“Let’s talk about experiences.”

“Which kind?”

“The weird ones. The things you have seen that you still remember for no good reason, or the one you still carry like it happened yesterday?”

“It’s a sad one though.”

I told Achieng that the sad ones were usually the ones that stayed, those found a small room somewhere inside us and refused to leave

And there was a pause, a moment. A quiet that gathers weight before it speaks

“We used to take turns milking Dani Nyauyoma’s cows. She lived alone in that small homestead just beyond the path that cut through the maize. Her sons and daughter had long gone to the city, and the work of the animals fell to whoever still remembered the old woman. In return she gave us milk, sometimes a little butter when the days were kind. It was never much, but it was something, and in those days something was enough.

That evening the darkness came early, unlike the gradual kind that announces itself with soft purple edges, this was sudden, the kind that swallows the sky whole while you are still wiping your hands. My brother, spooked but trying to be the man of the house, decided to light the pressure lamp. You remember those? The ones you had to pump until your thumb ached? They hissed like angry serpents. Mum had strict rules about that lamp. We were never to touch it when she wasn't around.. Still, the cows would not wait, and Dani would not either.

I walked with the lamp held high, the hiss of it loud against the quiet. When I reached her compound the radio was on. That was the first wrong thing. Dani always switched it off after the seven p.m. news. The second wrong thing was the darkness itself. No lamp in the kitchen. No lamp in the main house. Only the radio talking to itself in the empty rooms.

I called her name.

“Dani?”

Nothing.

“Dani!”

Still nothing

I stepped into the sitting room. Her old cat shot past my legs like something fleeing a fire. I raised the lamp higher.

And there she was.

Seated restfully on that old chair, the one with the worn armrests she used to grip when she laughed. Head slightly tilted. Hands folded in her lap the way she always folded them when the day’s work was done. The radio still murmuring beside her. The light from my lamp fell across her face and did not move anything in it.

She looked as if she had simply decided to rest a little longer than usual.

I stood there longer than I should have. The lamp hissed. The cat watched from the doorway. Outside, the night had finished its work and was now only waiting.

I do not remember putting the lamp down. I only remember the stillness of her chest, and how the radio kept speaking into a room.”

Achieng stopped talking. The silence on my balcony was sudden and deafening.

“And?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper.

“She was lifeless,” Achieng said, her eyes completely vacant. “That was the day I saw what dead looked like. But that wasn’t the thing that keeps me awake at night.”

“What was?”

Achieng looked at me, a cold, ancient fear swimming in her eyes. “Her hands… her hands were stiff and cold. But the volume knob on the radio... it was slowly turning up by itself.”

Listen, they tell us that the corporate ladder is made of wood, sweat, and merit. They tell you that if you keep your head down, hit your KPIs, and synergize until your soul bleeds, one day you will reach the top. It is a beautiful lie.

But every so often, the mask slips.

Something fascinating happened in a certain office… A story as old as capitalism itself, yet it never ceases to amaze. The Big Chair fell vacant. The Lord of Operations, the one who makes the wheels turn, was moving on, and the throne needed an heir.

Naturally, an email was sent to the masses. The decree was clear: Only the Generals of the Trenches, those who have managed large teams and bled on the battlefield may apply. It made sense. You don’t ask a man who only polishes swords to suddenly lead the infantry.

But then, as the deadline loomed, a magical addendum appeared. A mysterious breeze blew through the recruitment department. The email was quietly revised. Suddenly, the criteria expanded to include... The Watchers of Quality. The people who stand by the door with a clipboard, ticking boxes to ensure the swords are shiny.

It was a highly specific, suspiciously tailored amendment. It was like watching a tailor measure a suit for a ghost, only for a very specific man with exact measurements to walk into the room ten minutes later.

Everybody knew what was happening. The air in the office was thick with the scent of an impending anointing. The shortlist came out, and lo! behold, it was a list of exactly one. A race where only one horse was allowed at the starting line, yet the horse still celebrated winning by a nose.

Herein lies the thoughtful rub, dear reader, the one that nags at the edges of our collective conscience like a stone in the corporate shoe. Do we, in these moments of quiet engineering, pause to interrogate ourselves? Do we gaze into the mirror not the one in the washroom, polished to flatter, but the unforgiving one of the soul and ask: Is this right? Or has our internal moral compass recalibrated, its needle swinging merrily toward “beneficiary”?

Satire, they say, is the weapon of the civilized. Consider, then, the exquisite irony. We rail against nepotism in high places, dynasties in politics, legacies in boardrooms as if our own cubicles were bastions of pure Darwinian selection. Yet the mechanism is identical, scaled down to the departmental org chart. The powerful do not create fair grounds; they till the soil for their saplings. Growth in the organization becomes less a matter of photosynthesis (sunlight, water, merit) and more a grafting operation: attach the favored branch, watch it flourish at the expense of the rootstock. The tree looks impressive from afar. Up close, it is a Frankenstein of favoritism.

And the beneficiaries? Ah, the gentle art of self-deception reaches its zenith here. “I earned this,” they murmur, adjusting their new title like a well-tailored suit. “The process was rigorous.” Rigorous indeed like a race where one runner starts at the finish line, cheered on by the judges. Cognitive dissonance, that magnificent human faculty, spins the narrative: It’s not favoritism; it’s foresight. Not cronyism; it’s loyalty. The internal morality doesn’t break; it bends, gracefully, into a shape that accommodates comfort. After all, if the system rewards the connected, who are we to question the system while reaping its fruits? Questioning is for the losers, those naive souls still slaving under the delusion that hard work alone suffices.

One is reminded of ancient courts, where viziers whispered promotions into the king’s ear, not for the realm’s glory, but for the stability of their own households. Or modern democracies, where public service mysteriously enriches generations. The pattern repeats because the raw material us remains unchanged. Tribal at heart, we cloak our instincts in HR vocab and performance metrics. “Diversity and inclusion,” we proclaim, while the inner circle remains as homogeneous as a gentleman’s club circa 1890.

Yet satire without a sliver of hope is mere cynicism, and cynicism is the refuge of the defeated. What if we dared the uncomfortable? What if organizations those fragile ecosystems of ambition and anxiety insisted on transparent nets, wide enough for true competition? What if leaders measured their legacy not by the number of buddies elevated, but by the strangers they empowered to surpass them? The cognitive limitation, as some have noted, is real: decentering the self is arduous work. But civilizations have conditioned it before through culture, through shame, through structures that make unchecked favoritism costly.

In the end, the incident (whichever one you might recall from your own corridors) is not anomaly but archetype. It reveals us not as villains in black hats, but as ordinary souls navigating an imperfect arena. We push our own forward because blood or its professional equivalent runs thicker than policy. We justify it because admitting otherwise would require rewriting our self-image, and who has time for that amid KPIs and quarterly reviews?

So the next time an email lands, curiously revised, and a shortlist materializes with suspicious elegance, smile that knowing, weary smile. The inner circle is composing again. Listen closely: that is not the sound of merit ascending. It is the soft click of the gate closing behind the favored few, while the rest of us applaud the “strategic hire” and update our CVs’ with ever-so-slightly more desperation.

Perhaps, in questioning it, we edge a little closer to being the humans we pretend to be on our vision statements. Or perhaps we simply wait our turn in the circle. The mirror awaits either way. Polish it if you must-but do look.

I found out about Peabo Bryson’s passing the way most sad news finds us these days: sandwiched between things that don’t matter.

A headline. A scroll. A pause.

Then suddenly I was twelve again.

It’s strange how music works. Someone dies thousands of miles away and before you’ve even had time to process the loss, your mind has already boarded a matatu headed straight for your childhood.

For me, that journey began in Primary Six.

Back then, I was in love.

Or at least what a twelve-year-old boy understands love to be.

Her name was Shirley.

The first letter I ever wrote to a girl wasn’t really a letter. It was plagiarism.

I copied the lyrics of A Whole New World from Disney’s Aladdin and presented them as though they had arrived directly from the depths of my soul.

I can show you the world
Shining, shimmering, splendid
Tell me, Princess, now when did you last
Let your heart decide?

convinced I had discovered the most beautiful words ever arranged by man.

Shirley saw through me immediately.

“You copied this from Aladdin,” she said without even looking impressed.

I stood there feeling exposed.

Then she smiled.

“I love your music taste.”

That saved me.

She had one of those exercise books girls used to keep back then. Half diary, half scrapbook. Pictures of musicians glued between pages. Song lyrics written in different coloured pens. Magazine cuttings carefully preserved.

She even had the latest copy of The Insider, that teen magazine everybody pretended not to buy but somehow everybody read.

“Have you listened to Roberta Flack?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Luther Vandross?”

Another shake.

The disappointment on her face suggested I had somehow failed Her

“You really need help.”

And that was how my first relationship began.

Not with flowers.

Not with declarations of love.

With musical intervention.

One Sunday afternoon, when her parents weren’t home, she called me over.

“Kuja hivi nikuonyeshe kitu.”

Normally, those words are how trouble introduces itself.

But I followed.

In their living room sat a magnificent Panasonic stereo system. One of those giant three-CD changers that looked capable of communicating with satellites.

She switched it on.

“You sure about this?” I asked.

“Relax.”

She turned knobs. Pressed buttons. Adjusted frequencies.

Static, more static.

Then suddenly the signal cleared.

The opening notes of a song floated through the speakers.

“Spanish Guitar,” she whispered.

And then she started singing along.

Not loudly.

Not for performance.

Just enough to tell me she knew every word.

I remember watching her more than listening to the music.

Then, as if heaven had scheduled the afternoon personally, A Whole New World came on next.

We looked at each other.

And sang.

Every word for word.

Two awkward children in a living room, harmonizing terribly but believing we sounded exactly like Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle.

At that age, it was probably the most intimate experience I’d ever had.

The year was around 2007.

Life still moved slowly enough for moments like that to matter.

After that, Sundays changed.

Football became optional while music became compulsory.

Every week Shirley introduced me to another artist.

Celine Dion, Cyndi Lauper, Michael Bolton, Anita Baker, Phil Collins, Gregory Abbott.

She was my personal radio presenter before algorithms took over the job. We would sit in open fields, discussing songs with the seriousness of music critics.

Sometimes we’d argue.

“Pendergrass is the greatest vocalist ever.”

“No chance. Have you heard Luther?”

“You’re biased.”

“And you’re deaf.”

Looking back, I realize we weren’t really discussing music.

We were discovering ourselves.

Every song was another small window into who we were becoming.

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Then high school arrived.

As it often does.

Like a government project nobody asked for.

And just like that, we were separated.

Different schools. Different towns. Different futures.

Life happened.

It always does.

Today, I’m not reminiscing about some lost childhood romance. At least not entirely. I am thinking about Peabo Bryson. because some people don’t just make music.

They become custodians of memory.

Peabo possessed one of those rare voices that could fill a room with warmth, tenderness and longing. His songs became woven into the fabric of people’s lives. First dances. Weddings. Long drives. Quiet evenings. First loves.

The remarkable thing about music is that it outlives the moments that created its meaning. A song can survive a relationship, distance and decades, sometimes, a song even survives the singer.

And so while Peabo Bryson’s earthly voice may have fallen silent, His music became the soundtrack to ordinary people’s most sacred moments first dances, quiet reconciliations, long drives where words failed but melody didn’t. And now that voice has fallen silent. Yet the emotions it awakened remain stubbornly alive.

Inside the hearts of people who once sang along.

People like me.

Which leads me, inevitably, back to Shirley.

I wonder if she made it, if she has children now. Wonder if her eyes still carried that emerald sparkle whenever she spoke about music. I wonder if she is happy.

Does she remember that Sunday afternoon?

Does she remember the Panasonic stereo?

Does she remember two children singing A Whole New World as though they were auditioning for destiny?

Or was it just another afternoon in a life that moved on?

Perhaps that is what growing older teaches us.

Not every love is meant to last.

Some loves arrive simply to introduce us to beautiful things before quietly leaving.

Maybe Shirley’s purpose in my life was not to stay.

Maybe she came to hand me a soundtrack.

And Peabo Bryson was part of it.

May God comfort his family, his friends and the millions whose lives his music touched.

And wherever Shirley is, if she ever hears one of those old songs floating through the airwaves, I hope she smiles.

It has been months now since Fraudwood, a man whose real name is securely locked in an HR filing cabinet, but whose behavior earned him this title stood before us at the water dispenser and dropped the heavy word.

“Cancer”. Colon cancer, to be exact.

Now, if you know anything about Kenyans, you know we have an automatic, factory-installed setting when tragedy strikes. We do not do “thoughts and prayers.” No. We activate the spirit of Harambee. We form WhatsApp groups.

Within forty-eight hours, there was a committee, a treasurer, and a customized digital poster with Fraudwood’s face looking appropriately somber. We shared the M-Pesa paybill number with the manic urgency of a gospel crusade. We became our brother’s keeper. We skipped the Friday plot. We sacrificed our small weekend luxuries, which hurts twice as bad these days with the dizzying new fuel prices slapped on us by Kasongo’s government. Waol gi uii! Every shilling we sent left a dent in our souls, but we sent it anyway.

Our Director of Operations (DOO), a thoroughly good-natured Scotsman who clearly didn’t understand the Nairobi terrain, took it to international levels. This man set up a GoFundMe account back in Scotland. He laced up his running shoes and dedicated his weekends to grueling marathons. He was out there in the freezing rain, running his lungs out, sweating for Fraudwood’s colon. We were deeply moved. Some of us even shed a small corporate tear.

The first red flag was a bit bizarre. Fraudwood presented medical documents showing he would be receiving his treatment and surgery in neighboring Tanzania. Tanzania? For a major operation? We raised our eyebrows, but then we chastised ourselves. Who are you to judge a dying man’s choice of an oncology ward? Maybe Tanzanian doctors have a smoother touch. We kept sending the money.

Then came D-Day. The week of the grand surgery.

That is when the entire theatrical production collapsed. The truth didn’t just leak out; it walked into the office and slapped us across the face. Kumbe tulichezwa!

There was no tumor. There was no oncology ward. There was no looming surgery. The man was as healthy as a high-altitude marathoner, playing a long, wicked game of charades while watching our hard-earned money stream into his phone. While the Scotsman was busy destroying his knees on tarmac for the cause, Fraudwood was likely sitting somewhere sipping a cold beverage, checking his M-Pesa balances with a grin. We hadn’t just been conned; we had been emotionally strip-mined.

This brings us to the sticky, hilarious, yet deeply tragic mud of pure ethics.

When you swindle Kenyans using a deadly disease, you don’t just steal their money. You steal their capacity to care. You poison the well of collective empathy. Fraudwood didn’t just break the law; he broke a sacred social contract. He turned our purest virtue, our willingness to carry each other’s financial burdens into an absolute punchline.

The next time someone genuinely stands up in that office with a real medical crisis, a tiny, cynical demon in everyone’s head is going to whisper: “Chief, are we sure this isn’t another Tanzanian excursion?”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you ruin the world for everyone else.

The sky was a chameleon at this hour. As the sun dipped behind the hills, the orange bled into a bruised lavender, shifting moods like a restless spirit. Outside, the cows were being lowed back into the abila, their bells clanking, a metallic heartbeat marking the end of a day that moves by a different clock than the one on my wrist.

In the village, time isn’t a sequence; it’s a weight.

For us city dwellers, dinner was served with an unsettling punctuality. By seven, we were already huddled around the table, the house full, the air thick with the kind of bonding that only happens when you’re forced to trade your glowing screens for old stories.

Then came the knock.

It wasn’t a polite tap. It was a demand.

Min Aboy didn’t just enter the room; she wove herself into the conversation, effortless and fluid, as if she’d been sitting there all along. She brought with her the scent of woodsmoke and authority. Before her shadow even hit the floor, her voice claimed the space.

“Oyimoreuru!” she rang out. A sharp, melodic announcement. “Peace be upon this house,” she said, though peace is a quiet word for a woman who brings so much life.

“Oyimore ahinya, Min Aboy. Karibu e mesa,” my mother countered, her voice warm with the rhythm of hospitality.

Min Aboy’s eyes, quick and observant like a hawk’s, settled on my sister and me. “Aneno ka jo-town osechopo dala,” she remarked, a playful needle aimed at the city dust we were still trying to shake off our shoes. She spoke of our arrival not just as a visit, but as the return of seedlings to their original soil. We shifted on the sofa , a communal realignment to create a space that hadn’t existed a moment ago.

She sat, and the air seemed to thicken. She didn’t just talk; she performed. But then, she leaned in, her voice dropping into that low, conspiratorial register that usually precedes a scandal or a revelation.

“Iwino ni ya ji oneno Rosa e gweng’ ni kawono?” she murmured.

Have you heard people saying they saw Rosa around the village today?

The table froze.

Even the spoons paused mid-air.

“Rosa?” Aunt Atieno asked slowly.

“The same Rosa?”

Min Aboy nodded.

And just like that, a story that had slept for twenty-two years woke up and stretched its limbs across the dinner table.

Rosa came to live with her uncle after tragedy had already claimed too much of her childhood.

Her parents died within months of each other, leaving her behind like a sentence that had been started but never finished.

She arrived at the homestead quietly. A thin girl with watchful eyes and the cautious politeness of someone who had learned early that life can shift beneath your feet.

Her aunt tried her best.

But grief has a way of making people present and absent at the same time.

And Rosa learned to become invisible.

Invisible girls move through the world like shadows. They fetch water, gather firewood, sweep compounds, cook meals and somewhere in the quiet spaces between those duties, they grow up.

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Aunt Atieno cleared her throat slightly and leaned back, the way people do when they are about to pull something heavy from memory.

“ Aparo Juma no ,” she began slowly, “ne wachiew Saa achiel gi nus mar okinyi .”

Not because there was work waiting.

Because something felt wrong.

Rosa had not returned the previous evening.

At first nobody panicked. In the village, worry walks slowly. You give the night time to correct its own mistakes.

But morning came.

And Rosa’s bed was still empty.

“At first I thought she had gone to the river early,” Aunt Atieno said. “You know how girls sometimes do that before the sun becomes stubborn.”

But the river was quiet.

Her yellow jerrycan was still leaning against the wall.

That was when uneasiness began spreading through the homestead like smoke from damp firewood.

By mid-morning they were already asking around.

Had anyone seen Rosa?

Someone said they had seen a girl walking toward the market the previous afternoon.

Someone else said the rain had made it difficult to see clearly.

So they began walking.

From the homestead.

Down the narrow path.

Toward the market.

They retraced her path.

Step by step.

As if footsteps could be remembered by the soil.

But the rain had done what rain always does.

It had erased the evidence of small rebellions.

“At one point,” Aunt Atieno said, “I stopped on the path and looked up.”

She paused there.

Her fingers slowly tracing the rim of her cup.

“I asked the heavens something that day.”

She looked at us.

“Kiyie to Nyasaye nyisae madhi e chiro?”

Which path did God take her through?

Because in that moment something dawned on her.

Rosa had not simply gotten lost.

She had left.

You see, Rosa was not just any girl in that homestead.

She was Awiti’s cousin.

And Awiti had been married for four years without a child.

In those days tradition had its own solutions.

Quiet ones.

The kind discussed under trees by elders whose voices carried the authority of custom.

Sometimes a younger girl from the family would be sent to “help” the marriage produce children.

Rosa had quietly become that solution.

A body meant to patch a silence that was never hers.

But somewhere between the river and the firewood paths, Rosa had already begun writing her own story.

That was where she met Solomon.

People called him Solo.

He ran his uncle’s duka at the market. A tall boy with restless eyes and a smile that carried the quiet promise of trouble.

Their meetings were simple at first.

At the river while she fetched water.

Along the path while she gathered firewood.

Sometimes they spoke.

Sometimes they simply walked.

Young love rarely arrives with drums. Often it begins in silences where two people suddenly realize the world has shifted slightly in their presence.

Soon the river became their meeting place.

Sometimes just before dusk when the village was too busy preparing dinner to notice two young people standing too close beside a slow river.

He promised things.

Young men always promise things.

“Abiro gero ni ot kumabor gi kae.” I will build you a house far from here.

“Wanyalo dhi kisumu kata Nairobi ” We can ether go to Kisumu or Nairobi.

“Ok ibi ting’o yien kata moto kendo” You will never have to carry firewood again.

Promises are a peculiar currency of youth. They are minted freely because the future still feels infinite.

Saturday was market day.

The village would be distracted.

Paths crowded.

Voices bargaining over tomatoes and goats and second-hand jackets.

Perfect chaos.

Solo would be at the duka.

All Rosa had to do was reach the market.

The rest, he said, would take care of itself.

That afternoon the sky darkened unexpectedly.

Clouds gathered like elders forming a quiet council.

Rosa left the homestead.

No one noticed.

Then the rain came.

Not ordinary rain.

The kind of rain that turns paths into rivers.

The kind of rain that erases footprints.

By evening Rosa was gone.

The room fell silent after Aunt Atieno finished.

Not the comfortable silence of people finishing a meal.

But the heavy one that settles when memory opens an old door.

Outside, the cows had long settled into the abila, their bells now only an occasional dull clink in the darkness.

For twenty-two years the village carried that story.

Rosa disappeared.

The rain swallowed her footsteps.

And the village slowly folded the story away like an old letter taken out only when the evening was long enough for memory.

Then Min Aboy leaned forward again.

“But today,” she said softly, “she came back.”

A spoon slipped from someone’s hand and tapped against a plate.

“She arrived in a car.”

No one laughed.

Because in villages like ours time does something strange when someone disappears.

We freeze them at the age they left.

But the world continues moving.

Twenty-two years later Rosa stepped out of a car to attend the funeral of the uncle whose homestead she once left behind.

Not the girl who fetched water at dusk.

Not the girl whose path they tried to retrace.

But a woman who had walked a road none of them knew.

And perhaps somewhere along that road, the heavens had answered Aunt Atieno’s question.

Kiyie to Nyasaye nyisae yoo madhi e chiro.

Which path did God take her through?

Maybe the answer was never meant for the village.

Maybe it was always meant for Rosa alone.

Nairobi rains have a sense of timing that can only be described as premeditated malice. It is not random; it is organized possibly unionized. It’s never 8:00 PM when you’re safely indoors. It’s never 10:00 PM when you’re tucked under a duvet. No. The clouds wait. They hover. They consult their watches. And the moment the clock strikes 5:00 PM the precise second the Kenyan corporate slave dreams of freedom the heavens decide, Sasa tuanze. Let’s begin falling with the fury of a landlord whose rent is overdue.

I stood there, watching the CBD turn into a swamp, and made a quick decision: I’d take an Uber. Of course, when Kenyans say “Uber,” we don’t necessarily mean Uber. Bolt, Uber, Little… whatever. In Kenya, every ride-hailing app is Uber. It’s like how every detergent is Omo and every transparent tape is Sellotape. We are a people of brand-name convenience, even when the app on our screen is clearly green. Even the driver himself might say, Niko Uber, while driving a Bolt.

For a moment I just stood there watching the streets dissolve into chaos, water swallowing pavements, people hopping over puddles with the optimism of gamblers. And I found myself wondering something slightly philosophical for a man whose socks were slowly absorbing water.

Maybe the rain is a metaphor.

It doesn’t arrive to nourish. It arrives to disrupt. A sudden flood, much like the promises of progress that pour endlessly into our timelines and speeches loud, convincing, and everywhere yet somehow we still find ourselves standing in the same puddles.

So we adapt. We improvise.

We roll up our trousers, find stones to step on, laugh about it with strangers.

But deep down, I think we all know something uncomfortable.

The storm was never unexpected.

It was always coming.

Seven minutes later, a silver Toyota pulled up, looking slightly tired but determined. I hopped into the front seat. It’s a risky move a silent contract that you are ready for a podcast-length conversation. The driver, a man with the calm disposition of someone who has seen the worst of Nairobi’s traffic and survived, adjusted his mirrors. He was a talker. Most of them are. They are the unofficial therapists of the city, hearing secrets that even priests wouldn’t be able to handle.

Before the car had fully merged into traffic, he said, “Hii mvua imeanza mapema leo.”

I laughed. “Mapema? This rain has been waiting since 8:00 AM. Five o’clock is just its official launch time.”

He laughed the laugh of a man who has heard every passenger theory about weather. We joined traffic that was moving at the breathtaking speed of two meters per minute. Bodabodas’ zipped past us. A matatu behind us was playing gospel music at a volume that suggested the driver had unresolved issues with the devil.

Then, the driver took his phone from his pocket and placed it on the dashboard. The wallpaper was a woman stunning, radiant; the kind of beauty that makes you wonder how the driver managed to “overachieve” so significantly.

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“My wife,” he said, noticing I had noticed. He smiled in that proud but tired way men do when life hasn’t quite kept up with their plans. “She’s a biochemist. Topped her class, too.”

I nodded, impressed. “Is she practicing?”

“Practicing? My brother, she is currently a science teacher at a local primary school. Teaching Grade 4 kids about the parts of a bean while she has the capacity to synthesize the cure for things we haven’t even named yet.”

“Campus sweethearts?” I asked.

He smiled. “Of course. That’s where all dangerous love stories start.”

He pulled over to let a reckless matatu overlap. Then, he dropped the wisdom.

“You know,” he said, gesturing to the phone, “a wife is like a luxury handbag. You want to carry her with you everywhere. You want the world to see the craftsmanship, the value, the pride of what you have. But circumstances... the system... they force you to leave the handbag at home. You go out into the world alone because the world isn’t ready for her weight.”

We sat in silence for a moment, the wipers rhythmic against the glass. Swish. Swish. The sound of wasted potential.

The conversation drifted, as all conversations do, to the “system” the Great Kenyan Failure. We talked about how we’ve become a nation that exports its brains because we don’t have the stomach to feed them. We are a talent farm for the West, training engineers and doctors to teach primary school, and scientists to drive Vitzs’.

“The system hasn’t failed,” he said, his tone turning sharp as we neared my destination. “The system is working exactly as intended. It’s an extraction machine.”

As I reached for the door handle, the rain finally began to ease into a drizzle. The driver turned to me, his eyes reflecting the neon glow of a nearby pharmacy sign. He asked me a question that has been echoing in the chambers of my mind ever since: “Tell me, my friend. If Kenya finally industrializes... if we become food self-sufficient and every biochemist is in a lab instead of a classroom... if the people are full and the youth are busy... what will the politicians have left to hand out in exchange for our votes?”

The matatu smelled of pine air freshener and old sweat. The radio was on. And then it came: that synth line, that familiar Luganda flow. The song was Gutamiiza by Radio & Weasel.

The driver was tapping the steering wheel, oblivious. But for me, the world folded in half. It was her song-the one that used to pull her from whatever corner of the room she occupied (cooking, reading, or simply staring out the window with that faraway gaze) and set her swaying like a reed in a breeze. I’d watch her then, hips syncing to the rhythm, her laughter bubbling over the lyrics like an unexpected chorus.

My body remembered before my mind did. First, it was my foot tapping against the matatu’s grimy floor. Then my head, giving a slight, involuntary shake. By the time the chorus hit, a tremor ran through me. There, sandwiched between strangers, I was dancing. Just a quiet, internal shudder, but a dance nonetheless. The images reeled: the two of us laughing, our shadows giant on the bare wall, the heat of her back under my palm as we shuffled in that cramped space. In my tiny bedsitter, where the single bulb swung a lazy yellow light, she was there again.

But before the dancing in my tiny apartment, before her laughter learned the shape of my ceiling, we had to meet in the neutral light of the world someplace public that didn't yet belong to us.

It was mid-July. The sun was a pale coin behind the clouds, a splash of deliberate color against the grey tarmac, when I first saw her.

They say some people are born for the sun; she was one of them. She wore a yellow blazer that caught the light like a flare, turning heads without effort. The next day, it was a pink kikoi draped over her shoulders, vibrant and unapologetic, hugging her form in ways that whispered of curves sculpted by some divine hand—a testament to the earth’s generosity. And that morning? A bright orange waterfall poncho cascading over her like liquid fire, making her look angelic, ethereal, as if she’d stepped from a fresco in a forgotten chapel. Her smile to the boda guy who dropped her was wide and genuine, revealing teeth like polished pearls and dimples carving soft valleys in her cheeks. She was beauty incarnate not the fleeting kind peddled in glossy magazines, but the sort that lingers.

Then, poof! two weeks of absence. I scanned the stage daily, my heart a foolish sentinel, but she vanished like mist over a Lake. I gave up, or so I told myself, resigning to the wry humor of fate.

One evening, leaving work with the city’s fatigue clinging to me like exhaust fumes, I caught a vague silhouette in the matatu queue. It looked like her. In a burst of chivalry (or desperation), I surrendered my seat to a middle-aged mama laden with shopping bags, standing the whole rattling ride from town to Fedha just to confirm. When the light caught her profile—those thin, oversized, clear glasses resting softly on her nose like a scholar’s afterthought—my heart skipped what I once called a beat.

“This is your moment!” my mind screamed. But my legs were stone. The bus hissed to her stop. She alighted. I don’t know how I got off, my boots felt heavy, yet I moved like a magnetic pull was dragging me through the crowd I found myself behind her, my face arranging itself into a fearful smile.

“Hi.”

She turned. There she was, in her full glory. The orange poncho was gone. Today, it was a simple dress the color of red earth. It was odd, and yet entirely right.

“Oh! Sorry, I was drawn to…” she started, her voice carrying that Ugandan lilt, a slow, sweet roll of words.

“You don’t need to use a bike today,” I said, immediately regretting how strange that sounded.

She laughed. Soft. Unoffended.

“And why is that, stranger? Planning to carry me on your back?”

“No,” I chuckled, wits scrambling. “Just... walk with me? The evening’s too kind to waste on exhaust.”

She considered, then nodded. “Alright. But only if you tell me why you’ve been staring like I’ve got something on my face.”

Her name was Namazzi.

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That walk stretched into mornings. Every day after, I’d save the window seat for her in the matatu, watching Nairobi blur by as she leaned against the glass. “Tell me about home,” I’d say, hungry for her world.

“Uganda, you mean,” she’d reply, her accent a melodic lilt, rolling Rs like gentle waves. “Dad’s from there—Kampala born and bred. Mom’s Kenyan, so I’m a bridge between two worlds.”

“First time in Nairobi?” I asked.

“Third,” she smiled, that ship-anchoring smile. “But first time staying this long.”

She had just landed a job, fresh out of Makerere. She was staying with a relative near Nyayo. She said it casually, but I could hear the bravery tucked inside those sentences.

“You’ve only been here twice before?” I asked.

She nodded. “I think cities reveal themselves differently when they know you’re staying.” She added, “And you? What do you carry, besides that notebook I see you scribbling in?”

We started hanging out—coffee spots turning into evenings at my place.

“My goodness,” she told me one evening as we sat in my apartment, flipping through her family photo album. “I never knew a man could speak this much. Don’t you ever run out of words?”

“Only when I’m looking at you,” I said.

She paused, her finger resting on a photo of her sisters.

“I write stories,” I confessed one night, as she stirred something aromatic on my tiny stove. Her eyes lit up, moth-wing lashes fluttering. “Have you ever written about someone like me?”

“Not yet,” I lied.

It wasn’t entirely true. I had written a poem titled The Scent of Sunshine and tucked it deep into my drawer. It was too raw, too exposed. It spoke of the way her laughter unknotted the tension in my shoulders, and how the scent of her hair a mix of coconut and sunshine, lingered on my pillow. I was afraid it would expose the quiet, desperate awe I held for her. Instead, I read her other poetry.

“This one reminds me of you,” I’d say.
“Does it?” she’d tease.

She, on her end, would command my small kitchen. She’d cook Oluwombo that filled the tiny apartment with the scent of steamed banana leaves and groundnut sauce, or a startlingly good spaghetti carbonara. I would sit watching her move, seeing the concentration on her face and the way she’d hum; I would anticipate not just the meal, but the entire, precious ritual of her presence.

One year down the line, she was still there: a constant, colorful thread in the fabric of my life. Then, the thread began to fray. She became vaguely distant. Our phone calls grew shorter.

“My dad is in town,” she’d say, her voice laced with something unspoken.
“What if this is my chance to meet him?” I’d prod, trying to sound light.
“Maybe,” she’d reply, the word hanging in the air between us.

Then, the spare keys I gave her stopped turning in the lock. I’d come home to a neatly arranged space and a sticky note fluttering: “Was here. Left you some tea. Miss you.” But those visits ceased. No more letters, no more scents of her cooking lingering. Devastated, I paced the bedsitter, whispering to shadows. She left just like that? Without a goodbye? I ached to board a bus to Kampala, chase her across borders, and demand answers from the water that had quenched me.

Now I hunt fragments in every woman: I look for her accent, her cooking that fed the soul first, her presence that lightened cramped spaces. This thirst has never been quenched.

A friend of hers, one I still touch base with, mentioned she’s in Frankfurt now. Thriving, perhaps. But clarity eludes me. Where did she truly go? Why the silence? Sometimes, late at night, I wonder if she’s out there, dancing to our song, her beauty unchanged in all her forms, still love. Or if, like water, she’s evaporated entirely, leaving me to chase vapors in the wind.

I think I will carry a dictionary to the next session.

She said epistemic and paused, as if waiting for it to land. It didn’t. It hovered between us like a bird that had flown into the wrong room.

“Do you know why you left the building?” she asked,

“Not that I care,” I replied, staring at a smudge on her mahogany desk. “I just wanted to be off that floor. The walls were closing in, or maybe I was just expanding too fast for the room.” She nodded. Therapists do that a lot. They nod the way people do when they want you to keep going without interrupting the story.

A lot has been going on. Not loudly. Just a quiet transition one I can’t quite catch in the act. You wake up one day and realize something has shifted. You’re still standing in the same place, but the ground feels unfamiliar.

Sitting there, I grew curious. What draws them to other people's pain? Are they just standing on the riverbank, watching the rest of us drown to study the ripples?

Maybe it’s an escape for them. Maybe they are like deep-sea divers who have learned to breathe underwater so they don’t have to face the thin, dry air of their own lives. They sit there, cool and fluid, while we are tidal waves of mess and memory. How can all that emotional dumping not erode them? You’d think they’d eventually burst their banks, but they just remain still, reflective, like a lake that hides its depth under a glass calm surface.

She sat there writing. Pen steady. Eyes alert. At some point, I felt like she had cast a spell on me. This was just her job. Or maybe she was just the gravity pulling the tide out of me. I was spitting things out, a dam finally breaking, and she just watched the water rise.

Why I ended up there is still hard to explain.

That day, my shift had started like any other. And yet something was off. No reason. No trigger. Just a feeling. I left without telling anyone. Went home. Sat down. And then it came.

That feeling.

Like running out of breath while sitting still. Like your body panicking without informing your mind. She called it a panic attack.

I remember thinking, hizi shida za matajiri zilinifikia lini?

The session slowly became an interrogation, except I was answering willingly.

The idea of therapy hadn’t even been mine. It was all Patricia’s the woman I was seeing then. She’s the one who handed me the contact, a referral that felt like a polite way of saying I was too much for her to carry. I wanted to ask how she knew this doctor, what history lay in the silence between them, but that would stir a fire I wasn’t ready to fight.

That was last year.

Today, I found myself booking another session.

“I’ll be waiting,” she said, her voice calm, almost kind. They had moved from Upper Hill to Parklands.

When I arrived, she stood up and smiled. I reached out my hand. We met somewhere in the middle.

“Dr Nelima,” I said, “nice of you to have me.”

She gestured for me to sit.

“What have you been up to?”

“Just the normal,” I said. “Kazi, nyumbani, na kulala kwa wingi.”

English failed me there. Kiswahili carried the weight better.

“I loved your last Substack article,” she said.

At least she loves my writing.

I mentioned Tausi. Briefly. The way you mention a bruise without pressing on it, but she caught it. I watched her hand move across the notebook. What does she write in those margins? Patient is deflective? Patient is longing?

“What of friends, do you have any?” “How is your relationship with Tausi?” “Ok... as friends, though?”

Then, the career talk. “Still the same,” I told her. “You remember the nature of what I do.”

I explained why I was back. The feeling had returned that suffocating nearness of nothingness. Last time, she had mentioned that I isolate myself. She had also said almost casually that I might have a personality disorder. Labels that felt like heavy coats I didn’t want to wear.

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Now, I’m seated at Artcaffé near Aga Khan, watching the steam rise from a cup of coffee I can barely justify. Outside, the Parklands traffic is beginning to clot a slow, metallic pulse of people trying to get to places they aren’t sure they want to be.

I remembered a conversation with Mwalimu at work. I told her once that we are all broken, all of us carrying jagged edges under our Sunday best. But I never told her about this visit. I never told her what the doctor said about me.

I’m still in denial. Maybe acceptance is the first step to healing, but denial is a much softer place to sleep.

It’s likely just one of a million fragments spinning through my mind, searching for a landing spot. I’m constantly looking for ways to send a sense of calm and excitement to someone far across. I understand this sensation intimately; maybe you recognize it, too.

Some days, it’s a fire in your chest, an ache for a life that remains just out of reach. You can sense a turning point is close, yet your own body feels impossibly heavy, holding you back. You know you were built for a higher purpose, but the path to that “something more” is buried in a thick, grey mist. So you remain still, burdened by the potential of who you could become, while frustration starts to set in and turn sour within you.

I have to leave now. Mwalimu is waiting.

I walk out into the cooling air, the silhouette of the city skyline jagged against a bruised purple sky. I think about Dr. Nelima’s notebook. I think about the dictionary I’ll never carry. I think about the distance between who I am and who I’m pretending to be.

The engine starts. The radio plays something soft and detached. I drive into the neon blur of Limuru Road, reflecting on how to heal, while secretly hoping the fog never clears.

Because at least in the fog, no one can see how lost you actually are.

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I’ve really come to appreciate that my off day fell on Monday. While the rest of the world is frantically sprinting into the work week like they’re trying to outrun their own shadows, honesty it’s like nursing a hangover from the weekend. Even life seems a bit slower. Mondays don’t pretend fast they really are. The city moves slower, conversations are thinner, and even life feels less performative. It’s a good day to listen.

So on one such Monday tea going cold, phone face down, the kind of day that feels borrowed I decide to Watch the TV series MAID

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The world Alex inhabits is one of stained carpets and frayed nerves. The woman isn’t a Gypsy Queens she's an invisible ghost, scrubbing the baseboards of houses she’ll never own. Here shes weary, with hollowed eye and back bent by the weight of a toddler and a heavy vacuum. However, Alex is undeniably strong. She doesn't have the luxury of smoking "neat" whiskies; she measures her life in pennies and the desperate, suffocating math of a gas tank.

The moment that truly gutted me was when Alex looked at the wreckage of her situation and whispered, "I’m trying to piece together how I ended up here."

Alex’s story forces a question many of us avoid because it’s uncomfortable:
Are we really where we are because of our choices or is life just… doing us? Not a show about dramatic escape. It is about accumulation: of silence, of fear, of moments that don’t leave bruises but still bruise deeply. Alex leaves an emotionally abusive relationship without proof. No marks. No paperwork. No neat story. What she has instead is instinct, exhaustion, and a child whose safety matters more than explanation.

That decision to leave without evidence costs her everything. Housing. Stability. Believability. She must choose between returning to her abuser for shelter or facing homelessness with her daughter, Maddy. It isn’t heroic. It’s cruel. Life doesn’t ask her what she wants; it asks what she is willing to lose.

We like to believe life is a sequence of choices, neatly connected to consequences. It comforts us. It suggests control. But MAID quietly unsettles that idea. Some situations aren’t chosen, they arrive. Some challenges aren’t earned, they are assigned. And sometimes what we call a “choice” is simply the least destructive option available.

Watching Alex struggle pulled me backward to childhood, when life felt generous and uncomplicated. Back then, our only obligations were to eat, play, and sleep. We wandered into fields, swam in rivers, grazed time without naming it. Growing up felt linear then. Almost kind. life is still presented in a linear way: go to school, get a job, find love, maybe adapt a hobby, a car, build a house, look after your parents, retire. The script is seamless in anticipation. But adulthood introduces footnotes. Even what should be simple is layered with complexity.

No one warned us about black tax. Or toxic jobs disguised as opportunity. Or loving the wrong person and calling it patience. No one explained how exhaustion could become a lifestyle.

We also didn’t know that much of who we are our tastes, preferences, even our fears are shaped by proximity. By the people we walked with early on. We are fragments of our environments, carrying pieces we never consciously chose.

Affliction and adversities i have known. And I’ve learned this much: life is less about outcomes and more about it's activities. The becoming, not the arrival.

Alex isn’t brave because she is certain. She is brave because she moves while unsure. She answers a call she never made, never expected, and never wanted.

And one day, that final call will come for all of us. That one, no one misses. But until then man, am I living this thing. Day by day. We are alright. That much is certain. You will hike mountains so steep and descend ones that are gentle. You will rise again even after a fall. Not everything in the fridge will be fresh sometimes you’ll open it and find the fish has gone bad. That’s not neglect. That’s life

But tell me, when the phone rings at 3:00 AM and it’s Life on the other end…will you answer it because you want to, or because you have nowhere else to go? And if you don't pick up, does the ringing ever actually stop?"

Lie to Me

Sit close, my muse in this breathless night, shroud my soul in veils of blinding light;

Create a tale a sweet, melodic sin, of where my love ends and my dreams begin.

Speak to my heart the words it thirsts to hear, Though truth be ashes and the end be near.

Lie to me. With lips of crimson stain, soften the rhythmic sting of this beautiful agony.

Tell me your thoughts are anchored to my name, That in you there burns a kindred flame.

I seek no balm, no healing or truth, Only the mercy of your deception.

Whisper that hope still lingers in the air,

A ghost of joy to banish my despair; Swear that your steps shall never leave my side,

Though well I know how fast the shadows glide.

For when daylight dissolves the midnight charm, I wake to find an empty, silent cell.

Your secrets, dark as a raven wing, Within my breast shall never cease to sting;

But if we falter, if our bond should break, The fault is mine a cross for me to take.

Only for now, let truth and reason flee; Open thy lips, my love...

and lie to me.

It is a strange thing, the new year. We like to pretend it arrives with a clean slate, as though time is polite enough to forget who we were yesterday. But it doesn’t. It only teaches us about beginnings. And endings too. For even the Good Book reminds us better the end of a thing than its beginning.

So goodbye, 2025.

As this new year opens its doors, I find myself thinking about the places I visited last year. Not cities. Not buildings. But places within myself quiet rooms I had avoided for years, corridors I finally walked down, corners I sat in long enough to learn their names.

The Place Where I Let Love In

This, without question, was the most fulfilling thing I did last year.

Your heart knows things long before your mind gathers the courage to admit them. Love is not a feeling you can outrun. It will find you in the crowd, tap you on the shoulder, and ask you to sit down.

We are living in suspicious times. Everyone is hedging. Guarding. Calculating exits. So if you find someone who loves you someone patient and kind, someone honest, someone who genuinely seeks your welfare please, do not be difficult. Do not let your ego stand guard at the door of a good thing.

Good love is rare now. Almost endangered.

And love, I’ve learned, is never wasted. Not when it is given freely. Not when it is returned imperfectly.

The Road I Learned to Walk

Last year, I started walking.

Not for distance. Not for achievement. Just walking.

Ten hours behind a screen. Night shifts. The blue light drains the soul, this can convince you that your body is an afterthought. Walking reminded me that it isn’t. It’s a witness. It remembers what the mind suppresses.

I live in Ruai, where the land still breathes between houses, where roads feel unfinished and honest. Walking here feels like a conversation with myself uninterrupted, unhurried.

Sometimes clarity comes disguised as movement.

A Quiet Place Called Prayer

I don’t know how you define faith.

But I have come to believe there is something larger than me, something that wakes the sun daily and holds the fragile machinery of the human body together. Last year, I began to pray.

Not loudly. Not formally.

I pray while walking. While thinking. While trying to stay whole. Prayer became less about asking and more about acknowledging. It steadied me. Anchored me. It’s the only thing that held the frame together when the wind got loud.

Some practices don’t change your life. They keep it from falling apart.

Finding a Home in Words

Substack happened. I started leaking my thoughts onto the page. There’s something haunting about a stranger seeing you through a screen and understanding the frequency you’re vibrating at. It’s not about "content." It’s about being seen.

And so, as the new year begins, we continue.

We try to be better not only for others, but also for ourselves. We move gently. We listen more. We learn where we bruise easily.

And in all this, remember to be kind.

There is no such thing as too much kindness.

Below are a few images I carried with me through last year. I took them without knowing why. Looking back now, I think they were small attempts at paying attention.

The question “Why do we love beauty?” strikes at the heart of the human condition, yet the answer society provides is often a deceptive mirage. We chase a universal limitless Measure of “beautiful,” a chase that inevitably leaves us wanting. General standards die precisely where the individual begins. We are naturally drawn to aesthetics. It’s an instinctual, evolutionary pull toward vitality and health cues. That initial spark of physical attraction serves its purpose: it gets our attention. But herein lies the critical distinction: physical beauty attracts, but we are kept by much more.

This is why, as you grow older and gain wisdom, your standards shift. Superficiality loses its meaning. The world’s standards pale in comparison to the resonance of a compatible mind and a strong spirit. When it comes down to it, physical traits height, shape, whatever your initial ‘type’ might be lose their significance when weighed against the profound feeling of “home” you find in another person. The more you truly know them, the more those linear, general beauty standards dissolve.

True beauty isn’t a checklist; it’s a subjective, profound connection. It’s the feeling that your biochemistry is in a paradise-like equilibrium when you consider the possibility of a shared future. It is a force of nature that is less likely to change than the weather.

The Transcendence of Aesthetics

But there is a deeper question here: I think it’s safe to say that everyone, to some extent, has experienced some sort of perception of transcendent beauty. This recognition of beauty could be an encounter with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, a breathtaking sunset, or an extremely attractive person.

This innate attraction to beauty seems to be more than just instinctual. It feels unnecessary for mere survival. Where within the human person does this come from?

The answer, I believe, lies in the human spirit’s capacity for recognition of the divine, or perhaps simply the recognition of profound order and harmony. The universal “beauty” that we recognize in Bach’s music or a sunset is an echo of a deeper, foundational harmony that resonates within us. We aren’t just reacting to stimuli; we are recognizing something fundamental about existence itself.

When we transpose this capacity for recognizing transcendent beauty onto human relationships, the physical attraction is just the visible, immediate, surface-level harmony.

The “beauty” that truly matters is an echo of the soul. It’s the alignment of two internal worlds, a resonance of character and mind that mirrors the harmony we find in great art or nature. This non-physical beauty is the substance that keeps us, because it feeds not just the eye, but the soul.

You must center you. When you center yourself, you sieve accordingly. You stop playing Russian roulette in spousal selection, chasing a generic ideal that offers only fleeting satisfaction. The world might seek a “done up” woman, but a man who knows himself will seek the partner who aligns with his values, his spirit, his quiet certainties. We are drawn to beauty, yes, but we stay for essence. We stay for the character that makes the ordinary extraordinary. True beauty, the kind that endures all seasons real or imagined, transcends the physical realm and serves you best. It’s the beauty you would die defending because it feels less like a choice and more like destiny.

It’s been months since I last came here. The funny thing about moving out is how confidently you tell yourself you’ll be back every weekend as if adulthood honors weekend promises. The plan was simple: wait for the perfect Sunday. But perfect Sundays keep slipping away, replaced by errands, fatigue, and vague guilt. Until today.

I pushed the gate, and before I even saw her, the smell found me, the aroma rose like incense from an ancient altar, alive, insistent, pulling me in. Warm oil and dough. That subtle sweetness only chapatis from home seem to carry. When I stepped into the kitchen, Mams turned, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Itwo ni pod ing’e ka?” she said, smiling, eyes soft.

“I was kidnapped by life,” I joked.

“Life my foot. Go wash your hands and taste,” she said, sliding me a hot, soft chapati. It burned a little, but nostalgia burns too, so it felt right. Not just chapati scent's that hung now, but redemption. It washed over me, baptizing the guilt that had pooled in my chest for not ever visiting , drowning it like Pharaoh’s chariots.

“Cindy, Cindy, ter gigi ejikon!” she called out.

Cindy emerged from the bedroom, blinking like someone dragged from a different timezone. She had her math book open, pencil tucked behind her ear.

“You came?” she asked.

“I missed the food,” I said.

She made a face. “Just say you missed Mams. Sahii homework inaniua.”

Before I could answer, Mams chimed in: “Tinde ilal, kata goyo simu. You know it’s wrong.”

My dad. His presence needed no fanfare, but it filled the whole house. It was from those sharp, sweet guitar notes playing in the background, the familiar, slightly warped sound of an old cassette tape that had probably been chewed and spat out by the deck more times than I could count. I knew the song instantly. It was the smooth, rolling guitar lines of Embakasi by Les Mangelepa playing. A song of transit, of movement, of life unfolding in an uncertain city, now the soundtrack to my homecoming. Walked to the sitting room. There he was, dozing in his favourite chair, the chair that has survived every decade of our family life.

“Dad,” I whispered.

“Hm?” He opened one eye. “You’re here.”

“Adwa ng’iyo ka be u para”

He chuckled. “We remember you when we look at the electricity bill.” Then he closed his eyes again, smiling. That man.

Standing there, the room wrapped around me like a memory, suddenly I was ten again. Hearing the rumble of Dad’s music, smelling Mams’ chapatis frying, and watching Cindy argue with her homework, I was pulled back into the Sundays of our childhood. We grew up in a house that sought God on Saturdays. So Sundays… Sundays were for reflection. For quiet. For the slow unwinding of a family. Maybe that’s why they always felt almost holy. Sundays meant staying in bed till midday, unless Mams decided beds were a luxury we couldn’t afford. They meant the warm hush of afternoon naps. They meant those tiny gestures of love that parents give. Dad pretending not to check our homework, Mams ironing uniforms while muttering that warning that carried more love than authority:
“Rwak sweater koyo ng’ich.”

Sundays were always like this. Slow. Soft around the edges. A kind of hush that belonged only to our home.

Later, after eating more chapatis than my adult stomach could handle, I went to my old room. Lay on my old bed. The mattress sagged in the exact places it used to, like it had been waiting for me.

From the next room, I heard Dad call out, “Tomorrow unaenda job mapema ama utajifanya kuna public holiday?”

“Asubuhi na mapema,” I said.

“Good. Don’t grow up to be like these boys who oversleep and call it self-care.”

I laughed into the pillow.

There, in that small, sunlit room, something settled in me. A kind of longing. A kind of hope. I found myself thinking about the future I want. I want to be that dad. The one whose kids glare at me because my rhumba is too loud, but secretly love it. The one who sneaks old-school music into their playlists so that even in their adulthood, something in them will remember me.

Lingala na Benga inangoja Bibi na watoto wangu.
I hope wherever they are they’re choosing their own taste

Give me Les Mangelepa over Sauti Sol,
TP.OK over Watendawili,
George Ramogi and Dr. Osito Kalle over anyone who will be topping charts then.

Because Sundays carry stories.
And today, mine found its way home.

There exists an unspoken covenant between man and work. One side promises survival; the other, surrender. We trade our time for meaning, our dreams for security. And when the trade feels unfair, we still return day after day because in this broken arrangement lies our only sense of order. We call it purpose, but often it’s just fear of what might become of us without it. Man needs something to serve, even if it devours him.

My days have taken on a color I no longer recognize, a flat gray that settles on the mind like dust. Lately, they are not days at all, but repetitions: the same desk, the same streets, the same faces, the same questions circling in my head. And the same feeling. A bitter rage. Rage at myself for permitting this slow erosion, and rage at everyone else who seems to have found the map I lost.

It is not that I hate the world not yet. But every detail around me has become a sharp reminder that I am not yet living. The good news that meets my ears feels almost unpleasant. The laughter of other, joyous mouths irritates me. The same streets that once gave me the fondest memories now feel like the iron bars of a cage.

I love work. I truly do. I was raised to find dignity in it, to measure worth by the weight of my effort. I love being busy, productive the sense of shaping something, anything, with my hands or mind. But maybe, if I’m honest, I also love work because it’s all I’ve ever known. My one constant. My one safe addiction.

I’ve asked mysel did I stay busy because I had too much to do, or because I didn’t know who I was when I wasn’t working? Was it initiative, or was it escape? Maybe both. Because I do love molding things, but I can’t stand the man I become without something to mold. And therein lies the tragedy: that the very thing which kills us also gives us life. Work has stolen so much my joy, my time, my friends, my woman, my Sundays, even God. Yet if I stopped, I fear I’d die. What a curse. What a life.

Lately, though, I’ve found myself saying it out loud I resent my work. I resent what it’s turned me into. But then I pause and wonder, is it the work, or the environment? Because this was once an answered prayer. I once knelt for this chance, begged for this seat. And now I sit in it hollow, asking how much of myself I’ve left scattered along the way.

You wake up every morning with a kind of half-purpose one side alive, the other decaying slowly under invisible weight. The hours roll on, and there’s always music playing somewhere in your head. You nod along because that’s what people do. The world runs, builds, loves, and even dies and you, you just sit and wait.

Somewhere inside, you know it that this isn’t it. You can feel the pulse of something greater calling your name, but you can’t locate the door. You were made for more, yet you don’t know what more means anymore. And in that space between desire and direction, your heart starts to harden to life’s smaller joys.

Nothing is heavier than the life you haven’t lived.

But perhaps that’s the grace of ashes that from them, we can rise again. Maybe this isn’t the end but an interlude, the quiet between the breaking and the becoming. Maybe this exhaustion is just the soul’s way of telling you: it’s time. Time to start again, to pick up what’s left, to breathe new air, and to live truly live once more.

Because no matter how lost we get, there’s always light at the end. There always is.

It all started with one of those random phone calls that somehow spiral into something deeper. Tausi was on the other end, casually dropping “Hotdog za Cleanshelf ni tamu kuliko za Quickmart.” Laughed, intrigued by the conviction in her voice. I shot back, already salivating, wondering what magic Cleanshelf’s hotdogs were working. “Let’s try them kesho,” I said, already picturing the taste test. Who knew a simple debate over supermarket hotdogs could lead to a conversation that hits you right in the gut?

The next day, there we were, seated across from each other at a table, me sinking my teeth into this incredibly soft, perfectly prepared hotdog. The bun was fluffy, the sausage juicy yeah, she was right, it edged out Quickmart’s version by a mile. In approval all I could say was “hii inaslap” But as we savored those bites, one topic flowed into another, the way conversations do when you’re comfortable. I found myself recounting a story that had stuck with me, something raw and real that happened not too long ago.

That’s when I found myself telling her about Maurice.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Maurice never saw it coming.
“The wife never announced that she was leaving,” he told me.
It hit him like a punch to the gut. He knew things hadn’t been great, but he never thought she’d actually go.

He had a thousand questions, but they all collapsed into one simple word: Why?
Why would she do this?
Why couldn’t we work it out?
Why didn’t she tell me she was so unhappy?
Why wouldn’t she even talk to me about it?

Picture the scene, gritty and real. You’re Maurice, living the dream, or at least what you thought was one. You’re clocking in, planning for kids, picturing grey hairs with your queen by your side. Life’s on rails, sawa? You’re thinking, “Hii ni maisha yangu. I got this.” But life, bwana, life’s got a way of flipping the script faster than a tout snatching your change. For Maurice, it wasn’t just a plot twist it was a full crash. A nasty road accident, the kind that makes headlines, left him with an amputated limb. Suddenly, he’s not the guy he was. Can’t move like before, can’t hustle like before.

“This,” Maurice said, “is how you think your life will go.”

We all think that, don’t we?
That we have a handle on life… the job, the small victories, the children, the dreams. Until something happens, and it all comes undone.

It was in their fourth year of marriage when the accident happened. With medical bills piling up and the city bleeding his savings dry, so they packed up and retreated to shags, out there in Gem Malanga, where the air’s thick with dust and dreams don’t always survive. That’s when the cracks in his marriage with Grace started showing. Not little hairline fractures, hapana. These were rifts, mzee, wide enough to swallow promises whole.. That’s where the cracks widened into rifts. City life chewed up their cash, and shags life chewed up their love. Nyarmalo grew cold, distant, like a radio signal fading out.

He was no longer the man of the house or at least that’s how he felt because he couldn’t provide. And the woman he’d once called his anchor, Grace, the one we fondly knew as Nyarmalo, grew colder by the day.

I still remember their wedding: Grace in white, smiling as if eternity was something you could touch.
For better, for worse, they both said.

But when “worse” came, she left.

Gone was his witness to life, the woman with whom he’d planned to raise children and grow old together. In her place came silence and a fierce, unrelenting pain.

“For months, I couldn’t eat, sleep, or speak without crying,” Maurice said. His divorce lawyer, calm as stone, listened and then told him, “Boss, she was done with you long before she left.” Ouch. Cold, but real.

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As I recounted this to Tausi, somewhere between the second bite and the shared silence, I wondered what was running through Nyarmalo’s mind before she ghosted. Was it the pressure? The resentment piling up like unpaid bills? Or just a dream that no longer fit? I looked at Tausi, her eyes locked on mine, and I asked, “If it was us, ungestay?”

Tausi smiled faintly, her eyes searching for something deeper than words. I wanted to ask again, to press the question, but I didn’t. Instead, I took another huge bite of that hotdog soft, savory, slightly sweet. But this is where I pull my move and leave you hanging msee. The story doesn’t wrap neat. Life doesn’t either. Tausi’s answer? That’s for another day, another hotdog. So, you tell me what’s your call? If the accident hits, if the money dries up, if the vows start feeling heavy... would you stay?

It wasn’t supposed to mean anything.
Just a step, one careless moment when the light broke through the clouds and I thought why not? The air smelled of wet grass and the kind of stillness that comes after something has wept all night. I wasn’t trying to find meaning in it. But sometimes, even in the smallest gestures, the heart betrays itself.

When my foot sank into the mud, it felt honest, the kind of honesty that doesn’t speak but simply exists. The cold bit my skin, and the earth pressed against me with the quiet insistence of something that has seen too much. It didn’t reject me; it welcomed me with that heavy tenderness the world offers when it knows you’ve run out of ways to pretend.

I looked down, later, at the mess I’d made, the stains climbing up my ankle, the dirt in the creases of my skin. There was a strange intimacy in it, this mark of having chosen wrong, of having wanted to feel even when it would cost me cleanliness.

We all do it, don’t we?
We play in the puddle.
We mistake the shimmer for safety.
We step in because we want to remember what it’s like to be unafraid, to feel without calculating the aftermath.
And when the mud dries, when it cracks against our skin, we call it regret. But perhaps it’s only proof that we were alive enough to forget ourselves for a moment.

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The past few weeks have been hard on me. Work has been relentless, and my finances well, let’s just say the math has not been mathing. But life has a way of balancing itself. For every sharp stone, there is a soft patch of grass. My soft patch has been Tausi. I’ll tell you about her another day, because today is not about her.

Today is about the keys I forgot, my house keys. Not in some chic office, but right there at t Mama Mona’s corner my local Soko. A cardinal sin for a man who considers himself habitually vigilant. It was the necessary return journey, that gifted me this column. There is a gospel truth I cling to: where women converge…the salon, the soko, the water point that is where the stories are baptised. It’s where the raw, unfiltered stories of life is woven, piece by delicious piece. And as I hovered, pretending am fascinated by her neatly stacked orange,, I became an invisible mamber of the story. Taking a bite into the siced orange, the smell of fresh coriander tangled with my nostrils. A women in bright lesos leaned on the despay stand picking her tomatoes, another man with a wheelbarrow full of sugarcane shouted “twenty bob twenty bob” and moved on. A Thursday afternoon it was, the kind of day where everything feels both chaotic and ordinary.

And just like that, between the smell of overripe mangoes and the sight of oranges stacked too neatly to be natural, a story unfolded

“Imagine alienda hadi Uganda kumtafuta,” one woman said, her voice rising above the clatter of coins

“Mwanaume hachungwi,” Mama Mona replied, slicing through the air with her words as she packed sukuma into a polythene bag. “Lakini nasikia walirudi.”

“Sikuhizi aliamua kunyamaza,” the friend added

This simple scene, a familiar dance of gossip. Yet, the lesson settled in. It was the story of Mama Kate.

Mama Kate, the original version, was noise. A human siren. She was the one who corrected, who complained, who made a public fuss over every perceived wrong from a misplaced sock to the monthly remittance. Her life was a constant argument with fate, and her husband the primary audience. But what struck me now was the quiet update: “Sikuhizi anakuanga amenyamaza.” She grew quiet.

Mama Kate’s husband had gone to Uganda years ago, and the whispers followed him there “another woman,” misused money, pension squandered, school fees swallowed by smoke. Mama Kate had fought then, loud and sharp. She boarded buses to Kampala. She confronted. She demanded. She carried her hurt on her tongue, repeating it to anyone who would listen.

But now? Now she is silent.

Her husband is back in Kenya, sick and bedridden. She looks after him. Pays the bills. Buys the medicine. She no longer reminds him of the money he blew, or the woman she once caught him with, or the months he went without sending home a cent. Silence is her answer when she pays for bills that her husbband should have taken care of but neglected.

The previous Mama Kate fought to be heard. This new Mama Kate fights to be left alone with her dignity. She has moved beyond needing to justify her pain or her husband’s flaws to an audience. The silence is a shield, yes, but also a judgement more brutal than any spoken word. It’s the final, unforgiving veto on a conversation that was never going to solve anything.

Perhaps, in that quiet, Mama Kate regrets the noise. Maybe she wishes she had been silent years ago, when a quiet glance could have communicated volumes more than a screaming match. The noise was for him; the silence, I suspect, is finally and entirely for her. It is the ultimate act of self-possession: refusing to expend her precious, finite energy on a man who never learned to listen.

She didn’t find the lesson in a seminar; she found it at the coalface of a damaged life. Her silence isn’t surrender. It’s the sound of a woman who has finally realised her peace is more valuable than his chaos.

And that, retrieved from the scent of oranges and the wisdom of Mama Mona, is a louder lesson than any I have heard all year.

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Time has a way of mocking us. We chase it, as if it owes us something. We mark and count it with alarms and calendars, hoarding it, as if it can be stored away like coins in a tin. But time is slippery. It doesn’t belong to us. It moves whether we notice or not, whether we sprint after it or sit still. Marcus Aurelius said it best: “Time is like a river made up of events, and its current is strong; no sooner does a thing appear than it is carried away, and another comes in its place.”

I was reminded of this on my second day back in the village.

Picture yourself outside a road side kios taking a sip from a bottle of soda its glass bottle cool with dew this was me. The air here hasn’t changed. It still carries that old perfume damp earth, the faint sweetness of banana trees after rain. Nairobi has smells too, but they’re impatient: exhaust, ambition, desperation. The city smells like things that want to leave you however the village, ooh here things smell of staying.

I spent the day with Sam, an old friend. He runs a duka by the roadside, a small wooden shack with a sliding shutter. Inside: sodas, loaves of bread, cooking fat, soap, and credit. “be mandas ntie?” a customer would inquire and Sam on the other end of the metal rail will be all smiles. This was his kingdom of small needs. To me, it looked like a normal kiosk. To him, it was a dominion a livelihood

With the warmth of old comrades we laughed about nothing. Shook hands like men who have seen things. I bought a soda, cold in a glass bottle, and we sat outside on a weathered bench that has survived more behinds. "Nairobi treu nade" these words kindled our true exchange, trailing the usual pleasantries, my gentle asks into the well being of his mother and wife, for as the river of years carves its course, we recount the big and the small, the subtle shifts and seismic upheavals that have etched themselves between our yesterdays and today, all wowen into that unhurried conversation. Eventually, the words trickle out. About life and its detours. About family and its demands. About money the endless chase. About politics noisy, hopeless, exhausting. we were not solving anything. We Were laying down the heaviness of being alive, side by side, like luggage at a bus stop.

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By midday, the conversation fades and while we said nothing. Silence sat with us like a third companion. You can’t have that kind of silence in the city.

At dawn it had been quiet, a lazy ribbon of dust. By noon, it was a vein, pulsing with life. School children poured out, their laughter sharp and bright. Women passed with baskets perched on their backs, their chatter rising and falling like music. Men pedaled bicycles, solemn in their nods, gravel crunching under their tires. Then a matatu thundered past, bass rattling the air a storm that disappeared as quickly as it came.

I watched it all, and it felt like watching breath itself. The village inhaled, filling with motion and noise. By dusk, it exhaled. Children vanished into homes. Mothers called. The road emptied. Quiet returned, slow and final.

And it struck me: this was time itself. Not the hours I chase on a clock. Not the deadlines I dread. But time in its truest form a rhythm, a tide, a breath.

All my life I think time is ours. That we control it, bend it, manage it. That our busyness creates it, our idleness stretches it. But the truth is simpler, harsher, more liberating:

Time is not mine.
I belong to it.

It is the stage, not the play.
The canvas, not the stroke.

My life, my errands, my laughter, my grief is just a scribble on its surface. I’m an ant on a mound, believing I am forging a path, while really I’m tracing a design I cannot see.

And yet, unlike ants, we are aware that sometimes, we can step back and see it, even for a moment. That’s what Stoics meant when they said: live in accordance with nature. Don’t fight the river. Don’t curse the current. Sit on the bank once in a while. Watch it flow.

The sun slipped below the trees, painting the sky in amber and violet. Sam stretched, the bench groaning. “Another day has passed,” he said.

I nodded. It wasn’t regret. It wasn’t relief. Just truth. Another day had passed, and I, like the village road, had breathed it in and out.

I read somewhere that death doesn’t knock. Instead, it invites itself with so much charm, like a child playing with a venomous snake giggling, oblivious, fearless. One moment you’re laughing together, the next you’re left hollow, wondering how joy could have turned into mourning so quickly.

It's in Sakwa, where the sun kisses the earth with a stubborn glow, life was a string of small acts, the clink of pots, the smell of burning wood, the crunch of dry leaves under bare feet. That’s where my mother met Nyartanga, a friend so close she wasn’t just in my mum’s life she was stitched into it.

She wore names the way some women wear bangles - effortlessly. Min Abeny when the village wanted to remind her she was Abeny's mother, Aisha when her Tanzanian roots peeked through, Nyarloka when the older women teased her about marrying far from home. And yet, somewhere between washing clothes at the lake and gossiping under mango trees, she learned Dholuo so fluently you'd think she'd been born with the language on her tongue.

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Nyartanga didn’t look like the rest of us. Her beauty? A quiet contrasts in a land where everyone wore the same deep, earthen hue. born of Tanzanian roots (hence the name), she married into our homestead just two weeks after my mother, courtesy of my father’s cousin… who, in our Luo mathematics, was my father’s brother. Her skin was lighter, the kind of complexion that made elders murmur and secretly compare her to sunrise on the lake. And she was beautiful in that quiet, unfair way … not the shouty, “look at me” beauty, but the kind that catches you mid-sentence and makes you forget what you were saying.

She was also a worker. Not just hardworking, Nyartanga-hardworking. She had that stubborn kind of energy that made even lazy people tired just watching her. "kawuono imondo ne puotho?" my mum would ask when she found her bent over a shamba before dawn. "Nyaka atiek chon" Nyartanga would reply, shrugging, as though farming, fetching water, washing, cooking, and still having the energy to laugh was nothing worth mentioning

The two of them, my mother and Nyartanga were like two verses in the same song. They washed clotheys in the lake, the water clapping against stones as they gossiped about everything and nothing. They carried firewood together, their laughter spilling into the paths like breadcrumbs.

Did I mention her pilau? My people are loyal to “kwon bel” like it’s a religion. Rice (mchelle) is viewed as suspicious food, the kind you serve visitors you’re not particularly fond of. But Nyartanga’s pilau was something else. “Puonja tedo pilau kamae” my mum once teased her, sniffing the air thick with cloves. “Mae yot loso” Nyartanga said, winking, because apparently truth was a spice too. Even the most stubborn ugali eaters defected to her plate without shame. Her children were my mother’s children, and we were hers. She mothered us without hesitation, folding us into her days like it was the most natural thing.

They had just come back from weeding in the shamba. The sun was a bully that day, and Nyartanga complained of being tired. My mum still says it the same way to this day, shaking her head as if the words still surprise her: “Ne wayaa doyo to Min Abeny no wacho ni yaa okowinjo maber” we had just finished weeding when Min Abeny said she wasn’t feeling well.

Not the usual “give me a minute” tired, but something heavier. “An achach, nyamin. Chunya ool,” she murmured, sitting down. Abeny, her only child, began to cry, that strange, sharp kind of cry that makes everyone uneasy.

“Ber, bed piny e par,” my mum said, spreading a mat under the mango tree.

“An atwomo,” Nyartanga whispered, sinking down, her glow dimming like a lantern low on oil.

My mum ran to fetch Agunda, her husband, the clinic being far enough to demand more than one pair of hands. I stood by the small gate, five years old, watching them come back. Abeny’s wails didn’t stop. My mother knelt, touched her friend, and asked, “Nyartanga, in iriyo nadi?”

Silence.

Then my mum’s cry joined Abeny’s. Agunda bent his head, his shoulders shaking, the way trees bend when the wind is too much. No illness. No accident. No foul hand. She had simply collapsed, as if death had been walking alongside them in the shamba, waiting for its turn.

I met Abeny last week, and something in his eyes took me back to that day… that gate, that mat, that mango tree. My mother’s laughter never came back the same. It was quieter after that, like she’d lost not just a friend, but the part of herself that laughed freely.

Sometimes I wonder if she ever found another friend like Nyartanga. Or if, somewhere in Sakwa, under the whispering mango leaves, she’s still keeping company with a ghost only she can see.

Imagine you're sprawled on your couch,Spotify humming through your earbuds, and Remmy Ongala's Kipenda Roho starts to play. The guitar strums, raw and unhurried, pull you in. But it's not just the rhythm. It's her. My Mwalimu. Your thoughts turn heavy, like stones sinking into a riverbed, dragged down by the weight of her memory. You still love her. You always have. The song's refrain-kipenda roho, kipenda roho, feels like it's singing your truth, a stubborn pulse that refuses to fade, no matter how much time has passed or what she told you about needing space, about not being ready.

Kipenda roho hula nyama mbichi

Love doesn’t wait for the perfect moment. It doesn’t ask for a clean plate or a polished plan. It’s messy, unapologetic, and it feasts on what’s real, even when it hurts. You think of Mwalimu’s laugh soft, like she was letting you in on a secret. The way she’d tilt her head when you rambled too long, her eyes saying, I see you. That was enough to set your soul ablaze, to make you walk roads you didn’t know existed. And now, with Remmy’s voice looping in your ears, you’re back there, in the quiet moments when her presence felt like home.

They'll ask you why her. Why now, after she drew her line in the sand, saying she couldn't give you everything not yet, maybe not ever. They'll say you should move on, find someone who fits their neat little checklist for your life. But love doesn't hold elections. It doesn't care about their votes or their logic. It just is. You can't unfeel what you felt when she sat across from you that Saturday, her honesty cutting deeper than any rejection could. "I'd want to give it all," she said, and you believed her not because you're naive, but because you saw the truth in her eyes. She didn't break your heart; she spoke to it. And that's worse, because it means you can't hate her for it.

Kipenda Roho Haoni Wala Hasikii

Love doesn't wear glasses,. It doesn't do math. It doesn't care that she wasn't ready, or that I was already halfway to forever. It just kept loving.

Remmy wasn't just singing about lovers. He was singing about fools like you (that’s me) the ones who stay long after the goodbye. He was singing about hearts that don't ask for updates, that wait without bitterness, He was singing about how even a cripple walks when love leads the way.

“Mbele ya mapenzi, kiwete anatembea.”

Love doesn’t care about your flaws or hers. It doesn’t care that she’s not ready, or that you’re still waiting. It moves you forward, even when you’re limping. You remember waiting for her that day, her oversleeping after a long night of birthday laughter. You didn’t mind the wait. You’d wait again, because kipenda roho doesn’t count hours. It just wants to be near her, to hear her stories, to feel the fullness of her silence. That’s the holy terror of it, loving someone you can’t control, someone who doesn’t owe you a return.

What If you Stopped Fighting Love?

What if you stopped trying to "get over" her? What if you let your heart love her, quietly, without shame? Remmy's song dares you to consider it. Kipenda roho isn't about winning or losing; it's about existing in the truth of what you feel. Society screams about moving on, about finding someone new, but what if the real strength is in staying true to what your heart already knows? Mwalimu isn't just a person; she's a reminder that love, even when it's paused, even when it's unfinished, is still love.

So What Now?

Now, you hear the song.

“Kipenda roho, kipenda roho…”

And I think of her. Still

To Mwalimu, who walked into your life like a melody you didn't expect to love so fiercely. To the woman who taught you that love doesn't need to be loud to be strong. To the one who makes you want to be better, even when she's not beside you. You carry her not as a burden, but as a truth. And maybe one day, the door will open again. Maybe it won't. But kipenda roho doesn't panic. It waits, jacket on, heart steady, ready for whatever comes next.

And now, as the song fades out, you're staring at your phone, thumb hovering over a text you've drafted a hundred times. “Hey, My Mwalimu. Just heard Kipenda Roho and thought of you. Still do." You chuckle to yourself, imagining her face if you actually hit send.

Risky?……Sure. But when has love ever played it safe? Maybe tonight's the night you let your heart eat that raw meat one more time.