Edit: I'd written this sometime back in the beginning of 2019, lost access to it, then stumbled upon it today in an archive, on the 2nd of July 2025. The nostalgia is palpable.
The unit in that Roysambu apartment I'd just moved into had no lights and no one attempted to fix it or even bothered to listen to us. We were fresh and pretty naive to the ways of the world. That was our first lesson, that neither of us had power over the machine. Everyone else seemed to understand that the machine is faulty and breaks down from time to time and that's just the way it is.
"If you don't like it, I'm sorry but there's nothing we can do."
We'd always have Flirt. Our fragile psyches would get so tired of working every day. Something to numb the pain. Lucky our jobs ended at roughly the same time. When we ran out one of us would get the bottle on their way home and we never kept score because money didn't matter to either of us. It never did. As long as we had each other.
We'd drink pretty much everyday. Our invisible, young kidneys could take the beating. I'd do most of the talking, you'd do most of the singing, I'd do most of the fumbling with chords but we'd both do most of the drinking.
Sometimes we'd have people over and it'd be so much fun. We'd do some pretty weird things also, like that time we went out and bought a lot of tough, mature managu, brought it home and boiled it for hours. I can't recall if we ate it, but 22 year olds from Nairobi who want to be cool shouldn't be doing that weird shit.
We'd drink some more and we'd fight over some dumb shit and we'd make up and cry together and we'd make love and we'd sing some more and we'd drink some more and we'd fight and we'd fuck and we'd sing and we'd fight again and it was toxic and it was one of the best times of my life.