The alarm rings. You surface. It’s getting louder. You feel for your phone to silence it, but your hand knocks it to the floor. Shit. It rattles, insistent, mechanical. You must snooze it. No, you must stop it, once and for all. Reluctant to part with the warm embrace of your bed, you crane a hand towards it, but it is just beyond your reach. You peel yourself out of bed. And when your feet touch the floor, the cold strikes you like a bolt of lightning.

Just for a moment, you sit on the edge of your bed. The phone has quietened. The fragments of a fetid dream linger on your mind. Someone, something, somewhere…but as you try to recall them, they recoil. The more you try to remember, the more you forget. The dream fades away like smoke in the palm of your hand. And then you notice your tongue tastes like something died on it.

You can hear the groan of a coffee machine droning through the walls. The quiet of the morning shattered by a neighbour’s addiction. To calm yourself, you take a deep breath, and the scotched smell of burnt coffee invades your lungs. You choke, cough, wheeze, and stumble into the shower. You turn the tap. The arctic spray sinks to the bone. You jump back and wait, testing the stream intermittently with the back of your hand. The water warms, but not fast enough.

You brew yourself some tea. Not some crude colloid strung from some tea bags and sullied with a splash of skimmed milk. Proper tea, the tea leaves boiled to an inch of their life in whole milk, in an aluminium pot. No sugar, just a pinch of cinnamon and a slice of ginger.

The cup is warm to the touch, the scent is sweet, but your eyes are now planted into the glowing portal in your hand. The screen flickers. Endlessly. You read a sentence, twice, thrice, but you grasp nothing. You watch things but see nothing. Someone said something. Somewhere far from here, people have been slaughtered. Children too. The markets did something. You do nothing. You scroll. Away.

When you finally bring the tea to your lips, the temperature is wrong. Not cold but no longer hot, and the flavour has steamed out. You chug it down anyway, all at once.

Suddenly, the phone vibrates in your hand. You silence it. You don’t feel like talking to anyone right now. A WhatsApp message follows. You see the notification but do not open it. Answering this message requires energy you are saving for something else, though you cannot say what. You open the app anyway. 67 unread messages. “Six seven,” your mind chants back, a product of cognitive lobotomy. Your brain is rotting, poisoned by slop.

You doom-scroll the morning away. You read the first message without reading it, the way you read everything these days. Later you will not remember what any of them said. Tomorrow, someone will ask you if you saw their message. You will lie and say “no”, you don’t care that they saw the blue ticks anyway.

Someone has responded to your message from a week ago with a single emoji. You study it, trying to decode it. Is it friendly? Sarcastic? Dismissive? The pictogram gnaws at you. You compose some responses, delete them all, mark the message as unread and put the phone down.

Humanity has been writing for five thousand years. Maybe more. We invented glyphs, alphabets, and apps to escape the prison of the present, to reach across space and time. We now have more ways to communicate than any species in history. Yet, we misunderstand each other with remarkable consistency. We may speak the same language, yet it will not be enough. The things you mean and the things people hear! A careful message is read as curt. A joke lands as an insult. A heartfelt message as manipulative. So, maybe some messages are better left unread.

You were a happy child who loved to play with your friends. The days felt both endless and instantaneous, which is the same thing when you are seven years old. The games would go for hours but feel like minutes. And when your mother’s voice cuts into the dusk, calling you home for supper, the infinity of time collapses. You walked home slowly, dragging your feet, delaying the inevitable. She would be waiting at the door with that look that meant you made her worry again, you had stayed out too long. You wanted to explain that there was something wrong with the universe, that time was broken, that dusk had come too soon. Joy compresses time and suffering expands it, but you didn’t know why. You had no words for it, except “Sorry, mum”.

It was Christmas dinner, everyone was around, cousins, uncles. Chapatis were aplenty. The adults were talking, perhaps about another family, you cannot remember. All you remember is standing at the edge of the conversation like at the edge of a pool, wanting to jump in but not certain that you should. You wanted to contribute, to prove you belonged, desperately. They spoke with words you did not have, alluded to things you could not imagine. One of them made a joke in a language you did not understand. Everyone laughed. You laughed too, but a second too late. Then everyone looked at you with that expression that meant they knew you were pretending. You did not get it. You couldn’t. You wanted to belong, but no matter how much you tried, you couldn’t. And so even amidst the joys and laughters of family, you learnt to stay silent, and to speak only when you knew you were right.

You were fourteen. It’s Physics class, Mr. Akweya demands that you solve the problem on the board. You stand, flutter to the front, and scribble something as you mumble to yourself. The class erupts in laughter, but you do not laugh. You can’t lose focus now. You finish the problem in a flash, and flee back to your seat. Your face is flooded with sweat, but the solution is cold and clear. At first, even Akweya himself doesn’t get it. No one gets it. Everyone wonders why the answer is right yet you didn’t solve the problem the way you should. For many years, no one has understood you, and for many years to come, no one will. You are just another Alvin, just passing through, lost in your own world.

As a teenager, the world demanded that you must excel. Sports and scholarship. Social fluency and sexual maturity. Everything all at once, or else you are a loser. If you are not good at football or getting girls, this becomes part of who you are. Say you are good at Physics, really good, and maybe have one girl that you like, this too is insufficient. It marks you as soft, bookish, even strange. There is really nothing you are that satisfies your peers. You play with them anyway, because not playing is worse. And you kick the football to the chorus of laughter, the cruel laughter of those who are yet to learn that they too are vulnerable.

Noon comes. You remember that you are not a child anymore and you are still in your towel. You slip into some shorts, nothing else. You are at your desk now. You work from home. You attend to the annoying chime of slack notifications. In a few minutes, you knock out a few tasks with the gentle ease of competence. You don’t love your work. You execute it with the minimum effort required to avoid trouble. This is enough. Doing more requires energy you are saving for something else, though you cannot say what. You wonder, maybe you lack ambition. No, that’s not it. You just never learnt how to show enthusiasm for things that do not matter. You do not resent yourself, just the part of you that cannot manufacture performance.

When you join the third Zoom call of the day, your camera is still off. By now, your mind is off too, paralysed by reels that light your face like flash bangs. Someone says something in the meeting. You mishear it, and answer a question they did not ask. They look puzzled, half confused, half concerned, but they cannot see your face, and so you can pretend that the connection is choppy. For a moment, you fear that you have been found out. You have revealed something, some small but visible decay of attention and cognition. Later, you will replay the moment in your head, examining it from all angles for a little while, until you return to the reels again.

You are hungry. Lunch requires decisions: what to eat, where to eat, with whom. You hesitate. The hunger builds. Soon you will be too hungry to decide, and then you will eat something you ordered from an app, and it will taste like regret. You stuff your face with cold fries from the fridge.

You were seventeen. You meet someone who makes you feel seen. They listen when you speak. You tell them things you have never told a soul. They look at you with genuine delight. They show you that you might be someone worth knowing.

The friendship intensifies with a speed particular only to adolescence. From strangers to soulmates in days, from soulmates to sweethearts in weeks. In a month, you have become inseparable. You believe this is permanent. You have found the one.

You have not. First, a cancelled plan: something came up, sorry. Then a conversation that’s shorter than usual: they are a little busy and have to run. You try harder. Reach out more. You try to be funnier, but the jokes stop landing altogether. Desperation has a smell, and when you are the desperate one, everyone can smell it but you. You can feel the friendship dying but cannot stop it. It feels like watching a glass bottle roll off the far edge of the table, and all you can do is squint at the inevitable shatter even before it arrives. After a while, they are being polite to you, which is the cruelest thing because politeness is what we give strangers because they deserve nothing more.

You were twenty. You meet someone new at a party. In five minutes you have revealed the most awkward version of yourself. The version that tries too hard, laughs too loudly, and fills every silence with words because silence feels like rejection. You watch yourself perform this small disaster in real time, unable to stop yourself. The awareness makes it worse. They smile politely. Then drift away into the crowd. You stand there, holding your drink.

At twenty two, someone found you attractive. This surprised you more than it should. You have not learnt how to receive affection without suspicion. When they say they love you, you can only hear the things they never said: the unspoken “but” and “for now.” When they touch you with tenderness, some part of you waits for the torment to show its face. You know that it is there, hiding, waiting, somewhere.

You have been hurt a few times before. You have hurt people too, and you fear that this one can see the stain. You dread that beautiful things break and you would rather break them yourself than wait. However, not this time. You want to try, just one more time. Every day is a battle with yourself. You must stop yourself from sabotaging what could be beautiful. You want to love them and let them love you.

The heartbreak comes anyway. This is worse. Way worse. You see, failure with a clear cause gives us something to blame, someone to burn at the stake. The failure of sincere affection leaves you with nothing but ruin. It forces you to admit that love is insufficient, that it has always been insufficient.

You groan, close your laptop, and pick up your old diary. Therein, you surely must find something to make you smile. You read something you wrote ten years ago. A poem to a pretty flame. You cringe. You can see where you were trying too hard, every word, every line. You want to rip the page and chew it into a pulp. You choose to keep it anyway.

You are twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-seven. Milestones arrive and depart. Dames, degrees, destinations. Each birthday feels like it came too soon. You visit your parents. They are aging, and you can see it. Your father moves more carefully. Your mother repeats her stories. About the time your father forgot the directions and they ended up in Bondeni-Nakuru instead of the Bondeni in Eldoret. You have heard this story twenty times. You can recite it word for word. She tells it anyway. You listen with decreasing patience, checking your phone every few minutes. You do not know that you will hate yourself for your impatience, that you would trade everything to sit through one more Sunday lunch and hear that stupid story one more time, but it will be too late.

Your mother asks about your life with an interest that masks her concern. You offer her some updates. They sound like progress but you know they are merely motion. You are alive, employed, independent. You do not ask anyone for money. This should be enough. And yet a part of you insists that it is unsatisfied. It wants something you cannot name, and makes you feel that the life you are living is not quite the life you want. The life you have is what happens while you are making other plans, or not making plans, or making plans you will not execute because execution requires energy you never had, or no longer have.

You are thirty-two. You are not old, just no longer young. Your body requires maintenance now. The effortless physicality of youth has been replaced by a bad back and weak knees. It happened without announcement. You simply noticed that these days, injuries linger. Sit for too long and you pay for it for days.

Your childhood friends have children. They are tired in ways you are not tired. Happy in ways you cannot access. You watch them transform into people you do not remember. Conversation becomes more difficult. Not from indifference but the divergence of concern. They speak of diapers and school fees. You speak of startups and PhDs. The big things that take your time sound little when spoken aloud, like you have not yet started life and they have been living it.

Perhaps you have children, then you too are tired in ways you cannot express. You love them with a ferocity that terrifies you, yet you are bored by the daily tedium of care. These truths coexist, and they corrode you from within.

The sun is lower now. Even though you haven’t opened your curtains today, you can feel it in your bones that the day has started to decline. Focus feels like labor. Everything is done with decreasing precision. The work day ended but you cannot quite leave it behind. You check your emails once more. You compose responses that could wait until morning, because waiting for tomorrow feels like losing.

You draw the curtains. The clouds are bathed in that golden, elegiac sheen. The sunset is so beautiful it hurts. Beauty has become complicated these days. It moves you, but you are more aware of its transience. It’s better to watch it through your phone, where nothing ever decays as long as you have your charger.

You think about dinner and the thought exhausts you. You could skip it. Go to bed hungry. You could eat some fries, there are still some left overs in the fridge. The evening meal happens. The fries are good, probably. You eat without tasting. Now you are no longer hungry but you are also not satisfied.

For all of written history, the great project of philosophy has been to explain suffering. To contextualise it, to find its purpose or supply some framework of meaning. The Buddha told us that life is suffering and that only the eightfold path offers liberation. The Stoics said that suffering comes from attachment. They advocated for radical acceptance instead. The Existentialists had their say too, that suffering is inherent to consciousness, and that we are free to choose how we respond to it. Yet here you are, armed with the wisdom of the world, and still suffering. Suffering from the discontent of a bad meal, driven to anxiety by the chime of a slack notification, and carrying every agony like pins in your pockets.

You are thirty-five. Forty. Forty-five. Age is a number that matters less each year. You have achieved some things and failed at others. You have a career that is fine. A relationship that is fine. A life that is, by reasonable metrics, fine. This is probably normal. It could always be worse, and this should comfort you. But fine is not what you wanted. Fine is the accumulation of small compromises, until you look up one day and realise you have built a life you never really wanted. It is not too late to change. Except, the cost now exceeds what you are willing to pay.

You committed cruelties when you were younger. Small ones, and large ones that seemed small at the time. You spoke thoughtlessly, acted selfishly. You did not notice or did not care. Now you notice. Now you care. The person you wronged has moved on, or forgotten, or has not forgotten but has built a life in which you do not feature. You feel you cannot apologise because the apology would be another cruelty, another act of selfishness disguised as conscience. It would serve you more than them, reopen wounds for your benefit, wounds that may have taken a long time to heal. You must live with the certainty that somewhere in the world, you were the villain in someone’s story.

The dark deepens. Night is coming. You can feel it. You are fifty. Sixty. Seventy. You don’t count the years any more. Your body has long forgotten its job. It makes strange sounds when you move it, and fails in small humiliating ways. You need help with things you once did effortlessly. Someone must check that you have locked the door, taken your medication, and not wet yourself. Day by day, you watch as your independence is stripped away. You are becoming a child again. But at least children have potential, what do you have?

Your friends are dying. Maybe not frequently, but often enough to notice. The news arrives via a Facebook tag, a WhatsApp text, or by an absence where there used to be presence. You attend the funerals. Some, not all. You feel like you should be mourning but feel mostly numb. You want to feel more, but feel nothing. Perhaps you are already practicing for your own death. Learning to treat death as the destination.

If you are lucky, your children visit. You have become their burden. An obligation they will resent and later feel guilty for resenting. You can see it in their eyes when they tend to you, the politeness that barely masks their pity. You want to apologise for existing, for needing. You want to release them from the burden of your care. But dying is harder than it looks, it requires more courage than you can summon.

You are sitting in a room full of people who love you, yet you have never felt more alone. They are here, speaking to you, yet you are unreachable. Your loneliness is not about their presence or absence. It is about the isolation of your conscious experience, that no matter how much you try to connect with others you shall remain unknowable, even to yourself.

The night is now dark and full of terrors. The people you loved are all dead. You are in a bed that is not yours: hospital or hospice. You want to sleep but sleep will not come. You stare at the ceiling and count your agonies. You cannot remember when you stopped living, stopped trying to do something remarkable with your life. You did not die at once on some traumatic day. No. You simply eroded, year by year, until one day your life was all gone and you could not remember what it felt like to possess it.

Nothing you did ever mattered. Nothing anyone did mattered. 13.8 billion years of this universe have passed, and it will continue for trillions more. Civilisations disappeared. Cities became ruins. The Tang Dynasty collapsed. The Songhai Empire fell. Rome fell, and fell again and again. Each time felt like the end of the world for those who lived through it. The past becomes a footnote for those who come after. All of it will be erased as if it never happened.

The great religions of this world have promised transcendence. Heaven, nirvana, union with the divine. Something beyond all this. They promised to tell us why are we here, why any of this matters. We have built temples that touch the sky, poured our prayers to the heavens, and starved ourselves, to discover what it means for men to feel? To suffer? We have been offered answers, but their proof is withheld until we are already dead.

Science, our youngest attempt, has given us the most, but has refused to offer us the comfort of lies. In 300 years, it has turned peasants into kings, men into gods. It has split the atom, photographed the cell, told us the true story of creation. It has shown us the salts that sustain life. But ask it about the texture of grief or the meaning of life and it goes quiet.

Perhaps Science is still too young. Perhaps some day, in the far future, it will yield the answers we need. Until then, you stand here facing questions that can be posed by a child, and you have nothing. This should terrify you. It does, but the terror of meaninglessness is soon dispelled by the agonies of daily life.

A tepid cup of tea, the fear of death, both agonies wound us the same. Both are proof that time will always do what time does. All your life, you have been waiting for the right time. You will start living when you finish this project. When you meet the right person. When something shifts. Sometime in the future. Yet the future never comes. It shimmers in the horizon, beyond your reach, receding at the speed you approach it.

The speed of time.

The present is the only time that exists, and if you wait for the right time, you will almost never be in it. You only touch it briefly then ricochet into a memory or into a dream.

Agony is not that bad things happen. It is not that we suffer. We always will. Your agony is that you are dying right now. You have been dying your whole life. Dying every moment you are not here.

You could be here. Right now. Always. This is all there is. But, probably, you will not. You will probably keep waiting, die waiting, waiting for the right moment. Habits are hard to kill. Yet tomorrow comes whether you lived today or not. The alarm will ring.