Half psalm

There’s a boy. He once wrote a love letter and never sent it. Not because he chickened out, but because somewhere between “Dear you” and “Yours,” he remembered she belonged to someone else. Or maybe to God. Or maybe just to Nairobi, which is worse. He writes like someone who was once told to “man up” and then learned that being a man is just being a boy with a straight back and a heavy heart. He comes from a place where men die with their secrets, where grief smells like Jik and burnt chapati, and where silence is inherited like land, or alcoholism. Most of the time, he writes not because he has something to say, but because if he doesn’t, his thoughts pile up like laundry in a bachelor’s sink — damp, shameful, and starting to smell like memory. He doesn’t like bios. They make him sound like a brochure for pain. But here you are. Reading this. And maybe that’s enough. Welcome to Boys Who Don’t Come Back; where the stories are mostly true, and the boy is still trying to forgive himself for the ones he never told.