Lunch Break and Everything in Between

I’m using those old wired earphones,they are dead on one side.So Jah Cure is singing into my left ear ,which means half of me is receiving free soul counselling and the other one is still employed.

Call on me Call on me

Wah.This man has no respect for a working Kenyan. You cannot release a song like that and expect me to keep chewing like a serious person at 1:07 on a Monday manze. I am sitting on a blue plastic stool with one short leg, outside a small hotel where the beans are always sweeter than they have any right to be, and my whole chest has decided today is the day.

Because I am thinking about her

Not the way you think about rent. The way you think about the smell of rain hitting hot dust near Kangemi. She stirs her tea for forty seconds too long. She laughs at her own jokes before the punchline arrives, which should be annoying and is instead my favourite thing on this Mama Africa. When she is happy she does not call me by my name, she just says “Wewe,” and somehow that one word carries more affection than an entire wedding.You may now kiss the bride.

And in my head, we are old.

We have a small house in Syokimau with tiles we argued about for three months. We have a dog with an unfortunate political name. Her mother has finally stopped calling me “that boy” and now calls me “mwanangu,” which took four Christmases upcountry and two goats. I am the one carrying the shopping bags because she is carrying the conversation. We are seventy. Her knees complain. I am pretending my knees do not.

Then the daydream does what daydreams do in this town. It changes lanes without indicating.

Because gone are the days we spoke about growing old. We used to say “when we are old” like it was a shop we had already paid deposit for. Now we say “let us see how it goes.” Forever got quietly downgraded to a maybe, and neither of us signed anything, and neither of us complained, and that is the part that sits in my throat.

You can miss someone who is still texting you. Nobody prepares you for that.

So here is what I have decided, on this chair, over these beans, with half a song in half my ear. If the ending is coming anyway, let it find me enjoying her, not rehearsing her funeral.

Let the jacaranda drop when it drops. I will still stand under the tree.

I wipe my hands. The sun is doing that Nairobi thing where it burns your neck while the wind lies to you about being cold. I am mellow. The kind of mellow where a man might text something he cannot take back.

Then my phone lights up.

It is the love of my life.

The lady clearing my plate looks at my face and pauses. “Kwani mbona macho yako ni red?”
Ni pilipili I tell her

She nods slowly.