31/07/2026
The Weekend
Brian was seventeen the first time he tried it. Not because he wanted to — because Mwangi and the boys were passing something around behind the estate, and saying no felt heavier than saying yes. He remembers laughing that night, feeling light for the first time in weeks. His mother's job had just been cut. His father wasn't around. School fees were a conversation nobody wanted to have at the dinner table.
By eighteen, "just weekends" had become Friday, then Thursday, then any day the weight got too heavy to carry sober. He told himself he had it under control — good grades, still went to church with his grandmother, still showed up. Nobody had to know.
But things started slipping. Small things first — forgetting his sister's birthday, snapping at his mother over nothing, sleeping through form four mocks. Then bigger things — money disappearing from the house, a friend from the estate who overdosed and almost didn't make it, another who dropped out entirely and just… disappeared into it.
The turning point wasn't dramatic. It was his grandmother, sitting across from him one Sunday after church, not shouting, not crying — just asking quietly, "Mtoto wangu, uko sawa?" Nobody had asked him that in a long time. Not "umefika wapi na maisha," not "utaenda campus lini" — just, are you okay.
He wasn't. And saying it out loud, for the first time, felt like putting down something he'd been carrying with both hands for two years.
