The kids come quickly; the first, then the second. But the job tarries for a while. You have an Education Arts degree, so you’re not so worried. Soon, you find a school in Machakos, and we’re all happy for you. They pay very well, you confide in me when you, Victor, and Oyoo come to my place, carrying booze you didn’t drink that one Saturday afternoon. But then you lose the job after a couple of months and are forced to send your family to Shags (upcountry) to stay with your mom as you hustle in this city under the sun. Still, you’re not worried. You’re young. You are a good Seventh-day Adventist. Your mom prays for you every night. And you just turned 26 the other day. There will be plenty of better opportunities. It’s only a matter of time, and time is the one thing you have in plenty. Towards the end of 2024, you land something. It’s not bad, you tell me vaguely. You ask when we can meet so you can share the details, and I say ‘one of these weekends’ because my editor wants three film review pieces from me, and at my full-time gig, there are TV Commercials and radio spots to be scripted. So I say ‘one of these weekends’ and end the conversation.

I would learn that you had gotten a nice apartment along Ngong Road. It was not a two-bedroom with a balcony and neighbours who didn’t talk to each other, but it was cosy enough. And you brought your wife and kids to join you. Your future was shaping up in front of you, just as you had dreamed it. In time, you’ll get a promotion at your new job. You’ll send your kids to fancy private schools where they speak English of the nose and call bread, sandwich. For your little family, you will build a big, elegant house in your ancestral land like a true Luo man, overlooking the lake in the ways of your ancestors. Then one day, when you are old and grey, when the kids are all grown and roosting away, when you are done looking, or whatever you were looking for in this city, you have found, you retire to this home overlooking Nam Lolwe. In the evenings, you sit on your balcony with your gracefully greying wife, sipping Soya like the staunch Seventh-day Adventist you are, gossiping about your kids, talking about time and memories, and the long life you’ve lived together. You watch that devastatingly beautiful Nyanza sunset get swallowed by the lake’s horizon, and you appreciate even more these golden years that you’ve worked for, that you’ve earned, that you deserve. This is how I choose to remember you, my friend.

In the memories I’ll carry with me, you will never have been run over by a reckless speeding car along Ngong Road. You will never have lain sprawled on a mortuary slab with a broken body. You will never have left a young wife and a grieving, ageing mother to pick up the pieces and try to move on. You will never have left two kids, the first just starting to learn what a father is, the second only months old. Unlike that vacuous downtown Kanjo, your life will have meant something. In my memories, you will be forever young, your youthful face untarnished by the mucky hands of time. But you will also live a long life and when the time is right, die an old man with spots on your hands and clouds in your eyes. This is how I say goodbye, my friend.

And yet I envy you. Unlike the rest of us who remain, you shall never experience the pain of losing, of being the one who remains when time is past and all that you loved is long gone. You will never know what time does to a body. When ‘muscles slacken, grip weakens, joints stiffen. The shades are pulled down on the world. You can’t come and go at will.’ This is how I pick up the pieces, my friend.

‘Thank Heaven. The crisis, the danger is past, and the lingering illness is over at last. And the fever called “living” is conquered at last.’⎈