You Are Still with Me

—James Baldwin, Just Above My Head.

The first news of your death would come from Facebook. A mutual that I had long forgotten would post: ‘What is that that I am hearing about Papai?’ Confused, I would spiral into a panic, go on a rampage, refreshing timelines, searching on the internet for answers. Teary, I would check on every available platform; Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp– anywhere that would hold a trace of you. Every question about life, about being, would ring in me. What had happened to you, my friend? What had gone wrong? Every platform had little to say. Clues could be deduced, but in that moment, in isolation, I would never find anything reasonable; just scattered whispers, half-truths, and silence where your voice should have been. You were gone, and just like that, the last of my coming-of-age friends was lost, forever.

I met you in very unusual circumstances. I was in my first year out of high school. Lost and depressed, I would not go to university that year. I had packed my bags, travelled from my hometown of Mpeketoni to Nairobi in the guise of admission, but had sneaked back to Mombasa two weeks later after a student protest paralyzed learning. It would only take a week, but by then, I was in Mombasa, having spent a quarter of the KSh 8000 that I had been given as admission fees.

My life in Mombasa was nothing remarkable. I stayed with an aunt, who, begrudgingly, due to blood relations, could not throw me out. I filled my days with a need to prove myself useful by assisting her in her second-hand clothes business. Every day except Sunday, I would wake up at 6 am, have breakfast, shower and by 8 am, I would be outside, clothes neatly arranged for sale. Earphones plugged in, I would spend the day there, only rising when a customer came around.

For four months, I did that without understanding my life. My reasons to be in Mombasa, held up selling second-hand clothes were inexplicable to me, leave alone my family. I could not go back home since I would have to explain, and I could not be at the University either since, unprepared for admission, I had not even picked my high school certificate. It was in that limbo that I would start speaking to you.

In the four months that I would be in Mombasa before ultimately having to face my family and be forced back home, although our conversation was, for most time, on Facebook and WhatsApp, you were my closest confidant. Closeted, I would text you about how good you are, praise you for your beauty and body, and sadly, I would tell you how, in all my innocence, I was gay but not gay like that because I had not had gay sex.

‘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.

The world could have been falling apart. And of course, it was. The Kenyan High Court would, in 2019, uphold the colonial-era law criminalizing homosexuality. The court had reaffirmed that homosexuality could lead us to up to 14 years in prison. That night, you called me. Your voice unsteady, your breath uneven. You sounded overwhelmed than anyone I had ever heard. And then, for the first time, you tried to end it all, the anguish and sadness of queer life as the law had reaffirmed.

In Nairobi, frantically confused and anxious, I would call Chiloba to ask him to come rescue you. Afraid, Chiloba would rush there, running two kilometres, heart pounding to find you, our dear friend, unconscious. He would, on call, be crying, unsure of what to do. What would he tell society; what would he tell the family had happened to his friend? We would be on a call as he rushes you to the hospital, as you are placed on a stretcher, as Chiloba would be told, ‘You can't go past here,’ as he would stand there, tears dripping through his cheeks, watching you wheeled into a ward.

For three days, you would be hospitalized unconscious, and the world we had so beautifully crafted would be broken. We would have to figure out how to live without you, with your possible loss. We would cry and ask ourselves why this had happened, how we had not seen it coming. I would write a poem I would title, ‘You are still the one I love’. I would declare in the last lines, ‘When fine, I love you, When suicidal, I love you, You are my friend to the grave!’ I would cry again and again as if my crying, silent as it was, would bring you back.

And yes, like a miracle, you, my Papai, our Papai would wake up on the third day. Your eyes would open and be hit by the light of the hospital ward. Your eyes would light up at the sight of Chiloba, your friend who had tried to save you and succeeded. Your father, being wealthy, would pay the hospital bill. He would, like everyone else, try to understand what had happened to you, but, like everyone else, would fail at it. To make you open up to him, he would, for a week, force you back to your ancestral homeland in Busia.

Away from us, we would still be there. We would call you every other evening, asking you how you were doing, trying to know whether you had taken your medications. Begrudgingly, you would, showing us on video, swallowing the pills to assure us you were okay. Reassured, we would leave you tucked in bed.

But what did reassurance even mean in a world that kept breaking us? The weight of survival pressed heavily on our chests, and so we turned to the only relief we knew. Alcohol became everything—the numbing agent, the eraser of trauma, the thing that let us forget how quickly our bodies were ageing, how that ageing made us less desirable, less safe even within the queer community. When you came back, we went drinking again. Scared, we would, Chiloba and I, now with the uncertainty of how to handle you, watch over you until we were all too drunk. Arm in arm, together, like we had done so many times before, late in the night, we would stagger home from keg joints.

Back then, healthy or recuperating, nothing mattered to the three of us more than our affection, our moments and love for alcohol; for chrome, for Vodka and keg. We spent the nights partying with either three of us or with others, but always, as long as I was in Eldoret, together. Moving through drinking joints, strangers gazing at us, we were the unmistakable queer friends unafraid of what the world was turning into. Together, although in different cities, we discussed watching the news as Kenya voted yet again for Uhuru Kenyatta, awarding him a new five-year tenure as president, a presidency that would, at the end of it, lead to our inability to buy Unga, to afford even the most basic meal. But we continued drinking, not oblivious of this new economic pain but because of it. Drinking, our lives were passing through as if the world outside never existed, as if we were all that mattered to us.

My relationship with Chiloba would end after two solid years. I would stop travelling to Eldoret and you would move to Nairobi for your MBA. We would again be the two of us, just like in the beginning.

There would be others: Dave, Jasper, Collo. Many others who made our new lives and parties in Nairobi a deal. Collo, forever favourite, was a year or two younger than me. Having just graduated from the university, he wanted to make it so badly into the Kenyan Cinema and Film industry. Disillusioned with the Kenyan film industry, he would take us out for drinking. He would end up, at 25, telling us he was no longer gay and begin to distance himself from us.

Again and again, we would anger your apartment caretaker for our drinking, our visible queerness. Brushing off his concern, we would not care. We would not stop it. Drunk in the middle of the night and sometimes during the day, our friends would kiss, play loud music and twerk on the balcony. Your house was our lived reality, where all the love and drama of queerness revolved.

And then my life would fall apart. My mother, then, her business failing, would be unable to send me upkeep money. I would fall homeless, travel to the countryside and then back again to Nairobi. You would try to make sense of what was happening to me. At one point, you would let me stay with you. For three weeks, we would play mates, cooking, washing dishes and laundry together, but most importantly, in the evening, heading downstairs to the supermarket outside your apartment building to buy alcohol. We would drink and try to swallow what our lives were beginning to become as we aged.

But I would, after three weeks, become more afraid of what that meant for me, now homeless and more uncertain than ever about my prospects in life. On the day you would wake up to tell me you needed your own space, that I would have to move, I would be hurt, but also assure you that I would be alright. I would walk out of your house the next day, never to see you again for eight months.

And then Chiloba would be murdered in grotesque and unbearable circumstances, and we would never talk about it except once, when you got drunk and called me using a new number. We would get drunk and act like nothing ever happened, that history did not matter, that we were friends again. We would cry over our failure, over how we should have protected each other, about how our unspoken collective responsibility had dissipated over the years. We would hug, embrace and drink more as if we were in Eldoret, young again.

Drunk, I would storm out when a man, your friend whose house you had invited me to, would try to rape me. And I would say no, that I am too drunk, and he, being a man, would not listen. I would push him off, stumble out, the streetlights dizzying, the nausea from the alcohol mixing with something deeper; something colder. I was beginning to lose hope in the community that I had so deeply needed when younger.

I do not know if you ever heard what happened that night. I never asked. And you never said. There was nowhere on earth we could ever discuss what had happened that night. We would never see each other after that. A few months later, almost exactly a year after Chiloba was murdered, you would also be dead, from suicide, from what we had experienced and fought together, and I would not ever be the same again.

I would continue watching most of the friends we had met turn into Collo and declare, with a certain kind of exasperated defeat, the need to get married to women. I would become more exasperated at the sudden loss of people we had come of age with, as heteronormativity pushed them to the brink, and sadly, they caved in. In the next eleven months, having lost both you and Chiloba, I would not look back at leaving the country when an opportunity would arise. I would swear to carry your names everywhere I went. And even now, across borders, across time, I do. You are still with me. In the taste of Italian wine, in the echo of our laughter, in the poetry we once highlighted, and in the rides across the streets of Rome. You are still with me. And you always will be. My friends beyond the grave⎈