One of the fondest memories I have from my time in high school was the days when we had functions at school.

You’re probably wondering where I went to school.

Well, I wasn’t fortunate enough to go to a National School.

Actually, let me rephrase that.

I wasn’t unfortunate either. I simply wasn’t bright enough.

So, I ended up in an Extra-County school in Nairobi.

Not Upper Hill.

‘Upper Hill ni Ushago in the CBD’

Someone has to say it

Of course, I have to take a shot at Upper Hill because I have so many friends from there. And Lenana School too. If any of them are reading this, please understand that this is all part of the culture. 😂

I went to the Great High School, locally known as Dagoretti High School.

Ditchez!

We are the original Maroons, by the way.

Forget about Lenana.

We always had beef with those guys. They were academic giants, and we respected that. But deep down, we knew we were sleeping giants. During my time at Dagoretti, we made sure they knew that when it came to extracurricular activities, they were no match for us.

Under the Leadership of our very able Principal

Mr. Peter Orero

Now the Mp for Kibra

And it wasn’t just Lenana.

Upper Hill, Nairobi School, Ofafa Jericho, Highway, Aquinas, Bush, Olympic High, L.A. and the other schools whose names have slowly disappeared from my memory all had their place in the unofficial Dagoretti hierarchy of rivals.

Some rivalries were serious.

Some were completely imaginary.

And some existed simply because someone had decided that we were supposed to hate each other.

But that’s how high school worked.

You could spend four years passionately disliking someone you’d never actually spoken to, only to meet them years later and realize they were actually a decent human being.

Then there was our ‘sister school…’

Precious Blood Riruta.

Oh, Precious Blood.

They never really wanted to be associated with us as a sister school because, according to them, we were academic dwarfs. They also had some affiliation with Lenana, which, in our minds, meant they had developed a little too much aristocracy for their own good.

But that didn’t matter.

We didn’t like them anyway(I’m obviously lying)

We had our own alliances.

State House Girls.

Ruthimitu.

Buruburu Girls.

Nembu Girls.

Kenya High School.

These were our people.

These were the schools we had our little friendships and connections with, and, naturally, the boys took these alliances very seriously.

Looking back, it was hilarious how much importance we attached to school affiliations.

You could meet a girl from Kenya High and suddenly feel like there was some ancient diplomatic relationship between your two schools.

And, as fate would have it, one of those “diplomatic relations” eventually became personal.

My first high-school girlfriend was a kenya High girl.

But I’ll get to that.

The second term was underway and, as you may recall, it was time for the music festivals to kick off. And that year, I was in luck. The regional festivals were going to be held at our prestigious Kenyatta Hall.

For a Form One who had only recently discovered that boarding school came with something very important, no parental supervision-Kenyatta Hall felt enormous.

There would be students from different schools coming in.

Girls.

Beautiful girls.

Girls who had not spent the last three years looking at the same 200 faces every single day.

This was serious business.

At this point, I was still a mere Form One.

A Jongo(One shilling coin), as the Form Fours liked to call us.

And, unfortunately, I had my admission number plastered all over my clothes.

I still remember admission day.

For those who have never experienced Kenyan boarding school, admission day was basically the official beginning of your transformation from a civilian into a government-issued schoolboy.

You got your uniform.

You got your mattress.

You got your locker.

And, most importantly, you got your admission number printed on practically everything you owned.

And when I say everything, I mean everything

The logic was simple:

If it’s numbered, no one can steal it.

A beautiful theory.

A completely useless theory.

I remember my mother standing beside the guy who was printing the admission numbers on our clothes. She was taking the whole process very seriously.

Shirts? Numbered.

Trousers? Numbered.

Towels? Numbered.

Socks? Numbered.

And then, for reasons that still confuse me to this day, she handed the man my brand-new men’s boxers.

“Put the number on these too.”

The guy looked at her.

Then at me.

Then back at my mother.

He smiled and shook his head.

I swear I could see the thought going through his mind:

“Madam… hakuna mtu atamwibia boxer.”

But he printed the number anyway.

My mother was not taking any chances.

Besides, she had already paid the printing fee, so the man wasn’t about to start negotiating with her.

But the most embarrassing part came afterwards.

Once your clothes had been printed, you had to find somewhere with enough sunlight for the fresh ink to dry.

So there I was, a newly admitted Form One, laying my entire wardrobe out in the sun like I was running a small-scale laundry business.

And then it happened.

Another family was there.

I don’t remember who they were with, but there was a girl among them. I looked up and our eyes met.

My first assumption was that she was there to bring her younger brother to school.

Then I noticed where she was looking.

My boxers.

There they were, lying proudly in the Nairobi sunshine, admission number staring at the sky.

I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me.

For a brief moment, I considered pretending they weren’t mine.

Maybe I could walk away and act like I had never seen them before.

Maybe I could convince myself that the boxers belonged to someone else.

But there was one problem.

They were my boxers.

And to make matters worse, I was sporting what I considered to be a very respectable Michael Jordan trim at the time.

You know the haircut.

That clean shave that made you feel like you were one crossover away from playing for the Chicago Bulls.

I had absolutely no business being perceived by a girl in that state.

My nonchalant demeanour was not going to save me this time.

Neither was the haircut.

Neither, apparently, was my mother’s admission-number strategy.

I had been in school for barely a few hours, and already a girl had seen my underwear before I had even properly learned where the dining hall was.

The night before the function, the Form Three prefects called us together.

And this is where I discovered that high school had an unofficial curriculum that nobody had mentioned during admission.

They told us we needed to be outside.

We needed to mingle.

We needed to talk to girls.

Apparently, this was the new high-school norm.

I remember listening very carefully.

Because I had been a huge fan of the movie Spud, and in my mind, this was exactly how high school was supposed to work.

You arrive at school.

You meet girls.

You become mysterious.

You say something witty.

She laughs.

You stare into each other’s eyes.

And somehow, before the end of the day, you’re kissing behind a tree.

Hollywood had prepared me.

The prefects had confirmed it.

Tomorrow was going to be my day.

Of course, I had kissed a girl before.

But this was different.

This wasn’t some neighbourhood girl.

This wasn’t some childhood crush.

This was HIGH SCHOOL !

There would be uniforms.

Different schools.

Music.

Dancing.

Hundreds of teenagers pretending they weren’t looking at each other.

And, most importantly, there would be girls from other schools.

I went to bed that night with the confidence of a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing.

I had already imagined the entire sequence in my head.

I’d walk into Kenyatta Hall.

A beautiful girl from another school would notice me.

I’d smile.

She’d smile back.

We’d somehow start talking.

Then, at some perfectly cinematic moment, we’d disappear from the crowd.

And…

Boom!

First high-school kiss.

I was ready.

Or at least, I thought I was.

The morning of the function, Dagoretti High School underwent a complete transformation.

You could tell the seniors had been preparing for this day for weeks.

These were the same guys who ordinarily looked like they had slept in their uniforms and fought their way to breakfast. But that morning?

Everything was different.

Their clothes looked brand new—freshly washed, perfectly ironed and somehow sitting on their bodies like they had just walked out of a Jumia catalogue. Shirts tucked in properly. Sweaters sitting exactly where they were supposed to. Shoes polished until you could almost see your reflection in them. And suddenly everyone seemed to have a Blazer.

And the hair?

Well kempt!

No more waking up and running your fingers through it.

These guys had clearly visited the barber, not sure whether there was a barber in the dormitory that night but the transformation was astounding

Then came the cologne.

My goodness.

The corridors were smelling like every perfume shop in Nairobi had been emptied into one dormitory.

Some guys had clearly understood that if you couldn’t attract a girl with your personality, you could at least fumigate the area around you.

Even we were watching all this in awe.

We were still walking around with admission numbers on everything we owned while the seniors looked like they were attending a wedding.

And then the schools started arriving.

This was when the real excitement began.

Whenever a bus entered the school compound, students would suddenly appear at the windows.

We would peep through the classroom windows trying to identify which school had arrived.

“Statoe wamefika!”

A few minutes later:

“Kenya High wameingia!”

Then:

“Precious Blood wameland!”

And whenever a bus from a school we considered a rival pulled up, the whole room would suddenly become a scouting department.

We wanted to know everything.

Which school had arrived?

How many students?

Which girls?

Which uniform?

And, most importantly…

Which school had the finest girls?

Nobody said it out loud, of course.

We were young gentlemen.

But that’s exactly what everyone was looking for.

Eventually, the function started.

The music was playing, the hall was filling up, and the atmosphere was unlike anything I’d experienced since joining high school.

This was my moment.

At least, that’s what I thought.

I spotted a girl from State House girls and decided to make my move.

Remember, I was a Form One.

But confidence has never been proportional to age.

I walked over and tried to start a conversation.

She looked at me.

Then she looked at my collar.

Then my sweater.

Then my trousers.

And there, proudly displayed across virtually my entire wardrobe, were my admission numbers.

I might as well have walked up to her wearing a name tag saying:

FORM ONE - PLEASE HANDLE WITH CARE.

She immediately knew.

She was a Form Three.

Experienced.

She had seen boys like me before.

I tried talking to her.

She wasn’t interested.

I tried again.

Still nothing.

She didn’t even give me the courtesy of pretending to be interested.

And honestly, I couldn’t blame her.

To her, I wasn’t a potential boyfriend.

I was basically a school project that didn’t even know how to balance a Chemical equation.

But rejection had not yet humbled me.

So I kept trying.

I moved around.

Talked to a few girls.

Got ignored a couple more times.

At this point, my confidence was beginning to develop cracks.

But I was determined

I had to go back to class with a phone number

And I contemplated making one up just to fit in with the rest

Andy, my desk mate had already chatted up two girls and had exchanged his tie with one

I couldn’t give up

Not yet

Then I met her.

A Form Two girl from the Kenya High School

And unlike the State House girl, she didn’t seem particularly bothered by the fact that I was a Form One.

She liked my vibe.

We started talking.

And for the first time that day, I wasn’t trying too hard.

The conversation just flowed.

She didn’t care about my admission numbers.

She didn’t care that I was a Jongo.

She didn’t look at me like I was some lost child who had wandered away from his dormitory.

She actually liked talking to me.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a Form One boy who had been completely ignored by a Form Three girl from State House ended up finding his first high-school girlfriend at Kenya High.

Funny how life works.

I had walked into that function thinking I needed to impress someone.

Instead, I learned something much simpler:

The right person doesn’t need you to prove that you’re cool. They just enjoy your vibe.

And for a Form One boy with admission numbers running from his collar to his trousers, that felt like a pretty significant victory.

I was watching an old Alan Watts lecture the other night. One of those videos I put on when I’m too tired to keep refreshing my email, waiting for replies that probably aren’t coming.

And he said something that made me stop scrolling.

Something along the lines of: we suffer mostly because we take seriously what was actually meant to be fun.

I sat with that for a while.

Not in some profound, staring-at-the-ceiling kind of way. More like, huh.

Because if you had asked me what my life felt like that week, fun would probably have been somewhere near the bottom of the list.

It felt more like an exam I hadn’t studied for. Except the results kept coming back with some variation of not this time.

Different fonts. Same message.

Watts talks about this character he calls the Joker. Not someone laughing at you because they’re cruel, but someone who can see the whole board while everyone else is stuck staring at the little square they’re standing on.

And I think that’s what caught my attention.

He talks about how society is basically a collection of games we’ve all agreed to play. The strange part is that, after playing them for long enough, we forget they’re games.

Money is a game.

Job titles are a game.

Status is a game.

Even the version of yourself you bring into an interview is a kind of game. You sit a little straighter. You choose words you wouldn’t normally use. You suddenly become very interested in “leveraging your skill set.”

And there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this.

The problem comes when we forget we’re playing.

Watts describes two kinds of people. The ones who are “far out” are completely absorbed in the game. They’re climbing, competing, worrying, trying to win. And because they’re so far inside it, losing feels catastrophic.

Then there are the “far in” people.

They’re still playing. They still work. They still apply for jobs. They still care about what happens.

But somewhere in the back of their minds, they’ve remembered that it’s a game.

They’ve kept one foot backstage.

I’ve been very far out this year.

Probably more than I’d like to admit.

A job application has a funny way of becoming something much bigger than a job application when you’ve been looking for a while.

You start with, let’s see if this is a good fit.

Then you send the CV.

Then you check the formatting.

Then you check it again because somehow Word has decided to move something three millimetres to the left.

Then you tailor the cover letter.

Then you send it.

And then you wait.

And wait.

And eventually, if you’re lucky, you get an email that says they went with someone else.

If you’re unlucky, you get nothing at all.

And somehow, somewhere along the way, “we didn’t select you for this position” becomes “you’re not good enough.”

Those are two completely different statements.

But when you’re far out in the game, they feel like the same thing.

I’ve started thinking a lot about something Watts says about seriousness and sincerity.

I used to think those two words basically meant the same thing.

They don’t.

Being serious is tense. You’re gripping everything too tightly. Every decision feels like it carries the weight of your entire future.

Being sincere is different.

You can care deeply without treating every outcome like a final judgment.

Think about an interview.

Serious-you prepares every possible answer. You rehearse what you’re going to say. You think about your posture. You replay the interview afterwards and spend twenty minutes wondering whether that one awkward pause ruined everything.

Sincere-you still prepares.

You still care.

You still want the job.

But you show up and actually have the conversation.

And if you stumble over an answer, you stumble.

If they don’t choose you, they don’t choose you.

It doesn’t suddenly become evidence that you’re incapable.

It’s just one round.

I’m still learning the difference.

Some days I send an application and genuinely forget about it five minutes later.

Other days, I’m checking my email four times before lunch like my inbox personally owes me an explanation.

And whenever I catch myself doing that, I try to recognise what’s happening.

Ah.

This is the serious version of me again.

Not the sincere one.

Watts also brings up this Hindu idea called lila, which basically means play.

The idea is that existence isn’t necessarily some giant examination we’re all sitting, waiting to find out whether we’ve passed.

It’s closer to play.

At first, that sounds almost too simple.

But then I thought about music.

Nobody listens to a song and asks what it achieved.

You don’t listen to a piano piece and complain that it didn’t produce a measurable outcome.

You just listen.

One note follows another.

And somehow, that’s enough.

Yet we don’t really live that way.

We’re constantly racing towards something.

The job offer.

The promotion.

The relationship.

The money.

The house.

The moment when everything finally settles down and we can say, okay, now I’m doing alright.

Except there’s always another finish line.

And maybe that’s the strange part.

We’re so busy trying to get somewhere that we forget we’re already here.

There’s another part of the lecture that stayed with me too.

Watts talks about the people who step outside the game entirely. Monks. Hermits. People who decide they don’t want to participate in the usual race.

And their existence serves a strange purpose.

They remind everyone else that the game was never compulsory.

You don’t have to become a monk, obviously.

I’m not about to abandon everything and disappear into a hut in Roysambu, although I can think of a few days when that sounded like a genuinely reasonable career move.

But you can loosen your grip.

You can remember that the rules aren’t laws of nature.

Someone made them.

People agreed to them.

And that means you don’t have to let them define the entire meaning of your life.

Then Watts gets to something I found particularly interesting.

He talks about anxiety and laughter coming from roughly the same place.

That nervous energy.

That racing heart.

That strange feeling in your stomach.

Fear interprets it as:

Something is wrong. Brace yourself.

Laughter interprets it as:

This is ridiculous.

Same energy.

Different interpretation.

And I think that’s where I’ve been getting stuck.

Because I’m not interested in pretending everything is fine.

Some things aren’t fine.

Rejection hurts.

Waiting is exhausting.

Comparing yourself to people who seem to be moving faster than you is exhausting too.

But maybe some of the weight I’ve been carrying hasn’t actually come from the events themselves.

Maybe it’s come from how seriously I’ve decided to hold them.

A rejection is still a rejection.

But it doesn’t have to become a statement about who I am.

It can just be information.

This didn’t work.

Okay.

Try again.

Move on.

I don’t have some five-step system for doing this. And I don’t think Watts was giving one either.

Mostly, I’m just trying to notice when I start clenching again.

When I refresh my inbox for the fifth time.

When I start comparing myself to someone from university who seems to have figured everything out already.

When one unanswered application starts feeling like evidence that my entire life is going nowhere.

That’s usually when I try to ask myself:

Am I being sincere right now, or am I being serious?

Am I still playing the game, or have I convinced myself that this little square is the whole board?

I don’t always know the answer.

Most of the time, I probably realise it too late.

But there’s something comforting about hearing an old philosopher talk about all of this and realising that the things keeping me awake at night aren’t necessarily as permanent as they feel.

The CVs.

The interviews.

The waiting.

The performing.

The rejection emails.

They’re all part of the game.

And maybe the trick isn’t to stop caring.

Maybe it’s to care without forgetting that you’re allowed to enjoy being here too.

I don’t get my hair done often, and my dad has taken to complaining that I resemble a Mau Mau warrior. I don’t really mind the comparison. If anything, it makes me feel like I’ve finally amounted to something in his eyes — he always wanted me to become a doctor. I’m far from that. I’m a chemist, an Industrial chemist, and I earned the degree and carried it home to him like a trophy he never quite asked for.

Now he wants me to pursue a second degree and he never even took time to know what I really like…it might sound unrealistic but I’m a self proclaimed athlete I love doing track, hitting the gym and playing football, this is where you will find me smiling, except I don’t go to the gym anymore because a woman almost as old as my mother started eyeing me there, and as a paranoid young man with a healthy sense of self-preservation, I decided the safest move was to disappear.

The gym receptionist keeps calling my phone

“Hello Maestro, why did you stop coming to the gym? Is there anything you’d want us to improve on?” They even offered me a free month and sent an email that the hot showers have been repaired…they think that was why I stopped showing up but they don’t know the problem and I still don’t show up

I’m tired of my dad complaining about my hair, and dreadlocks are out of the question — he’s promised to cut them off with scissors himself while I’m asleep on the couch. Unwilling to live under that particular sword of Damocles, I decide to visit a kinyozi in Roysambu, a few minutes’ walk from where I live.

JB Barbershop. I catch myself wondering, absurdly, what it would mean if the first two letters were swapped — and then I let it go, because I’m getting ahead of myself. I miss her. That’s really what this is about, if I’m honest, though I’d rather talk about my hair.

The barber is Rwandese, and he blasts gospel music through a tinny speaker as he navigates my head with the calm precision of a man reading a map he’s memorized. He asks how I’d like it, and somehow the question sounds vaguely indecent. His colleague, a woman working the next chair over, mentions that they also offer facials. At this point I’m fairly convinced the two of them are having a private joke at my expense.

After a clean taper — an upgrade, if you’re keeping score, from a 10 to a 10.01 — I’m led into a smaller room for the facial. She unbuttons my shirt, and blood rushes somewhere I’d very much like it not to. I need to hide this, I think, and she hasn’t even touched me yet. She works through a cosmetic routine, clearing pimples and dead skin with the unbothered efficiency of someone who has seen every version of nervous young man there is.

She oils her hands, and it hits me — this is the first time a woman has touched me, really touched me, in over a year. I close my eyes and try to let myself have the moment, but I can’t quite get there, too busy calculating whether anything is visibly pushing through my sweatpants. I curse myself for not wearing jeans, which at least have the decency to conceal. I get through it the way men have gotten through worse: by conjuring an image of my grandmother, and then, for good measure, Cristiano Ronaldo lifting a World Cup he’s never actually won. It works, briefly — a stalling tactic as old as adolescence itself, and somehow still reliable.

As she buttons my shirt on again, she mentions that she also offers mobile services and by then I know this isn’t about haircuts and I nod just so the conversation doesn’t develop further

Funny enough, that is not even what stays with me

What stays with me is realizing I’d forgotten what ordinary kindness feels like.

I now visit the barbershop once every fortnight. And she knows my name now, she knows how I like my massage and I barely have to explain anything before she gets started. We now have deep conversations, she tells me what life was like in Rwanda, she tells me her dreams and aspirations and what she wants out of life. I tell her I’m ‘Wantam’ and she laughs, not sure whether she understands what that means, maybe she laughs because she is supposed to or maybe because it’s actually funny I will never really know. Sometimes we end up laughing about things neither of us will remember the next day. And somewhere inside all those small talks, something in me quietly begins to loosen

One afternoon, during an evening run it hits me that I haven’t thought about my Ex the whole day, this is the first time for a very long time that someone who used to occupy so much space in my head had gone an entire day without crossing my mind and that realization arrived very quietly

But my Dad still hates my hair. He says it’s too long, and I know he’d rather I came home with the full Michael Jordan.

On the other hand, the gym receptionists still won’t give it a rest, she doesn’t know that I have already made peace with the possibility of never going back

There’s still plenty in my life that isn’t sorted. Some wounds haven’t closed. Some questions still don’t have answers.

But my life doesn’t feel like a string of escape routes anymore.

It feels like I’m finally choosing where to go.

I believed that healing is something instant, I thought that I’d go to bed and wake up feeling lighter but no. It happened quietly through the simple evening walks that no longer felt intentional, my Barber remembering my name and getting accustomed to the simple acts of kindness without my shoulder tensing up

Perhaps the idea of healing is not to become a completely new person. Healing is all about regaining the person you once was before life convinced you to forget yourself.

I have read a great number of articles on Substack, and about ninety percent of which are concerned with love, and from time to time I find myself thinking, "Has anyone gone through what I have?”

On the contrary, pain is not a competition since it depends on individual experience; what shatters one person might cause only some discomfort to another.

That, however, is one of my scars.

The situation behind it is as follows.

A person who had once been a hopeless romantic became the most carefree of all the people in the room.

The year was 2020.

More precise,March 27th 2020.

You may now be asking yourself how it has been possible for me to remember the exact date.

Simple.

I had a rather unusual way of remembering this. Absolute zero is 0°C on the Kelvin scale, that is 273 K; the number 27 reminded me of the date and the 3 stood for March.

Ridiculous? Maybe.

That's the way it is with love: it takes ordinary things and turns them into lasting reminders.

I can remember this date without any difficulty... together with her birthday, of course.

I'll omit that one as it might jeopardize her identity

Besides…

I hope she reads this.

I hope she remembers us.

The stolen moments.

The laughter that was louder than it should have been.

Every afternoon, when my mother was distracted, she would slip into the house and I would quietly take her up to the upstairs room, where for a few precious moments the world seemed to disappear. We would share a kiss, hold on to one another a bit longer than was appropriate, and pretend that time was not going by.

The moments never lasted long enough.

We came from completely different backgrounds.

She was born in Ethiopia and moved to Kenya when she was twelve years old; she remained a Muslim. As for me, a Mount Kenya boy who was born and brought up in Nairobi.

It is generally thought that those differences were important.

To us, they weren’t .

If you have grown up in Nairobi, then you will realise this: the city has the tendency to bring tribal identities to the background. You learn to know people before you discover their surnames and you become friends with them before you ask where their grandparents were from.

Yes, she was born in another country.

I have never referred to her as "the Ethiopian girl."

She was simply…her.

I will never forget the day on which we first met.

It was rather ironic that I spent a great deal of my time as though she weren't present.

It is a strange thing that happens between men: the easiest way to hide your interest when a beautiful woman walks into a room is to act as though you had never noticed her.

My friend Angie had asked if she could come over.

She sent a text asking if she could bring a friend.

“Sure,” I replied.

Looking back, that might have been one of the best decisions I ever made.

She entered with a quiet sense of confidence.

She wasn’t loud.

She didn't want to make an impression on anyone.

She was entirely comfortable with being herself.

She was incredibly beautiful, remarkably intelligent, and possessed a calmness which caused everybody nearby to slow down as well; furthermore, she understood my sense of humour, and that was a rare gift.

Most importantly…

She was single.

Convenient, I know.

I remember the first song that I played when they were at my house; I had hoped that she might laugh at my taste in music.

Instead, she smiled.

She liked it.

That little moment was just like a victory.

I immediately sent Angie a message after they had left.

Can I ask for your friend's number, can I?

She laughed.

If you look back, you will see that all along she had known exactly what she was doing.

Call it a pass that only De Bruyne would make.

She created the chance.

All I had to do was finish it.

And somehow…

I did.

We talked every day.

I have never considered myself to be particularly articulate.

I have always been weak when it comes to words.

Yet she was able to understand me.

She never made me feel inadequate since I was finding it difficult to express myself; on the other hand, she accepted me just as I was. The conversations we had never seemed to be like examinations.

For a long time I had never felt accepted just as I was.

Love asks for sacrifices in a very unusual way.

We were obliged to remain invisible.

We never held hands in public.

We never took pictures together.

Before we introduced ourselves to our friends, we always took the time to carefully go over our explanations.

Every meeting required planning.

Every time we said goodnight, we worried that someone had seen us.

She often made it plain that her attitude was not because she was ashamed of me,(despite my obvious ‘Mamba’ facial recognition).

She was worried about me.

Her father was an extremely strict man, and as far as I knew, if our relationship had been discovered it wouldn't only have brought an end to it but could even have put me in real danger.

At first I treated it as if it were a joke.

Love tends to make young men believe that they are invincible.

I came to the point where I thought she was exaggerating.

Looking back now…

I am certain that she wasn't joking

Yet nothing in it appeared to be enough to make me leave.

It's said that a fly will readily die in a pot of honey.

For the first time in my life

I understood this statement

Months after being together and having to hide our love for each other from the public

One afternoon, she told me that she would be returning to Ethiopia soon.

I had not taken it seriously at first; I assumed that it was only a family matter.

It was not.

She told me that they wanted her to undergo female genital mutilation.

I nearly fainted at the news.

I had been aware of the practice, and what it entailed.

It had been the subject of many a newspaper article, and I had seen documentaries on the gruesome procedure.

But those stories were always about other people.

Hearing it being casually discussed by the woman I loved was an altogether different experience.

"Wouldn't it be best if you reported it?" I implored, desperation creeping into my voice, "Wouldn't it be best if we tried to stop them?"

She gave me a long, sad look before shaking her head.

"I can't," she replied.

It wasn't that she didn't want to.

It was that she was made to expect it.

It was part of who she was.

She told me that in her village, that was the way it was done.

The way it had always been done.

She even admonished me gently when I persisted.

"Don't try to save me," she said, "it won't happen."

It wasn't that she hated me, or even that she was afraid of me.

She had already made peace with the fact that she would undergo FGM, and I was powerless to do anything about it.

For days afterwards, I wandered in a haze of despair, as the woman I loved prepared herself for what was to come.

There was nothing I could do to stop it.

Then, she disappeared.

Vanished, without so much as a goodbye.

I had not even been given the chance to say farewell.

A couple of days later, I received a text message from a number I don't recognize.

It was a burner phone, for all I know.

"Sorry, I had to do it.

Don't look for me," it read.

That was all there was.

Nothing else.

No apologies, no reassurance, not even a sign-off.

I was furious.

Heartbroken, even.

How could she do this to me?

How could she, of all people, be so cruel as to leave me hanging like this?

It was unforgivable, really.

This was the woman who had known all my secrets, who had seen me at my lowest, and who I had trusted to know the things that made me tick.

She had seen nearly every major event in my life, and had seen me through most of the rest.

And yet, and yet she left, and without a word.

It took years for me to get over it, although the process was certainly helped along by the fact that she married an Ethiopian shortly after returning home, and had two children.

Not that that stopped me from wondering, for years after that, if she had been with me, if somehow she had stayed.

It was not that I wished her any misfortune, per se, but rather that I thought that perhaps those things could have been mine.

Perhaps those children could have been mine.

Time truly does dull everything, however, however slight the edge may be.

People ask me if I got over it, if I still think about her, if I still wonder what happened to her.

The truth is, I don't really know how to answer that.

I moved on, in the end.

I stopped thinking about her, stopped wondering where she was or what she was doing.

But sometimes, songs or phrases will trigger me, catch me off guard, and for a moment, I am once again that lovesick young man.

That man who believed that there was nothing love could not overcome.

That man who never got the girl.

Neither did she, in the end.

Perhaps that is why we always speak of first loves as things of the past.

They always leave their mark, but in time, we learn to conceal it, hide it, cover it up, until eventually, even we forget that it was ever there.

“Today is the day” he muttered to himself. He was going to take the leap. But for a moment he thought. What about my Mom and Dad. How will they take the news? How will they know I wasn’t as strong as I seemed, how will they know of my agony of proximity. But he was already fixated on what he wanted to do. He was not going to climb down this time, not for the fourth time.

He remembered his little Sister Chelsea and he started welling up, he knew he was never going to see her again and the last scuffle they had was going to be his last encounter with her.

This was the end for him. The end of his problems, he wouldn’t have to worry about his bipolar disorder anymore, he wouldn’t have to worry about getting a well paying job and going on a fishing trip with his Dad just as he had promised him

Alas! He took the Leap, for a moment he glided through the air as though he was flying, with his eyes tightly shut and his arms wide open as if expectant of an embrace from the Creator, he fell with a thud and wails rented the frosty atmosphere.

An onlooker, A mama mboga who saw the whole scene unfolding rushed to his aid- he wasn’t dead yet- broken bones poking out of his skin, he uttered something. “It is done! I did it! “

The news had spread like wildfire. And the questions everyone asked were, What could possibly lead a degree holder to do such a thing, he had it all in life. Only if they knew he didn’t, but who will be there to tell them

The remedy? The villagers said “Mimi mtoto wangu hawezi fanya digirii, hizo vitu ni za defowoshipa.”

The parents were left behind to mourn their only son, the so-called savior that would help them out of their financial ruins. Only if he had talked about it maybe they could have found a solution for this.

Chelsea-his little sister- was inconsolable, the pain of losing a brother and what’s more they weren’t in the best of terms the last time they talked. She felt guilty for his death, she thought to herself that she ought to have known her brother wasn’t in the right frame of mind. All along she knew they were best friends only to realize that Joe was an Iceberg and she only knew the tip.

Joe’s story was interpreted wrong. They thought that higher learning had messed with his head. They thought he was in a cult and wanted out.

Joe’s story wasn’t about a degree, unemployment, or failure. It was about a pain that wore the mask of strength until no one thought to look beneath it.I feel for him,I wonder whether Joe got his peace. I wonder