Grieving love

By the time you hit the prime age of 21, you’ve experienced some sort of grief; the pain that it trails along and trampled everything in its way. In this case your life is in the middle of the highway. Perhaps you lost a dog, a cat that you loved deeply. One that seemed to understand your deepest joys and sorrows better than anyone next to you. Or relatively worse, lost a loved one. Watched them lowered in a wooden box six feet under and you covered them with dirt. Only leaving the gravestone or cross that could never capture the whole life of this person and therefore only mentioned when they were born and when they died. The latter a day that you’d also remember always. You also know the stages of grief. You looked them up on Google when you couldn’t sleep. Trying to find out how long you’d feel such emptiness. When you’d finally get over this and not feel guilty for forgetting them as soon as you did, like they didn’t matter as much to you. But they did matter to you, only you can’t shake off the feeling of them looking at you from above(or below) and feeling sad that you’re finally happy without them. You convince yourself that they’d want that and close your eyes and reply to the text you’d been staring at for 5 minutes.  All that is grief.

However there is a grief that many people do not talk about. A grief that does not attract masses of loved ones to console you. One that people advise you to bottle up instead; or turn to the bottle, whichever suits you. All the consolations you’d get when you lose a lover, someone that you loved but chose to love another would be “We kuja tulewe” or “Iza bro inakuwanga hivo”. Or the usual “Nairoobiii! Anyways gin ama whisky?” At best some would offer a listening ear, of course at the cost if a mzinga of gilbeys or something worse. In the morning you will all pretend not to remember what happened because who wants sad stories when sober?
Losing a romantic partner goes deeper than many are willing to admit; in an attempt to appear unphased, unshaken by such a seemingly trivial matter. While in reality these people die inside us. They die but again they do not. Worse even they begin new lives almost immediately while your still trying to assess the damage. You play one song on repeat for a week trying to figure what to do with the memories you had. You try to delete all the evidence it their existence in your life but in vain. Because you’d meshed your lives together that you were both literally one person. Deleting their photos meant erasing all the memories you had for the years you spent together. Erasing the memories of the events that happened over the years, leaving a questionable gap like unaccounted for time in a resumé.
Once you manage(if you do), you realise you not only have to deal with the memories but also the dreams. You look at the date and remember how you’d marked the calendar months ago anticipating your anniversary date at Ole Sereni. Monies that you drank already trying to soothe your sorrows, again in vain. And in reality, you only drank a third of it; the rest you decided to make everyone at the club happy since you clearly couldn’t make one happy enough.
The cycle goes on for days, months until something breaks you out.
But even after you get a hold of yourself and move on, like a battle scar that never stops itching, your heart still aches every single morning when you wake up to work out. When you lock eyes with seven different women blessed with other worldly beauty as you walk along the busy streets of Nairobi; when you go to sleep next to a different woman for the 6th time in a week. All this while the pain will always be nudging, nibbling at your heart, reminding you that you were once truly happy. That you used to smile genuinely. It nudges you even when you end the two hour phone call and respond “I love you too babe” to the innocent loving girl on the other end of the call.