Back in high school, during that brutal August holiday before KCSE, my house felt less like home and more like a police station where my parents were the main detectives. Dad would sit on his favorite brown leather armchair, sipping lukewarm chai, staring at my mock results with a heavy, disappointed silence that cut deeper than any beatings from primary school. Mum spent the entire afternoon pacing the living room, hit-and-run lecturing me about how her friend Mama Njoroge’s son was already scoring straight A's.
I spent most of those dusty afternoons locked in my bedroom, staring at the peeling paint on the ceiling, listening to the muffled rumble of Matatus honking along the main road and wishing I could just hop on one and disappear to Nairobi town. Every meal was an awkward battlefield of clinking spoons and cold stares, where asking for extra ugali felt like demanding a personal loan, and no matter how hard I tried to explain that I was suffocating under all their unfulfilled dreams, all they heard was an ungrateful child wasting their hard-earned school fees.