By Ndolam (Lami, if you like your heartbreaks a little softer)
A year before everything fell apart, I was in love.
The kind of love that made you forget your diet and snack carelessly on cake and samosas.
The kind where even silence felt like conversation.
The kind I now realize was already leaking at the edges, but I was too enchanted to check for cracks.
His name isn’t Red.
But that’s what I call him now — not out of spite, but out of poetic necessity.
Because when I look back, everything about him came with a warning label I was too blissful to read.
But back then? He was… magic.
He sent me Goodmorning texts before I opened my eyes.
He knew how I took my tea, the difference between my thinking silence and my annoyed silence, and how I liked my earlobes kissed (gently, like an apology).
We spent Sundays doing nothing, and I swear that “nothing” had a soundtrack.
He danced like he’d forgotten he had bones, just joy and rhythm and abandon.
And when he laughed — it was quiet and he would bend over crouching his ribs — I would think: this is my person.
This is the person I’ll wait at the altar for.
We dreamed of having our own place. Building it. With all the trims and fittings that were a reflection of us. We had inside jokes and code names for almost everyone we knew. He once held my hand across a table in a fancy restaurant in Nairobi and said,
“I don’t know where this ends. But I know this is it. You’re mine and I’m yours … forever”
That was it. Surely, everything else would follow — the ring, the forever, the becoming a family.
But now I know: some stories …. well they are just that… stories.
Sometimes, the warning signs aren’t loud.
Sometimes, they’re romantic.
They bring you flowers, kiss your forehead, and promise forever in lowercase.
They’re red — just not in the way you think.
— Lami
