The third time Chir (officially) leaves me, I run up and down Mama Ngina street until I can’t breathe. But even then, despite everything, I can’t imagine going back to our—my—apartment without him, so I stumble into Prestige Bookshop to pass the time. I walk around the bookstore, picking up and putting back books whose titles I can’t comprehend until an attendant walks up to me and asks if I need help. I nod, but when he starts talking to me, I slide onto the floor, suddenly unable to keep up with any human interaction. He stands over me for a while then eventually walks away. I sit there for 15 minutes or so, apologizing to everyone who has to skip over me. When I get up, I pick two books from the shelf nearest to me. At the counter, the cashier asks me if I’m okay; if I found everything I was looking for. I nod, the knuckles of my left hand rapping at my chest, stifling a wail. When he gives me two extra bookmarks—just to brighten up my day, he says—I laugh and laugh to stop myself from weeping. Because I feel it in the pit of my stomach with the rise and fall of my chest, that if I start crying, I might never be able to stop. Clarie Gor
Nairobians will tell you that maddening heartbreak is inherent to dating a Luo man but listen, I’m a Luo babe, I thought I was immune to this shit. You would think that too if you have the kind of parents I do.
When my father finally left my mother for good, she did not sleep for four days. She spent those nights sitting by her bedroom window, gawking at the expanse between two poles where the gate should have been. He never came back. I was glad for it but my mother, she wailed for so long, my ears rang intermittently for three days after. That day, he’d woken up at four in the morning and stomped his way around their bedroom until my mother woke up. She asked him if that was him adding another passive-aggressive way onto his long roster of asking her to make his breakfast but he scoffed and walked out of their bedroom. She yelled at me to wake up and make him breakfast but I pretended to be asleep. The louder she yelled, the harder I shut my eyes. Surely, she knew, you literally cannot wake up someone pretending to be asleep. Eventually she got up and ran into my room to berate me but we heard my father slam the front door. He’d left a note on the dining room table:
I’m finally free of you rancid boring bitches. Don’t bother looking for me.
I cackled. My mother howled. When she finally fell asleep on the fifth night, she didn’t wake for another 36 hours. There’s a Luo saying: Nindo tek tero janeko. Sleep overpowers the lunatic.
But also rancid and boring? Isn’t that oxymoronic? At the end of my first year in high school he asked me what my favorite subject was. English, I said. It’s in your blood, he said, beaming. Like years of him being a high school teacher of English were imprinted in my DNA somehow. I said, Well no, my English teacher is actually awesome. She makes it feel like an art, like we’re not just reading books to pass exams. She situates these stories within our socio-political context. It makes me feel like I matter, like my stories can change the world. So he mocked me. Your teacher is from England, innit? How are you going to change the world if at 14, you still don’t know it’s teacher of English, not English teacher. I didn’t say anything. I was thinking, this man doesn’t understand context? Teacher of English, teacher of English but you don’t even understand pragmatics. Because he’d met my English teacher so what even was the point of his mockery? But also, that man was horrifying when he smiled. The way the skin on his forehead tightened, the way his eyebrows moved, like a snake slithering across the desert. I had spent so many years tiptoeing around him, trying to stay out of his way, resenting him for how his presence sucked the joy out of a room. I always thought, maybe, if I just saw him smile, if I could see that he had a capacity for joy, then maybe I wouldn’t be so wary of him. And then it finally happened and I thought, well shit then. Never. Fucking. Mind.
The first time I met Chir, my heart thumped so hard, I felt it in my eyes. For a second, I thought it a welcome change from the thundering, reverberating-in-your-ribcage type of music inherent to Thika Road Super Metros. Except it quickly became dizzying and looking back, I think in that moment, something inside me—my smallest cell, my quietest voice—must have known I was in trouble. Because even when I’ve been hungry and exhausted, an entire day gone by without remembering to eat, that ride to Juja never made me dizzy. But sitting next to Chir, I kept leaning out the window because more than once, I felt so heady, I could throw up. I didn’t know what it was about him that excited me so. I cast furtive glances at his throat when he took a sip from his bottle of water, his eyes closed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed. There was a cluster of tiny bumps on his throat. Usually, I hated that in men as it reminded me of my father too much. Of how I needed to make sure his black shaving basin had warm water for him as soon as he woke. I often listened, while he shaved, to the sound of his razor hitting the inside of the basin as he tapped the hair out. I listened to him repeatedly clear his throat and spit phlegm. When he finished, I had to get the basin to dispose of the water. I closed my eyes while I did it, not wanting to see the mixture of tiny hair, shaving cream and phlegm floating on the water, like a dead snail in an algae-infested pond. Once, I made the water too hot and he yelped when he dipped his hand in to start shaving. He yelled my name but I pretended I couldn’t hear him. He waited for the water to cool because he wasn’t the kind of man to walk to the kitchen to get a jug of cold water to lower the temperature. Later, while he ate breakfast, he told my mother she was raising the kind of daughter who couldn’t attract, let alone keep, a husband. When my mother came into my room to harangue me, I said I preferred that to being the kind of woman that kept a husband like hers. She slapped me and I shoved her, told her if she ever laid her hands on me again, I would fight her, I would fight her real good, so help me God.
But then, looking at Chir, I thought, maybe not all men were disgusting. I saw us in a terrible rom-com. He was the male love interest doing some physical work like loading a washer-dryer into a pickup and I was the female love interest watching him sweat through his wife beater. He asked for some water and I gave it to him, watching him drink, his lips curling around the bottle. He drank it quickly and the bottle was soon empty but his tongue still foraged for whatever droplets of water might be left. I thought to myself, you’re a fucking cliché, even your fantasies are shit but then he swallowed again and everything felt like it was happening in slow motion, like it could go on forever and I desperately wanted that to be true, just to stay suspended in that moment eternally, but I was interrupted by a screeching sound. I looked around, annoyed, and then I realized that I was the one making that sound and Chir was staring at me, half smiling, his right eyebrow raised. I sat up straight and turned away from him. But he surprised me. He stretched out his hand and introduced himself. I shook his hand but didn’t tell him my name, opting instead to wound him a little. I asked, What in the pretentious shit is a name like Chir? He chuckled. He said, My father named me. He was—is—a weird Luo asshole. I told him my father was also a weird Luo asshole and he said, Oh yeah? Did he leave to buy milk one Christmas eve and only come back six months later? Does he call you occasionally, drunk out of his ass, demanding you mpesa him 2000 bob chap chap because the owner of the bar he was at was threatening to beat him shitless? Does he send you a picture of himself in a cell, his nose broken and bloody, his right eye swollen shut, the one time you don’t send him money because you have only 100 shillings between you and starvation? Does he call to berate you when he gets out, swearing to summon all your ancestors to rain down curses on you? Did he run up to you the one time he saw you on Tom Mboya street, right in front of Fire Station, and punch you on the nose, three times! because the last time he called you told him to go find a dark alley and fuck himself right into the hottest parts of hell?
I smiled and shook my head. I said, Yes and no. Of course they’re different but, trust me, I recognize that strain of asshole. I meant it to be humorous, but my voice cracked and Chir, he tried to laugh anyway but his eyes welled up and so we just sat in silence, our hearts mangled and bloody, and all I could think was Tolstoy was a dirty dirty liar because wueh! Unhappy families are exactly alike.
He joked, But you know, maybe my father named me Chir, for courage, because mere minutes after my birth, naked and shivering in his arms, he already knew the kind of shit he’d put me through.
I wanted to laugh but I was thinking, at least your father cared enough to be pretentious. My name, Atieno, is just the generic name given to Luo girls born at night. But then I remembered, the last time I talked to my father, he said that when he looked into my soul, all he saw was a malignant darkness and I realized, maybe some forethought went into naming me after all.
Five years later, Chir would ask me about the moment I knew I loved him and I would think about this attempt. Not only did he see my pain, he also recognized that I needed to mine mirth out of it; that I pressingly needed to find my father’s shenanigans laughable, funny even. So he gifted me this joke, his laughter. To be seen like that? I never stopped looking for it, long after it became clear that he wasn’t a reliable source for it. I’m still not the kind of person that believes in love at first whatever but maybe to be loved is to be seen. Maybe when people say they love you, what they really mean is, I am capable of cracking you open; of peering into the unlit, neglected parts of you.
My father once told me that I was difficult to love. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I can visualize the words falling out of his mouth. I can see the places his mouth rounded, how his tongue rolled then slacked, how he seemed relieved that he finally said it, the flashing teeth, the edges of his mouth stretching just a little. I forget exactly why he said it but I know we were in the middle of an argument, you know, the kind of argument you have with someone who knows they have power over you. Which is to say he mostly barked and for once, I stood my ground. He wanted me to do something, to see something his way and I shook my head, said no, I have my own eyes. He rammed his fist into the table and shot up. I remember the way the light hit his eyes, giving them a light brown tint. I stared up at him, my eyes locked on his, refusing to look away, refusing to concede whatever ground I’d gained even though all I could think in that moment was maybe he’s right. Maybe I am impossible to love, because before that moment, I couldn’t have told you what color his eyes were. Now I think back to that moment and of course I know that I didn’t need to know the color of his eyes to be deserving of his love. He, after all, always said it was insolent to look adults, especially him, in the eye. Still, there’s something particularly corrosive about hearing that the people that are supposed to love you the most in the world are struggling with it. That there’s something about who you are that makes it hopeless. That to be loved, you would have to do things differently, be a different kind of person. It scrubs you raw, dulls out everything bright and shiny about yourself. Thank fuck I now know that parental love isn’t sacrosanct. But I didn’t know that when I met Chir. I thought he was doing me a favor by loving me. And let me tell you, I would have endured anything to keep that love flowing.
The first time Chir broke up with me, he said it was because I reminded him of his mother. My “lectures” about not missing too many classes so he didn’t flunk out of school and my worrying about if he’s drinking enough water because his lips were cracking. He said that when I acted like his mother, I made him feel like his father and I of all people should know that he would rather set himself on fire than have anything in common with that contemptible asshole. He said the more time he spent with me, the more his reflection in the mirror looked like his father’s, which in turn made him love me less and less. He slid onto the floor as he said this, occasionally looking up at me, his lips twitching violently, like it hurt him more to say it than it hurt me to hear it. Like this ingratitude was a burden he’d been forced to bear and now that he put it down, he had to take a beat, reorient himself. I said it was fine. Of course it was fine. Here was the thing, I loved him still, even if he didn’t love me back. Because I understood, he was nineteen, a teenager doing what teenagers do, pretend they didn’t love people they’d be lost without. It was how I was with my mother.
Also, he wasn’t entirely wrong. I loved him in a way that necessitated an uprooting, a displacement of self. I made space for two and then I let him fill all of it. My love for him was a voluminous, malevolent thing. It swelled and swelled and pushed me out of myself. For a brief moment, there was an us and then there was only him and the mangled forms I took to keep him. I was shapeshifting proper, bending and writhing and slithering, my spine bruised and bloodied.
You know that feeling when you’re heartbroken but you still have to get on with life? It’s not the-hard-to-do-life-stuff that knocks the wind out of you. Like begging your mother to leave your father or beating the deadline for the Global Workspace Theory (an analysis of its strengths, flaws and implications for future research) term paper you’re writing for a neuroscience undergrad at the University of Texas. It’s the mundane shit. Taking a matatu home, listening to your lecturer proclaim that half of you will fail his Calculus Ⅰ class, eating breakfast. Because then you have to sit there, swirling strong tea and Njoroge’s bakery mahamris in your mouth, like your ribcage isn’t on fire. Chir’s absence was like a freshly extracted wisdom tooth. I kept telling myself that I would adapt but then I prodded until there was blood in my mouth. It shook me every time—the redness of it, the pulsating nerve—that something I chose for myself, something that was meant to be good for me, could hurt me so bad. So of course when he showed up, sick with tears, three months later, I took him back. I suppose I had always known that getting over him would be an exorcism. I was always going to drag and shriek and convulse through it.
My mother met Chir by accident. I say accident, but if I’m being honest, when he showed up at my home, wheezing, his arm in a sling, a part of me was exhilarated to introduce him to my mother. Because here was a man who fought his father if it came to it, a man who chose a broken arm over a home where his father disrespected his mother. I wanted to tell her I’ve chosen a man who was nothing like yours. But my mother, predictably, was furious, incensed that in just an academic year away from her, I had turned into the kind of woman who let men believe they could show up at her parents’ house expecting to spend the night, a few days even. So I said, Look at him, at the clumps of blood dotting his chin, at the red, blue and black along his jawbone. How can I possibly turn him away? She let him spend the night and I left him my bedroom, offered to sleep on the couch. My mother smiled and went into her room, instructing me to take good care of my guest but when I followed her to thank her, she shrieked at me, Nyathini ochot! A shameless one at that. Ironic, that she could see me both as child and whore. I began to snivel but instead, slammed every door leading up to my room. It was a performance for Chir. I, too, was capable of refusing a parent’s fuckery. In my room, Chir tittered. I’m proud of you, baby, he said. Besides, how precocious of a whore would you be if you had shame bogging you down like fog in an airport?
Chir spent two months at my house because thankfully, my father was away on his semi-annual trips to, as we later found out, his other family. After six weeks, Chir transitioned to sleeping on the couch. He said that giving me the comfort of my room back was the least he could do for my generosity. I was hesitant at first but he insisted, and deep down, I was thrilled to have my room back, of course, but also at how romantic it was, that he cared so much about my comfort. I can’t say that my mother warmed to him. She mostly avoided us and as soon as he stepped out of the gate for the last time, she slapped me, her palm like stinging nettles on my cheek. She spent the rest of the day shrieking, saying she couldn’t believe that a daughter of hers would be so inhospitable. I spent the rest of the day on the floor of my room, my cheeks twitching, trying not to wonder why he deserved to be comfortable at my expense. Years later, when it hit me, like hammer on anvil, that Chir and I were done for good, I showed up at my mother’s house, grief dancing across my sternum, and asked her this question. She said, It is the way the world works. You can either give a man something willingly or he will take everything from you. So, you choose and you choose and you keep choosing because then they never realize that you’re always choosing your life. I asked her if she was curious about other ways of staying alive and she squinted her eyes at me and laughed that derisive laugh of hers. Like tears in her eyes, hands on her knees, chest in hiccups type of laugh. She laughed while I stood there, sobbing silently. And then she straightened up, swallowed me in a hug. She was shaking her head, her voice in my ear saying, Hera ok timi kama. You don’t let love do you like this.
Eight months after we moved in together, Chir started disappearing on me. It was a weekend, and then it was a week and then it was a month and once, he was gone for seven weeks and five days. At first, it was excruciating, like my nails were being pulled out one at a time but then I got used to it, started to even enjoy sleeping on my own, the freedom of splaying diagonally across the bed, the joy of sheets that didn’t smell like sweaty feet. When I heard his keys turning the lock just before the two-month mark, I was half-disappointed, wishing he’d just go back and come back a few days later, make the time he’s been gone in months into a nice round number. He stepped into the house, liquor on his breath, an exaggerated smile on his face. He bent down, the sleeve of his shirt grazing my cheek, and kissed me on the mouth. The kiss lasted too long and made me nauseous. When he pulled away, I ran my middle finger along his shirt, then up and down his left arm. It was a new shirt, white, its sleeves rough and stiff. I fixated on the buttons, on how perfect they were. I thought, We could stay like this. He could just stand still, and I could just trace the edges of the buttons, going round and round, no chipped edges or missing buttons stopping me. I wouldn’t have to address his absence, his fuckery. But then he pulled away, saying he desperately needed a shower. His shirt caught the light as he passed by the window and I shut my eyes because it was blinding, the brightness of his shirt, searing, white like guilt.
When he came back from the shower, he kissed me on the forehead and said I was his favorite person; that he deeply appreciated how we’d learnt to give each other space to be their own person. I tried to arrange my face into appropriately grateful and delighted angles. But all I could think about was how through the years, it’d often felt like I was starving. Starving like my intestines had been soaked in acid then wrung out. In that moment, I could say I missed him because I barely got to see him but that would be like saying you miss oxygen when you’re choking. It’s technically true, but it’s something more desperate, more visceral, no? Being his favorite person felt like holding onto water. How years and years of trying to lap it up had broken me down into a whimpering, neurotic version of myself. I thought about the time I went in for a fibroid removal surgery and didn’t see him for a month after. I’d come to, disoriented and in pain and sent him a long text, begging, that maybe if it wasn’t too much to ask, could he please be kind to me these next few weeks while I was in recovery? When he responded twenty-two days later, it was a facepalm sticker, like he couldn’t understand how I could possibly want more from him. I apologized and cried myself to sleep. I dreamt that I was dying from a cavernous emptiness and I woke up clutching at my abdomen, gasping for air. I told myself I was okay, it was only a bad dream, that it was just my insides carved open, hollowed out, greedy for more love than I was deserving.
I broke up with him. Or rather, I asked where he’d been, if he was cheating on me again. There was yelling, spittle, stomping of feet and banging of doors. He said he didn’t see how we could work if I didn’t trust him, if I accused him of being a dishonorable shit every time he needed some space. Perhaps I was cheating and projecting my guilt. He left and we didn’t talk for five weeks and three days. I survived by listening to Sauti Sol’s Feel My Love on repeat until the insides of my ears were hot. Because even though there was a part of me that was beginning to let him go, there was also this voice screaming in my head, despairing, terrified that only Chir would ever love me.
Chir’s and I’s first kiss was under a broken streetlight on the main street leading to our university’s main gate. I was half-running behind him, trying to keep up with his long strides. He occasionally stopped and waited for me, grinning and shaking his head before eventually taking my hand. Just so you can keep up, he said. I felt the scar on his left palm, the half-healed cut across his fingers, how tight he held my hand when we skipped a puddle. When we got to the streetlight he looked up and sighed. You know, he said, I was placing all my faith in the county government that this light would be fixed tonight because I really wanted to see your face when I kissed you. I started to say, This light has been out for years, why would you ever think that? but his lips were on mine, a soft pressure, a cracked lower lip, his thumb tracing my jaw. He tasted like ginger and honey, a remedy for something I was catching fast. When he pulled away, I said, May the Lord be with you and he laughed, urgently, like he too was coming down with something and my awkwardness, this laughter was a remedy. And then he kissed me on the forehead, the tip of my nose, my left cheek and then my right cheek. Sign of the cross? Yes, he said, In the name of the father, the son and the holy ghost.
The one and only time my mother came to Chir’s and I’s house, it was at my insistence because she’d just had a hysterectomy and I did not want her to be alone. I left to pick her up from the hospital and in the two hours that I was gone, Chir invited someone over. Her name was Victorious. I remember because my mother and I interrupted their fucking on the living room couch and while we stood there, waiting for them to get dressed, I asked her what her name was. I think I did it just to have something to do because I recognized that I needed to react, to do something, especially while my mother was watching. But I was also curious about who she was, about the kind of person that Chir wanted so compulsively, so recklessly. She said her name was Victoria with an S. I asked her to spell it out for me and when she did, when we realized what she meant, my mother and I laughed so much, I was afraid she’d rip out her stitches. Later, after Chir left to see Victorious off and didn’t come back, later, while I put my mother to bed, she asked me how much I must hate myself now that my life had turned out exactly like hers. I said, I almost don’t mind the infidelity. It is the disrespect I have a hard time swallowing. I’m not like you who accepted your husband’s disrespect so all you had was your useless rage against his infidelities. Because what is fidelity anyway and what does it have to do with your partner having sex with another person? Because, think about it, what right have you to decree that your partner be bound to you sexually? We share loved ones all the time. We accept that our parents can love us and our siblings. We accept that our friends can have other friends. So why are we so precious and demanding when it comes to sexual relationships? My mother rolled her eyes, said she was in too much pain to listen to my nonsense. I considered giving her extra painkillers so she’d be too loopy to trust her memory of the day. Regardless, moving forward, my plan was to deny that she’d witnessed my humiliation. She was kind of crazy, anyway, what was a little gaslighting for my dignity? Except right before she left the following day, she told me she pitied me because I’d taken my shame and twisted it into “sexual liberation” so I could pretend it wasn’t there. She said, When it hit me that your father was shameless, I flushed shame out of my intestines, refusing to let it constipate me. My heart steadily rose to my throat while she spoke and when she finally left, I threw up on my carpet. My mother did many things wrong, but she didn’t nurture anything for a second longer than she wanted to. I, more than anyone, should know that.
A week later, I got a text from Chir, asking to talk. We met at the Java on Mama Ngina street. Chir was already tear faced when he waved me over to his table. I sat down and kept my mouth shut. Chir often said that I was always one syllable away from ruining a perfectly good meal. I was so nervous that when the waitress came to take our order, I didn’t risk saying anything. He ordered dawas for both of us and we sat sipping them in silence, until Chir slipped a note across the table. It read:
I’m thinking of burnt things. Scorched things left out in the rain to be put out. I’m thinking of black scars, sizzling skin, parched edges. I’m thinking of how much I used to love you. I’m thinking about how once things are burnt, all you can see when you look at them is that they’re charred.
He said, It doesn’t mean that we can’t work things out but the part about burnt things always looking charred, you know?
I ran out.
The first time I met Chir, I tried to return his joke. I asked him, Did you see red? When your father punched you on Tom Mboya Street, did you see red? Because, you know, bloody nose, Fire Station? He chuckled, a small quiet sound but his seat shook and shook. He said, I’m never not seeing red.
🤣🤣🤣I love Clarie’s humor tbh.
This was hilariously intense. Such good writing!
Beautiful writing 🫶🏾