Until you

Stability is what most people, if not everyone, are looking for, whether they know it or not. Some might call it "peace"—whichever term floats your boat.

Doctors want it for their patients' heartbeats and their patients’ conditions. Newlyweds seek it in marriage before even thinking about kids or building a house. A cameraman stables his paraphernalia for a perfect shot. Even a sniper stationed on a rooftop in Kabul needs the wind to stay stable for a clean hit.

Stability.

It’s what the neighbor’s kid wants when he clutches his brand-new bicycle with training wheels attached. He wobbles down the path, trying to achieve balance. It’s what the middle-class father of that kid wishes for—a steady income, a job secured into the future, health insurance for not only him but his loved ones too. Him and many other workers want their income to remain steady, unaffected by the turbulent forces of inflation, supply and demand, or even Kasongo’s taxes. And maybe, a little extra fun money on the side, because a stable life should also be a fun one. Father and son both reach for stability, each in his own world—one seeking a steady hand to guide his family's future, the other finding his balance on two spinning wheels.

Divorced parents pray for stability for their children too. They don’t want them growing up thinking relationships always end in broken homes and in child support payments. They dream of a roof under which homework, dinner, and dreams are shared, not divided between "mom’s house" and "dad’s house." A stable home, where the candles glow after a long weekday, and conversations dance between tough math homework and looming fiscal deadlines at work.

But stability is fragile. Because sometimes life tilts. Expenses exceed income. Marriages collapse under the weight of unforeseen responsibilities, and the kids grow up switching houses, switching lives. Jobs dry up. Maladies strike.

But there’s a different kind of instability—not just financial or emotional—but the kind where life itself refuses to settle. Where the only constant is the cyclic rising and setting of the sun, and every other part of your world shifts like sand under your feet. No routines. No schedules. No year plans or goals. It is when growing up you had to frequently move cities and towns due to your parents' work.

Like Aisha’s life.

Growing up, Aisha never stayed in one place for long. Her father was a construction manager, and her mother a teacher, both who were constantly on the move. This meant she had to make new friends and classmates every time they moved, and that is never easy in any surrounding, leave alone different surroundings. This is the instability that forced her to learn the cultures and ways of the new places she lived. New faces. New churches. New schools. New routines, if any. Same sunshine, but a different feeling every time.

In early seasons, she was trudging through the red soil of Kiambu during planting season. Other years found her under Kisumu's blazing sun, battling cruel jokes from her classmates about the freckles on her face. Children can be cruel. In her teen years she was tucked into a quiet secondary school in Kirinyaga, the adjacent green hills a silent witness to her loneliness.

Each move meant starting over.

New mama mbogas to trust. New routes to learn; distinguish the safe from avoided routes. New friendships that never had enough time to take root. Aisha once joked that whenever you move to a new place, two things matter the most: the distance to the best chapo joint, and the nearest mama mboga. Chapo helped her through a lot of her depression, and mboga, well, that is staple food. Funny how survival always circles back to food.

And finding a good mama mboga isn’t easy; you need one who not only has fresh greens but also won’t gossip every time you bring a friend of the opposite gender to your place—like Aisha’s dad, who often seemed to test the discretion of surrounding greengrocers, by bringing different women to his home whenever mom was still at work.

But mama mbogas and boda boda riders know everything. They see everything—who works where, who studies where, who sleeps with who in secret, what problems plague different families. They know whose mother wept silently behind closed doors. Aisha had seen it too; her father’s infidelity and her mother's silent exhaustion and defeat at marriage.

So she learned at a young age not to get attached to anything. Not to places. Not to people. Not even to the smiling mama mboga handing her a fresh bundle of kales. Everything, even life itself, felt temporary.

Aisha didn’t even decorate her bedroom walls. What was the point? They’d only be stripped bare again when the next move came. She didn't keep close friends, because she knew she’d leave them behind. Her relationships were worse. Long-distance never worked because boys either abused her trust or treated her as a fleeting adventure. Promises broke. Lies flourished at every word spoken to her. Her heart learned to close itself tight, a fortress built out of necessity.

Life had been relatively good to her because she had simply gotten used to the instability. She never shaved her head, because switching barbers every year felt like betrayal, even though it wasn’t. It was just life moving her along. She never had a long-term boyfriend, because she was bound to leave anyway. She never joined any school clubs either; she would have been just another name on the list that nobody ever saw again.

The only people she really talked to at school were her desk mates, not because they were curious about why she’d transferred, but because they were the ones who helped her catch up with schoolwork and settle in. Still, despite all the moving, her grades stayed steady wherever she went. She spent most of her time studying—what else was there to do in a new neighborhood where she knew no one and was already falling behind in class? Sometimes, she'd even miss out on awards and recognitions for her performance because they’d move before the ceremonies ever took place.

Until Ian.

Ian was an engineering student at her uni. He wore brilliant specs on his tiny eyes, always wore a warm smile on his chiseled jaw, and had a calm spirit. Ian noticed her during a sports event at campus, and he made his move even while being sweaty and tired from playing football. Girls like sweaty hardworking men—athletes—so Aisha couldn’t hide her trembling knees and accepted to go out with him.

At the time she wasn’t even looking for someone. She never thought she'd ever feel all the things Ian made her feel.

Still, she was reluctant. Her mind replayed every betrayal, every ghost of a broken past. But Ian was a patient lad. After a couple of dates and meeting in school, she told her of her insecurities in a relationship, of all the moving her family does, and her unstable life. And so every time she brought it up afterwards he reminded her gently: she wasn't moving anymore. She was in campus now. She’d graduate soon, get her own job, her own place. She could build her own stability now.

Slowly, Ian became her safe space. Aware of her insecurities to stable relationships, Ian set small rituals in their then friendship. Dinner out every second Tuesday of the month. Lazy picnics under Nairobi’s moody skies. Texts that weren’t overbearing but felt like warm hands reaching across the distance. It wasn’t grand gestures that won her heart. It was the consistency.

The predictability.

The safety.

New territory to her, but it felt good. Felt like a foreign feeling—happiness. You never know what’s missing till you get everything you need.

Even when life threw curveballs, like when Aisha fell sick in her fourth year and needed an emergency appendectomy, Ian never wavered. He moved into the hospital by her side, sleeping in the adjacent empty bed, helping her blow her nose, cleaning after her, rubbing her belly when the pain got unbearable. Every evening after work, he showed up with mashed potatoes in a dish, her favorite comfort food.

Never once did even a squeak of a complain come out of his mouth. Her parents started to trust him like their own son, and allowed him to help them take care of their daughter. And for the first time in her life, Aisha let herself be loved. Not because she had to. Because she wanted to. We all want love, whether it’s a person or money, we want to love and to be loved.

At first, she struggled. She wasn’t used to texting someone every day. She wasn’t used to walking hand-in-hand in supermarkets without pulling away awkwardly. Affection had always been a luxury she couldn’t afford. But Ian’s love wasn't demanding. It was patient. And soon, she stopped running.

They both graduated and landed stable jobs—another sign from the universe that her life was starting to be stable. Ian landed a job as an engineer in Westlands, Aisha at an insurance company in South C. No more moving around. No more painful goodbyes. Just two people building something solid, one day at a time.

Nowadays, you’ll find them sipping cocktails on rooftops in Upper Hill, laughing about conspiracy theories, debating whether insurance is a scam, planning a dream trip to the white beaches of Zanzibar. They even argue passionately, but playfully, about Ian’s obsession with Manchester United and how Amorim might just be the solution to their woes.

And sometimes—most times—while Ian rants about football, Aisha finds herself staring at him. Into those small, spectacled eyes that seem to see right through her. And it hits her, like a gentle tidal wave:

Here, the world isn’t spinning too fast anymore. And those cyclic sunrises and sunsets, don’t look so cyclic after all.
Here, every sunrise feels intentional, and she embraces them gratefully from the hands of Were.
Here, with Ian, every day feels like it’s right where it should be.

✍🏽Reagan.