People ask how I ended up back in Nairobi after twenty years, and I usually give them the tidy version: a job ended, a parent aged, the timing was finally right. All of it true. None of it the reason.
The reason is harder to say without sounding foolish, so I will say it here. I came back by water. Not literally, though there was a flight and a great deal of paperwork. I mean that the decision moved the way water moves: not in a straight line, but downhill, finding the low quiet places, pooling until it was deep enough to carry me.
For years I dammed it. I built a career like a wall and called the wall a life. Every promotion added a course of bricks, and the water just rose behind it, patient, until the pressure became its own kind of noise, a low hum under everything I did.
The decision moved the way water moves. Downhill, finding the low quiet places.
What broke was small. A grey morning at a desk in London, and I realised I could not remember the last time I had spoken my mother’s language out loud. That was the crack. Everything I had been holding back came through it at once.
So here I am, at the shoreline of a life I did not plan and somehow always knew. I got here the way water gets anywhere: by yielding, by finding the low place and letting it be low. It turns out the low place is home.