Park. My brother and cousin introduced me to some of the players. We exchanged a few words before everyone drifted back into the easy joy that follows a good rugby match. It was an entirely ordinary afternoon, the sort of memory you never expect tragedy to reclaim. To me, he was first a rugby player who had my team’s victory as a responsibility. To others, he was a son, a teammate, a friend. A love. But, in a matter of minutes, he became something else entirely: a suspected thief.

A crowd gathered.

By the time police intervened, the damage had already been done.

Sydney’s death shook the country because we recognised him. His face had appeared on television. His performances had earned admiration across Uganda’s rugby community.

But the uncomfortable truth is that hundreds of Ugandans die in much the same way without ever becoming national stories. Police statistics have repeatedly shown that mob violence accounts for a significant share of the country’s homicides. The names disappear almost as quickly as the blood.

Sydney became a headline. The man outside my gate never did.

That difference has haunted me ever since. It says something uncomfortable about memory. About whose deaths become part of the national story and whose disappear into silence.

After Sydney died, I found myself returning to Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu.

The novel opens with another young man walking through Kampala. Kintu Kamu.

Someone raises an alarm.

A crowd gathers.

Within minutes he is beaten to death by people convinced they are delivering justice. When I first read those pages, I thought they were a brilliant piece of fiction, a dramatic opening to a novel about kingdoms, family and an ancestral curse stretching back centuries. I was wrong.

Kintu is about cultural inheritance.

The novel asks what happens when trauma is never interrupted. When violence is absorbed into ordinary life. When silence becomes tradition and repetition disguises itself as destiny.

The curse is not magic. The curse is repetition. That is what I witnessed outside my gate. Not merely the death of one man. The education of a child.

Nobody handed that little boy a stone. He learned what to do by watching the adults around him. Children inherit gestures long before they understand ideas. They learn how to greet, how to pray, how to mourn, how to laugh. They also learn what fear looks like. What anger sounds like. What violence is permitted.

That afternoon, violence became another continued mother tongue.

We often describe mob justice as an expression of anger. I am no longer convinced anger comes first. I think it begins with fear.

Fear of theft.

Fear that the police will never arrive.

Fear that the courts will never deliver justice.

Fear that if we do nothing today, we will become tomorrow’s victim.

Fear has little patience for due process. It mistakes certainty for truth. Somewhere between those two things, justice quietly disappears.

This pattern is not uniquely Ugandan. Across Africa, newspapers have carried familiar stories: suspected thieves lynched in Nigeria, vigilante killings in South Africa, mobs gathering in Kenya, Ghana and elsewhere before investigations have even begun.

The countries change. The choreography does not. An accusation. A gathering. A body.

It is tempting to dismiss such violence as evidence of uniquely African dysfunction. History refuses that comfort. Europe had its witch trials. The United States has its long history of racial lynchings. Crowds have always possessed a frightening ability to transform ordinary people into participants in extraordinary cruelty.

The question is not whether human beings are capable of collective violence. The question is what prevents it. Every failed investigation leaves behind more than an unsolved crime. It leaves behind another citizen who trusts the law a little less.

Enough of those citizens gather together and eventually they stop calling the police. They become the police. That transformation is fatal.

Because crowds do not investigate. They do not distinguish between suspicion and guilt. They amplify.

After Sydney’s death, I realised something that had unsettled me for months.

I had already witnessed his death. Not his exactly. Many just like it.

The names were different. The mechanics were identical.

Makumbi understood this long before many of us did.

A society is not cursed because terrible things happen.

A society becomes cursed when terrible things stop surprising it.

That is why Kintu has remained so stubbornly relevant. It is not prophetic because it predicts individual tragedies. It is prophetic because it understands the machinery that keeps producing them.

Near the end of the novel, Makumbi gathers the fractured descendants of Kintu Kidda for Okusamira, a communal act of remembrance, confession and reconciliation.

Healing does not begin with punishment. It begins with memory.

That may be the lesson Uganda needs most. We cannot arrest our way out of a culture.

Laws matter. Investigations matter. Convictions matter. But no legal system alone can undo habits rehearsed across generations.

Cultures change when different stories become possible.

When restraint becomes more admirable than revenge. When suspicion is no longer mistaken for certainty. When children watch adults choose compassion instead of spectacle. I still think about that little boy.

He is older now.

Perhaps he remembers nothing about that afternoon.

Or he remembers everything.

I wonder what story he was told afterwards.

Was he told that justice had been done?

Was he told an innocent man had died? Or did the day simply disappear into silence, becoming another lesson taught without words?

The blood outside my gate eventually disappeared. Rain carried some of it away. Time carried away the rest. Today there is nothing remarkable about that stretch of road. Children play there. People laugh. Bodas and passengers argue over fares. Life, as it always does, continues.

Roads do not remember.

Nations rarely do either. Memory survives only because someone insists on carrying it.

That is why I returned to Kintu.

Not because Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi predicted the death of Sydney Gongodyo.

But because she named an inheritance many of us have mistaken for ordinary life. We imagine curses as dramatic things. An ancestral spirit.

A prophecy.

A voice echoing across generations.

Makumbi offers something more unsettling.

A curse is repetition mistaken for tradition. A child who lifts a stone because every adult around him already has. A crowd that mistakes certainty for justice. A nation that remembers its heroes but forgets its anonymous dead. Sydney Gongodyo is gone. The unnamed man outside my gate is gone. Kintu Kamu never existed. Yet all three continue to walk beside us.

Not because ghosts haunt Uganda. But because memory does.

And until we choose to inherit something better, the child will keep picking up the stone and beating what is already dead.

I am beginning to suspect that God created some women for companionship and others for character development.

Unfortunately, I fear I may be in the second category.

The signs are there. I am thirty with the romantic track record of a WiFi signal during rain season: unstable, unavailable, occasionally promising, mostly buffering. Men like me in bursts. In trailers. In limited series. Nobody has renewed me for another season once they know the lore.

It saddens me more than I pretend it does.

When I was younger, I assumed love would happen to me bwcause I am loveable. Inevitably. Annoyingly. With very little effort on my part. I thought one day somebody would simply arrive at my doorstep emotionally available, six foot one, employed, and capable of discussing feelings without looking like they were being interrogated by the CIA.

Instead, I have become a woman with excellent conversation skills and no emergency contact. Well, there is my dad but he's at that fun age where if I rung him with an emergency, I might give him a heart attack.

Sometimes I wonder if I am less lovable than I imagined. Which is a brutal thought because I imagined myself extremely lovable. I grew up on movies where difficult women still got chosen. Loud women. Moody women. Women who smoked indoors and ruined men psychologically. Yet somehow I, who says thank you to bus conductors and makes meals to celebrate my loved ones, remain unmarried. Undated.

Fascinating.

And youth leaves so rudely too. One day you are twenty-two with skin tight as fresh upholstery. The next your knees crack when you stand and your tits begin participating in gravity like active citizens of society. King Solomon once compared breasts to twin gazelles. Mine now feel less gazelle and more exhausted civil servants nearing retirement.

Nobody tells women how frightening it is to age without being witnessed. Or maybe they do and I was left out of the town hall.

Not perceived. Witnessed. Gosh I want to be witnessed.

There is a difference.

I do not mean men looking at you on the street like they are pricing meat parts. I mean somebody knowing your body historically. Somebody saying, “Your laugh has changed.” Somebody remembering your old fashion choices. Somebody noticing you no longer sleep on your left side because of your shoulder pain and heart health.

Sometimes I see couples on Instagram sharing meals and feel an ancient ache move through my spirit.

Sometimes I want somebody to witness the boring parts of my life. Often.

To know how I take tea. (I like my milk as thick as I do my coffee)

To know I drink four cups of coffee daily despite behaving like somebody who should medically not be allowed caffeine. Despite my cardiologists begging.

To pick me from the airport. Take me to the grocery store. Eat meals with me.

To call me by my name loudly. Like see me across a mall parking and shout for me.

To know I cannot sleep unless at least two duvets are pressing me down like I owe them money.

To know I prefer a double decker, and preferablt the bottom bunk because it feels vaguely coffin-like and emotionally secure.

To know I rewatch the same shows not because I enjoy them but because they're my family.

That is the kind of intimacy I crave now. Not fireworks. Administrative tenderness. Like talk to me, listen to me. Know my cycle. Know I hate being touched but love being held by people I love.

Somebody to text “have you eaten?” and actually wait for the answer. And ask what I ate.

But modern dating feels like a group project designed by Satan. Everybody is healing. Everybody is “working on themselves.” Everybody has attachment styles now. Men disappear for three business days and return talking about “mental bandwidth”. Which is fair because who isn't stressed in this bloody bogus economy.

Romance has become deeply unserious. Do not get me started on courtship and "growing into something."

And yet the loneliness is serious. I am lonely. My friends all got married and had babies and now I am the fun aunt.

That is the embarrassing part.

People make singledom look so glamorous online. A woman drinks wine alone in silk pajamas for breakfast (Okay that is lit though). Meanwhile my own solitude often looks like eating bread while I type a new poem at midnight while watching conspiracy videos about why everyone suddenly has incredulous debt..

I am not always thriving. Sometimes I am simply unsupervised.

Still, acceptance has started settling inside me slowly. Like dust. Like Kampala traffic on Jinja road... Unavoidable.

Because my life cannot remain on hold until somebody chooses me.

Perhaps there is still dignity in an unloved woman loving her own life ferociously anyway. And heaven knows, Shelly looooves herself. But all this love has to go somewhere to bloom.

Perhaps there are other kinds of intimacy waiting for me outside romance. Friendship. Art. Faith. Laughter so violent it gives you a headache. The man at the rolex stand who already knows your order. Being known gently by a world that does not necessarily desire you.

Maybe I will end up single forever.

The sentence used to feel like a death sentence. Now it feels more like a weather report. Sad occasionally. Inconvenient often. But survivable.

And if I am alone forever, I hope at least I remain interesting.

I hope I continue becoming the kind of woman who buys herself profiteroles and sweet cheeses without guilt. Who learns how to fix things around the house. Who hosts dinners. Who writes strange poems. Who keeps soft blankets and dramatic opinions.

Who still laughs loudly in public from glee.

Who still believes tenderness matters.

Even if nobody ever calls her “baby” again.

(After Wendy Cope.)

After the walk to the gonja lady,

We stood by the gate,

next to the busy road.

A small grey toyota stopped and parked.

A man and his friend from upcountry.

A sack of fruits in the trunk.

Oranges and something hidden but bigger.

His friend left with his luggage,

and was walked to a black gate

down the lane across from us.

I shamelessly said,

"I wonder if we asked, what he'd do."

You, ever ready to stir a scene, smiled.

Said it could never be you so brave...

and yet you were.

Just for my amusement, you were.

I'd give five of my lives and trade the rest

for another view once Death creeps me away

from this realm where there's you.

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