Leaving Nairobi

There are cities that leave fingerprints on your soul, and then there are cities that sink their teeth in. Nairobi is the latter. A place that seduces you with its rhythm and devours you whole before you realize you were the meal all along. I have loved this city fiercely—until that love began to taste like rust. Now, as I pack the last of my things, I feel the weight lift, unfastening itself link by link. I leave without ceremony, and for once, I feel nothing pulling me back.

Nairobi isn’t a city that lets go easily. It’s a living thing, breathing in fumes and exhaling the desperate shrill of survival. Every corner pulses—sometimes with life, sometimes with quiet ruin. I’ve learned to live with both. The long stretches of twilight where possibilities feel endless, and the cold, hollow mornings when you realize those possibilities might have been nothing more than smoke. I chased them anyway, let the city carry me through its veins, convinced I could outlast the grind.

But there are ghosts here. They linger in the cracks of pavements, in the spaces between laughter and silence. Nairobi doesn’t bury its dead. It keeps them close—pressed into the concrete, rustled between the gusts of wind that coil around buildings at night. I know because I’ve felt them. The weight of promises unkept, the echoes of names that once filled the air but now hang empty, like unfinished sentences.

There was a time when I thought I could outrun it. The weight, the longing, the ache that stretches across this city like a second skin. But Nairobi doesn’t let you forget. The streets remember you long after you’ve left your footprints behind. I can feel them beneath me even now—Ngara’s narrow alleys, the rush of Tom Mboya street at dusk, the stillness that cloaks Parklands just before the city wakes. I know them intimately, as one knows the contours of an old scar.

I leave not because I am broken, but because I have outgrown the shape this city made of me. Nairobi taught me to survive, yes, but survival isn’t the same as living. There is something corrosive about wearing resilience like armor, about measuring your days by how much you endured. I no longer want to count my worth in scars.

And yet, there is no bitterness in my leaving. Nairobi gave me moments I will fold carefully into the lining of my memory. Rooftops where the sky stretched open in a thousand shades of blue, matatu rides where strangers laughed like old friends, the soft snore of the city just before dawn. I carry these with me, knowing they belong to a chapter I no longer need to reread.

As I ride away, I sense something within me unspooling, something once knotted tightly that now releases, quietly and without resistance. It’s as if, in leaving, I’ve also allowed the city to release me. It no longer has a hold on me. The weight of all those years is lighter now. I feel the quiet certainty that what I am walking toward is not an escape, but a return to something more true, more whole.

The city fades into the distance, but it doesn’t vanish. It becomes part of me now—woven into my bones, silent but steady. I no longer need to look back. The way forward is clear, not because I know exactly what lies ahead, but because I trust that the road is mine to walk. And for the first time, I am free to take it.

The ~end~ beginning.

Tafahri Theru Munjatta