No Mummy! A voice cuts through the cold night. Tiny. Cracked. Distressed. You sit up. Heart doing that quick little drum solo. Ears straining in the dark. Is that my child?
Close. But not yours.
You lean back into the corner couch and exhale, shaking your head slowly. Somewhere in the complex, another parent paces, shushes, and negotiates with a tiny human who does not yet understand the difference between day and night. You have been there. What often starts with such a cry ends up with you rushing to the hospital at ungodly hours, with a screaming toddler, battling high fever and sometimes puking all over. After spending two hours walking through hospital corridors, blood drawn from their tiny veins, ultrasound scans, with doctors poking ears and mouth with all kinds of equipment, they tell you there is nothing wrong with the child, send you back home with another bottle of paracetamol, antihistamine, and instructions to go back if they worsen. You drive back home with a sense of relief and slight annoyance. You paid for all those procedures out of pocket because your health insurance provider was taking too long to respond. Thank goodness tonight that will not be you.
You pull the fleece blanket higher over legs that have gone a little cold, and you settle back into the only throne you have left. The couch. Legs stretched out, resting on the coffee table. Laptop open on your lap. Excel sheets, a Word doc with a cursor blinking accusingly at the end of an unfinished sentence, and several browser tabs you opened for a reason you can no longer recall. To your left, your phone lights up. Notifications.
You scroll.
X is where you live now. A decade ago, you got your news from national TV stations; then it became depressing with all the negative highlight stories, so now you stay updated on current affairs through the X feed. Wars, elections, a man in a suit somewhere, driven by a colonial hangover, spews retarded rhetoric about a new world order. In between, your timeline is littered with complete strangers beefing about personal relationship matters or referencing them as if they are common knowledge, flanked by OF promos.
You swipe to TikTok. A dude in a knock-off branded T-shirt and pants a bit too tight splashes legal tender notes and prances around a European-made vehicle like American rappers back in 2005, promoting forex trading classes. Masquerading as generous, he wants to teach strangers how to triple their investment through forex trading, with props on display meant to serve as social proof of his success. If his business is that successful, why wouldn’t he reinvest his earnings and put his entire extended family on it instead of trying to teach strangers? Next, a self-proclaimed investment expert, confident, with a ring light glowing like a halo, tells you never to build a house. “Put KES 10 million in the stock market, get monthly returns, rent in Runda forever.” Bold strategy. You idly wonder where exactly a person gets a loose ten million to test that theory. You close the app before the algorithm decides you are his next client.
Instagram is worse because it is beautiful. The woman who was dining in Camps Bay three weeks ago is now wine-tasting in Tuscany, her hair catching the golden hour as if she had rehearsed it. Everyone is somewhere. Everyone is glowing. You, meanwhile, are sitting on a couch with one cold foot, stalked across every app by adverts for a bed because three months ago, at 1am, you searched “best mattress for back pain” and the internet decided that was the most important thing it had ever learned about you.
Maybe a new mattress will ease the back pain. Or maybe the ache is not spinal. Maybe it is just the weight of everyone who is sleeping soundly right now, trusting you to be awake.
Your eyes drift to the TV. Netflix, on mute, cycling through its catalogue like a bored tour guide. Coming Soon. Now Showing. Top in Kenya Today. You pay for four streaming subscriptions, yet you watch none of them consistently. Nothing on screen seems able to hold your attention longer than the thought you are currently having, which is itself going nowhere.
The clock on the wall reads 11:17pm.
You get up. In the semi-dark, you step, barefoot, fearless, foolish, directly onto a Lego block.
“Ouch!”
A single, sacred syllable, swallowed at once so it does not wake anyone. You hop once, mutter something your mother would disapprove of, and limp to the water dispenser in the dining area. Warm water. Glass in hand. You drift to the French window and look out onto the street.
Across the road, at the gate of the next block, a young couple is having what appears to be a lovers’ tiff. A man stands there in an oversized white T-shirt and khaki cargo pants, his pockets sitting somewhere near his ankles, you genuinely cannot work out what he keeps in there. Heartbreaks, maybe, or his entire personality. His companion is in a fluffy white jacket and a dress that is clearly not meant for Nairobi’s weather. They are gesturing, unmistakably, speaking IN ALL CAPS.
You almost laugh out loud.
A few years ago that was you. Standing outside some gate at midnight, instigating a crisis because peace, real peace, felt boring. Back then you went looking for the storm. Cheap thrill, expensive hangover, repeat.
Nobody warns you about this part of adulting. Not the bills. Everyone warns you about the bills. Not even the diaper years, brutal as they are, because at least there is a finish line you can see from where you are standing.
What nobody warns you about is the quiet.
You are now the man who has to help with homework that requires rare materials. “Stick real feathers onto your drawing of a hen, due tomorrow.” Where, in this city, does one source a chicken just to pluck its feathers for a Grade 2 art project? You end up Googling “where to buy feathers Nairobi” at 9pm, and somehow it is the least absurd thing that has happened to you today.
Your wife mentions that you no longer compliment her as you used to, buy her flowers, or text her sweet nothings during the day. She is not wrong. You make a mental note to add a reminder to your calendar to generate some poems on ChatGPT and send them to her next week.
At work, the junior guys are running the same plays you ran a decade ago. Flattery laced with ambition. You recognise every move because you invented half of them. It is like watching reruns of your youth, except now you are cast as the senior officer who is supposed to be wise about it.
Back upcountry, the farm, your big “passive income” idea, is doing what farms apparently do, which is bleed you dry and trigger hypertension. You do not know whether it will ever break even. You suspect it now exists mainly as a place you can drive to and stand in silence, which, it turns out, is its own kind of return on investment.
And then there is WhatsApp. Hospital fundraiser. School fees appeal. A wedding contribution. A burial committee. Four different groups, four different tragedies or celebrations, all asking the same five-figure question, in slightly different fonts.
Life no longer comes at you from one direction. It comes at you from every direction, all at once, politely, on your phone, while you are trying to find a bird’s feather.
So you understand now. Really understand why your old man used to be up at 6am, sitting in front of the TV watching CNN with a cup of tea gone cold beside him. As a kid, you thought, wow, Dad really cares about world affairs. Brother. He did not care about Syria. He just needed somewhere to look that was not a responsibility. CNN was his version of this couch. This window. This glass of warm water at midnight.
Here is the thing about peace, the grown-up kind. It is not the absence of noise. Your house is never fully quiet. Somewhere, a fridge hums, a child coughs, a phone buzzes, a dog barks, and a metallic gate clanks.
Peace, at this stage, is a door you close on purpose.
It is choosing, for one hour, not to be available. Not to be the answer to anyone’s question. Not the strong one, the funny one, or the one with the plan. Just a man, on a couch, with a slightly bruised foot, watching two strangers argue across the street and feeling grateful that it is not him.
You used to think peace was something you found out there. Along Diani Beach. A flight far enough away that nobody could reach you. Having done all of that, chasing horizons like they owed you something. Turns out the most honest peace you have found was not in the many foreign cities you toured or fancy establishments you patronised. It was in quiet nights in your living room.
Silence used to scare you. Now you let it stay. Sit in it. Some nights it is heavy. Some nights it is the best company you have had all day. This hour is when the mask comes off. When you let your shoulders drop. When you can admit, just to yourself, that you are exhausted. That the farm scares you a little. That you miss being appreciated, too, but you will never say it out loud because somehow that feels unmanly.
Nobody sees this version of you. And maybe that is exactly the point. Tomorrow, when the sun comes up, you put the mask back on because everyone around needs you to be the constant. An anchor they can hold on to when life’s tribulations hit. The kids need breakfast and an infallible father. The missus needs a protector, not another problem. The team needs direction. The farm needs a miracle, but you will settle for rain.
So if you are reading this at some ungodly hour, take heart. You are not falling apart. You are simply clocking in for the only shift that is actually yours. Tomorrow you go back to being unbreakable. Tonight, you are just a man up at midnight. And if there is someone beside you in this, send them this. Just so they know they are not the only one awake, bearing it quietly, loving everyone too much to say so out loud.
Peace, after all, is finally being allowed to be human.
