There was always something about Francis, one of the boys I met when I joined high school. While most of us did not want to be associated with our mothers, he wore his mother’s name on his chest like a medallion, proud and unashamed.
I cannot tell the exact day our friendship was born. But as we navigated that cesspool of hormones we call high school, we gradually gravitated together, joined by our nose for current affairs, politics, and a love for thick novels.
And boy, didn’t we read them! Francis and I devoured Sidney Sheldons and Robert Ludlums as if they were examinable. Of course, we knew we were slightly cracked, reading sizzling novels when we were supposed to be revising. But as good pals, we considered each other good eggs.
Nature has a way of bringing together those who share the same passions. College found us together, deepening our bond. While he took sciences and I arts, we always met at the crossroads of curiosity, gobbling up books and drinking life to the dregs. My uncle, whom we often visited, would warn us, “Youth is fleeting,” but we laughed. How could it be fleeting when it spread ahead of us like the endless ocean? Yet as we neared our last year in campus, we began to glimpse his wisdom and realized nothing lasts forever.
Those were the last years of Moi’s rule when jobs were hard to come by. To cushion our life after college, we opened a tuck shop in the hostels. Money started flowing in sooner than expected, forcing us to seek ways to reduce it to manageable levels. Francis, with his usual mischievous grin, asked, “Why not buy a wireless phone?”
So off we marched to Luthuli Avenue and returned triumphant, holding humongous Motorola phones with aerials so long they looked as though they could catch signals from the moon. Although the folly of the purchase was obvious to everyone else, it wasn’t to us-for friends do not see each other’s folly, only the glory of the adventure.
We quickly realized we had no one to call. Worse still, the whole hostel wanted to borrow the thing to call their girlfriends. “Do we need two phones?” we asked ourselves. And thus we sold one and retained the other, making it the official business line for our small shop.
Of course, the tuck shop collapsed, for we spent more time burning the money than making it. It didn’t matter-we had a shared phone and no bills to pay. But the loss taught us one profound lesson in life: being soaked alone is cold, but being soaked with your friend is adventure.
Later, broke and jobless, we sold the phone for a song to survive. And survive we did, because youth has no wisdom, but it has resilience-and Francis always carried plenty of that.
This week, Francis walked to the bright lights. In his leaving, I feel a whole world has dimmed, a world not born in me until the day I met him. For when such a friend departs, he does not go alone-he takes with him a piece of your world.
Rest in power comrade Mwaura.Son of a woman, kin of my heart.