November: The Nostalgia Album
5/30
I have the feeling I have walked into a room only to realise that I cannot remember what I came in for.
It is only day five of a 30-day writing series and I am already struggling to come up with anything to write. The plan is beginning to fall apart at the seams. Mostly because I have been walking up and down Lower Kabete's one road, looking for a roof over my head. But also because there isn't much to write about when your primary goal upon waking up every morning is simply to stay afloat in these rugged times.
I am looking for a house, chasing lecturers for marks that probably won't even matter two years from now, and searching for purpose in a year that has been scratching rock bottom only to discover new depths of misery.
In Nairobi landlords will frustrate you. I have said it here before. It is almost as though they have entered into some sort of pact to ensure that only the toughest make it into their houses. The toughest, and the wealthiest. If you go house-hunting like myself, dressed in denim shorts and a 2021/22 Madrid jersey, they won't take you seriously. They won't even bother asking what kind of house you're looking for'; they'll simply wave you away and resume their wait for serious individuals with serious money.
Lecturers will frustrate you even more. Especially short, slightly hunched ones who seem determined to measure their egos against yours simply because you happen to be taller. They resent seeing you enjoy your twenties as you should, while quietly regretting never having taken enough chances with their own. Maybe they spent their entire university lives buried in economics textbooks, studying why the rich shouldn't be taxed more and why the poor must remain poor to prevent the economy from going berserk on either end of the scale.
They will have you looking for them all the way to the borders of Sirare, through the bright lights and expensive corridors of Sarova Hotel, all in pursuit of marks for an examination you sat in December 2023. They won't care that you are only five days into a writing series, desperately trying to do something of your own beyond debits and credits.
The landlords, the WiFi guy who has come to reinstall the connection but is busy talking loudly on his phone, the egotistical short lecturer, and that long, winding road, with its cool breeze and zooming matatus. None of these will care that you will probably have to stay awake until 3am just to put something together for your series.
And honestly, why should they? They have their own lives to worry about.
What they don't know, however, is that somewhere in the middle of all this is a struggling writer, rather daft and terribly blank in the head, trying to build something solid on shaky foundations and promises made on impulse.
Reagan..✍🏽
