‘I love you,’ I remember texting you at some point. You laughed into my innocence, in the most customary way that I now know meant I would find more in life and maybe, fall out of that innocence that had blinded me. Being a year or two older, you read into my naivety but never shut it down. You rather let me unfold the life that I would come to learn is fraught with uncertainties.

We talked for close to a year before we physically met. In the meantime, I would be forced back home where, for up to two months, I would close myself in the one-room house, neither regularly having meals nor going out. My younger brother, God bless that kid, would bring food from the food kiosk my mother ran, and I would gulp on that meal as if everything depended on it. That single meal would help me survive the next 24 hours or so.

 I did not know what was happening to me. I had no words to describe my lack of enthusiasm at anything; at food, at life. There is a destructive darkness that is the process of finding oneself as a queer person. What I now know is that there was no way I would have survived the brutality of my existential crisis without you, Papai. For all those days, you, in Eldoret and I, isolated from the world and family, sending credit money, you ensured I had someone to talk to. I would, a year or so later, be able to join the university.

We never ended up as lovers, but we did meet. A few months before we would meet in person, I received a call from a young man who introduced himself as Edwin Kiptoo Kiprotich. ‘I stole your number from Papai,’ he said laughingly.

That is how I came to know Edwin, who, for some reason, you’d named Chiloba. I talked with him, joked about life, food, men, sex, everything. I remember once telling him how I could take him down in the bathroom where I was hand washing my clothes. ‘I will kiss you until you cannot breathe,’ I said.

Cheeky, Chiloba mesmerized me with his six-foot frame, his easy laughter and the quiet and yet genuine affection. There was no way on earth I would not have let him in, into a life that I had brutally constructed to sustain me away from direct homophobia. One day, during a visit in Nairobi, he came down to my place in Thika. A student with a roommate then, I was unable to host. Leaving for the countryside that evening, we stole our first kiss on a bus as we headed to Nairobi. It was hesitant; our lips brushing softly, our tongues tentatively closing the gap, the weight of secrecy pressing hard on our chests. Our eyes darted around, scanning the passengers, waiting to see if anyone had noticed. It was sweet, and, I must admit, slightly awkward in the way all first kisses are, but it was ours.

For the rest of the ride, I could not stop smiling. The city lights of Nairobi stretched out ahead of us, blue, red, green and everything in between, but all I could think of was how my life suddenly felt illuminated from the inside. Every other light could go dark, and yet, this one, flimsy as it could be, would forever remain lit.

What I did not expect then was that this light would soon intertwine with yours so quickly. You and Chiloba were friends and had known each other for more than a year. Chiloba, at 6 ‘2 from a largely working-class family in Bomet and you, at 5’ 8 from a wealthy background, were different in ways that made your bond remarkable, yet were connected by an unspoken understanding of what it meant to exist in a world that often refused to make space for us. Through Chiloba, I would come to physically meet you, and the trio of us would find a new kind of belonging.

I met you in a club, closer to the Moi University, West Campus, Eldoret. Hand in hand with Chiloba, we walked in and sat on the farthest corner of the one room that made up for a Keg joint.

I had never drunk before, at least not in a way that mattered. The first sip sent me into a face, sharp and contracted. I closed my eyes and swallowed my first sip of alcohol. I held my cup in my right hand, looked to the left and then slowly, straight where you and Chiloba, the two men who would shape my young life, stood engrossed in a conversation. Both of your faces showed curiosity and amusement, a smile here and a question there. You raised your cup in a silent toast. Chiloba smirked, waiting for my next reaction. I smiled back and took another sip of Keg, a drink that now connotes my coming-of-age as a queer black man and a sustaining love and friendship that would see me through undergraduate and a gruelling year in the job market.

The second sip was nothing like the first. I did not twist my mouth and close my eyes. I took it slowly, with the knowledge that the people with me had my back, and if the initiation into drinking were not to work, they would graciously lead me somewhere comfortable. Over the years, you and Chiloba would watch my face as my tongue would grow accustomed to the bitterness of Gin and Vodka.

Back then, there was no such thing as drinking too much. We could drink anywhere and whatever as long as the three of us were together. There were many nights of partying. Nights when, in Nairobi or Eldoret, we would wake up to cheap alcohol instead of tea. Vodka, Gin, Keg, every drink depended on how much we had. We drank so crazily that I began to think our lives would be wasted.

Those were nights of the future. That first night in that small Keg Joint in Eldoret began our lives, lives that would shape us for half a decade. That night, we drank together; I, you and Chiloba, three queer young men finding home in each other. We hugged, laughed and danced to tunes I can never recall. Chiloba and I were broke. You, being the kid from a wealthy family, offered to pay for everything, even our motorbike transport back home.

That was the night I found grace. That I first believed in love, in community and existence itself. It was the night that I learnt the dance in my body, when I tried and failed inexorably at sex and was kissed and held in Chiloba’s arms, anxious and crying. Cliche as it sounds, I can never forget that night; the night when everything came together in a world that was against us.

The next day, hungover, we woke up late, the air thick with last night’s laughter and the stale scent of cheap liquor that is Keg. In that dim, single room on the outskirts of Eldoret, we carved out a life—messy, fleeting, but strangely and incorruptibly ours.

It was a little life. We cooked on a stove in two dented sufurias, washed clothes in a plastic basin, and on each other’s arms, on our second-hand phones, we read each other poetry while laying on a thin mattress. I introduced Chiloba to Romeo Oriogun, to Essex Hemphill, Bhion Achimba and all the burgeoning Queer African poets then. In all of these, we delighted in highlighting lines that felt like home, reciting verses back to each other as if testing the weight of their truth.

And in between it all, the poetry verses and lines, there were hesitant touches and quiet discoveries. There was awkward, lovely, body discoverable sex that felt more like translation than instinct, as if we were still learning the language of our own bodies.

Unable to host in my bedsitter in Thika, for a good two years, I spent every few months on the road visiting Eldoret. The two of us, Chiloba and I, in a relationship, spending the day together and joining you in one of the numerous keg joints we frequented in the evening. Mostly intoxicated from the cheap liquor, we staggered home, awkwardly and firmly holding onto each other.