I love a good love story. And a good love story isn’t good if it doesn’t have pain and desperation running in its veins. It’s not a good love story if one of the characters doesn’t sigh and say, “I’m so tired, what are we even doing?” I hate love stories where strangers meet on hiking trails where one offers the other a bottle of their lukewarm water, then they later find themselves sitting next to each other in the van back to Nairobi and they “talked the whole way!” Those love stories always end up at the AG. Screw that. [And screw all the government apparatus that oppresses the common man.]
This below is not a good love story, it’s a great love story. It’s got varicose veins and irritable bowel syndrome. What makes it even more compelling is because it’s been told well. With just the right vulnerability. And the dark humour that love is.
I read it at dawn today because it was sent late in the evening (7:30pm) when I was shutting down. I loved it so much I called the writer and said, “you write so well when you are heartbroken,” and he said, “a heartbreak turns one into a poet, but three divorces transform them into a philosopher.”
I cackled like a fool.
***
On the last day of 2023 A.D. (Annus Domini has always sounded a little bit ‘sub’ and BDSM to my ears), I did a video call with my then fiancée – let’s call her ‘Anja,’ – and from the T-shirt she was wearing that Sunday morning, I knew the mzungu had cheated on me on New Year’s Eve.
Ye can’t miss/mistake a ‘boyfriend’ T-shirt; Why’re they always oversize?
I was alone in Nairobi – all my relatives, other than my daughter (with whom we are very close, but who lives with her remarried mother) – are either dead, or in America.
‘Minnesota’ to be precise!
The Kisii anthem, it seems to me, ought to be “hapa Kenya ukiona umesota, m’kisii uenda Minnesota.”
My only sister certainly did, on the year that Obama became president.
18 years down the line, she is not only American but a mid-level manager of some energy company, making a honey pot of money (whilst we are here in a death duel with Kasongo over our taxes; I always say our ‘Gava’ is like a baby ogre – a voracious appetite at one end, and a corrupt and wasteful a-hole on the other end) …
Anyway, there was my redhead diplomat fiancée, a woman in her late forties but fit-as-a-fiddle, in a ‘U2’ T-shirt, several sizes larger than her petite frame, turning red on a Sunday morning on a winter day – Deck 31st, 2023 – in a northern town called Kiruna by Lake Luossa in Sweden.
“You just slept with Joni last night, Anja*, didn’t you?” I said, voice dry.
“How did you know?”
That’s Scandinavian, and also German, women for you! No denying fact.
An African woman would be like: “Babe, Hapana! Aki how can you even think that? Are you crazy? Aki I can never cheat on you babe!!!” (That time there’s a Mandarin licking the lotus between her legs as you talk).
I mean, Kiruna is exactly 12,000 kms from Nai – so why wouldn’t you lie?
Anyway, after hanging up, I called my jirani Achi Lora, who literally lived in an apartment block round a corner from mine, for support and comfort; which means she brought a bottle of whiskey n soda with her.
“So, when she was sending pix of herself skiing and ice-fishing and dog-sledding with this dude these last three weeks, what did you expect?”
I told Achi Lora the truth – I had imagined that the mzungu, a diplomat, was a woman of great integrity – and hadn’t imagined she was a cheat.
“She told me they had been great friends at high school, and were like brother and sister; and I believed her,” I told Achi Lora, who promptly put on Pulp’s “Disco 2000” (YouTube) video on the screen, and mockingly curled her lithe tall slim body to the words: “Our mothers said we coulda been brother & sista/ ah Deborah, do you recall? And your breasts were very small/ your house had woodchip on the wall …”
Achi Lora and I are in the creative arts, and I was her mentee for 3 years.
She is one of those super clever Luo lasses, not from Luossa, but Gem!
She calls Lake Victoria ‘Nam Lolwe’, got a straight ‘A’ in KCSE, did ‘Medicine’ in university, but chose to still go into the creative arts – our Doctor Achi – which must have been a disappointment to her Gem clan.
(Gem of the legendary Gem, place of professors, refusing to be daktari)
I really needed a ‘daktari’ that January of last year, 2024, Annus Domini!
My betrayal, and subsequent breakup with the mzungu diplomat, Anja, hurt like the bish she was – later, I would realise it represented the ‘shattering’ of the image of a future of comfortable retirement.
I had been ready to sell half of some hotshot land I own in Syokimau to buy a piece in Watamu. She had said she would invest a few millions of her savings to build a little villa there, near the sea. Us.
And, now, on a ‘winter bunny’ visit back to her homeland in Kiruna, where her late dad had been an iron ore miner (in the world’s largest iron ore mine), this ‘iron hoe’ (as Achi nicknamed her) had rekindled her romance with her recently separated high school sweetheart from 1994.
Achi Lora, exactly twenty years my junior, was tickled pink by the irony – because I had dumped her, in the October of 2022, for my ‘very stable and mature age mate.’
Achi Lora isn’t just tall, slim, brilliant and beautiful (in that near Gen Z way of nose-ring, nipple-ring, Disney tattoo, ras hair, gap tooth smile) – she is literally the most mercilessly funny person I have ever met.
Wicked wit, and a macabre sense of humour.
Once, at a funeral, when the MC announced lunch, she actually said: “Hebu ambia huyo waiter apelekee Wafula lunch kabla Waluhya wajadandia wamalise kuku …” (Wafula was the cadaver in the casket)!
That month of post-Anja depression, when I dropped three kgs from 69 to 66 in a month (‘your world has been turned upside down,’ Achi teased, ‘you poor devil …’ which is one of the deadliest double puns ever, if you ‘gerrit’), she was always coming round the corner with soup and s**t – and even laying beside me at night as I sweated out ‘heartbreak.’
Valentine’s Day, last year, and I am seated across Achi Lora at a garden restaurant in Upper Hill.
“You left me for that silly Swede because she looks like a salamander,” Lora teased, “and you can’t resist lizards, right?”
I laughed long and loud – Achi Lora knows how to make laugh so well, as a Kamba may say.
And come March, 2024 A.D., we were off to Severin Sea resort, which is where we first went in the September of 2021, shortly after we met.
At the time, I was at the tail-end of my marriage to a hot-tempered Meru (corporate lass) and Achi Lora was listless in the city, having come back from Wuhan without her Masters’ degree after Covid hit, living with her aunty in the city, and teaching English at some Praimo in Ruiru.
She was so obviously over-qualified the ‘sapio sexual’ in me took her under my wing (and duvet, I must say), and this laughing, loving, learning lady – two decades my junior – soon became my ‘Tembea Kenya’ partner to my various workshops, in that last quarter of 2021.
Mombasa in September, Victoria Sands in Mbita that October (hapo karibu na Biko’s), Lily Palm Watamu in November, before the career woman split that December of 2021, Annus Domini.
I asked a hesitant Achi Lora to move in with me – and we ate rice and (fill-in-anything-else, but rice with spice was a must), laughed, made love and learned a lot more about life together, for 9 months in 2022.
Annus Domini!
Then along came the mzungu, a merciless Love Bomber, and led me awfully astray for the next fifteen months; until that end in 2023.
New Year, 2024, and Achi Lora and I ‘renewed our vows,’ without once ever mentioning that we were back together.
It just felt like slipping back into my skin, like I never had been away!
But while I was away, Achi Lora had applied for a scholarship to the USA.
And, on that Easter weekend of last year, she told me she had gotten it!
That was the third hardest thing that happened to me last year, I must say, although I immediately plunged into the various fundraiser and essay writing processes of getting her away from this ‘Kasongoland’ here – where the future of too many young people seems horridly insecure. Achi Lora, I knew in my heart, is too precious to just be here.
Last April, I proposed to her there near the end, by the sea in Watamu.
She said “yes,” then found me in bed the next week with a ‘summer bunny’ honey of mine (from the year 2014, Annus Domini), whose Dad had just passed, whose funeral I attended (and spoke at, as I speak well).
Emily and I had gone for a drink – strangely enough at that ‘Explorer’ place Biko introduced me to so long ago (it’s now closed). Then went to my place, as Emily didn’t want to amsha her aunt at 4 AM.
Then she was weeping, and in my arms, and then it was ten AM in May – and Lora Achi was standing there in the room, with her key to my crib.
She didn’t say anything; just kinda smirked and walked out of the room.
She did come back the following evening, however, looking wild and disheveled, her rage smoldering beneath the surface of her skin; and I could tell she had cheated on me, but I dared not say a word.
‘You deserve it, you son of a ___” but I stopped there, because my mother was truly a saintly woman – never mind all those people who say it about their mothers (and here I am thinking what our mothers would make of us, Biko, would they be proud of what we are, or just of what we’ve made of ourselves? One thing I know, they’d love the kids).
After that, Achi Lora’s affair pretty much went on for six weeks – she wasn’t hiding that she was sleeping out sometimes; and I didn’t dare question her about it, especially as I still recalled I had dumped her Once-Upon-an-October, 2022, Annus Domini – in that post-blue period of Chebukati and ‘hot air’ Koome, when Kenya was the wild geese chase
But on Tuesday, June 18, 2024, Annus Domini, she left me her laptop (mine was wrecked) as she went on a tryst.
I found her ‘Google Time Line’ online, dove into the Pandora’s Box, and discovered Achi Lora had been ‘going out’ with some musician since the previous October (2023, Annus Domini).
She had even been with him that Xmas week in Kisumu, just before the mzungu dumped me for her high school sweetheart in Lake Luossa.
To her meager credit, she had exited the ‘affair’ in January once we re-linked, but plunged right back in post-Emily in early May, 2024 Annus D!
I called the musician – I am one of those guys with Everyone’s Number in Kenya -and asked to speak to Achi Laura. It was 7.07 AM, June 19, AD.
This is the second hardest thing that happened to me last year!
It tells you a lot about this chap’s IQ that he handed over the phone to her, without even asking whom I am, where did I get the number, and how do I know Lora is there?
This is NOT the kind of ‘Buoy” to have as your winger.
He’ll get a call, and tell your wife: “Tuko tuu hapa tuki jibamba kwa hii massage parlour hapa Kilimani …”
I didn’t speak to Achi Lora for three days, then that weekend, I went over to her place and we ‘made war,’ complete with slaps n cuss words.
That July, Achi Lora’s grandpa passed away, and I accompanied her to Central Gem for the funeral; and ended up staying a fortnight at the Little Gem resort near Yala town as she stayed at her folks’ place.
( Four months later, mid-November Annus Domini, a security company HR manager would be abducted and murdered from there – for an affair (kupenda Tenda) – and I would wonder if he had been taken from the same suite that I had lived in).
We also explored South Gem, West Gem, East Gem and Gem Ndere, and when I said “you are surrounded by gems,” Achi Lora, quick as a whip, quipped: ‘And yet you went ahead and chose iron ore, yawa, milaya’
At the start of August, Achi Lora and I took a leisurely week driving back to Nairobi – staying in Maseno, Muhoroni, Molo; then Nakuru, Naivasha and Nairobi.
When I pointed out we had stayed at ‘3Ms and 3Ns,’ she said on a whim “Let’s go on to a Big ‘O’ town.”
And that’s how I ended up driving to, and staying in Oloitoktok for a weekend.
Start of September, and schools and colleges begin to open all over the United States of America.
That last day of August, we had a grand farewell party for Achi Lora where I drunk myself blind with sorrow.
I know it’s cliché, but Achi Lora is that kinda girl with whom, one minute we are discussing Hemeti’s evil genocide in Darfur and what it means to the ‘’regional balance of power,’ and the next we are laughing our heads off to something inane, often from word play or remembrance of situations.
She was my soulmate, and when she left, there was an ‘Achi Lora-shaped gap in the universe’ (you’re still paraphrasing Arundathi, owada)
Sunday, September 1st, 2024 Annus Domini!
“Stay alive!” she said.
She was weeping.
“You saved my life,” I told her, fighting back tears – and I meant it!
Four weeks later, I run into the Swede at an Oktoberfest rock event in Westlands; and I gather that she returned to Kiruna in August, and her ‘man’ has returned to his wife, and left her high-and-dry once more …
“Just as he did when I was seventeen, in 1994,” she says (as I add ‘Annus Domini in my head.’). “I really regret going back to him, man.”
“Maybe it is 1994, and not really Joni, that you were missing, Anja.” I say – and I suppose she takes this as the wisest thing she’s ever heard.
“I miss being young,” she says wistfully.
Three hours, nine million tequilas later, Anja will ask if I “want to go home …” in a way that I can’t miss the hint.
“Home is where the heart is,” I will say at that three AM of Sunday, September 29, 2024, Annus Domini. “And my home now is in San Jose.”
I’ll walk out of that club in Westlands, and look for the taxi I just app’ed.
Easiest thing I did in 2024
***
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