“The very thing that seems to cause loneliness and that sense of being “unseen”, hidden in the shadows of the star-light lives around us, is also an invitation to look into the face of God.”²

“Listen to the voice who calls you the beloved, because otherwise you will run around begging for affirmation, for praise, and for success. And then you are not free.”³

Fame evades me. Sorry to break it to you if you picked up this book because you thought I’m the freshest thing to hit the scene. But the truth is, I’ve never broken the Internet. Not even the Kenyan one. I’ve never dated a celebrity…or their son, and I most certainly don’t have a host of loyal fans on social media. I tried, once, to get a meme to catch on but from the likes of it (see what I did there?), it didn’t take. In most ways, I make it to the charts as part of the statistics Facebook, Twitter and Instagram cite as a reference for their ever-expanding user base. That’s me. A plus one statistic. A fraction of the percentage.

It reminds me of a time back in high school. While the rest of us were ravenously inhaling the githeri and banana set before us for lunch, one of the popular girls in my class casually stated, “I think ordinary is the worst word in the English language. Whatever you do with your life, just don’t be ordinary.” It was as though she was picking up from a conversation the rest of us were precluded from.

Ditto, Ellie. Granted, this is the same girl that managed to convince us that her sister had early onset Alzheimer’s but her boyfriend kept a notebook of their love story, pictures and all, to remind her about her life. If all this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s a play by play rip-off of the movie The Notebook. Will you look at me any different if I tell you that I caught on to her lie after high school? Because that’s how long it took me to figure it out. Also, her sister was much younger than her. Much, much younger.

So why did her words leave a gaping hole in me all these years? I mean, what’s wrong with being ordinary? (Sing it like Demi Lovato’s Complicated). Seriously. What do you do when you push for extraordinary but your life is really just mundane? Nice, exciting even, but mostly mundane.

If you’re like me, this has been the happy-unhappy song of your life. You want the bright lights of being somebody, but you don’t necessarily hate who you are. There’s greatness resident in all of us. We all get a piece of the sky to light up. You already know that. But why doesn’t anyone besides yourself, your bestie, your mum or that teacher from primary school seem to see it?

It stings sometimes—that feeling of being forgotten and unnoticed. It’s hard to make an entrance when no one’s watching you in the first place.

We’ve all been there at one point in time—heart bloody and leaking. Days when we feel like we fit in the palm of the world. Folded and foetal. Small. Unseen. It’s quiet. And the unobservant eye will easily miss it. But it pricks like a thorn to the heart. The question as to whether we matter seems to get amplified by the circumstances we often find ourselves in. You’re a shoe-in for the job but someone else gets the gig. Or the guy says he loves you, proposes even, but he ends up leaving you at the altar and saying I do to your now ex-best friend a few months later.

I know it sounds like a bad Lifetime movie, or a little too far from reality for you, but if you chat up the girl or guy next to you, you’ll realize we’ve all got a story if you care to listen.

Now that I have your ears, I must confess I did something I’m not proud of when I was much younger. It all started when I was 12. I begged my parents to take me to boarding school. I’m talking down on my knees, mentioning it in every second sentence, and finding ways to show that I was good for it. It must have been exhausting, but it worked. My parents finally acquiesced and I got to own those big blue and silver metal boxes that were synonymous with boarding school at the time. I packed up my uniforms, sleeping clothes, sugar, Blueband (a Kenyan boarding school staple), drinking chocolate, a few snacks plus some exercise books and I was good to go.

To be honest, I was actually looking forward to the fresh start. I had burned bridges at my former school and I didn’t want to return to a less-than-stellar reception hence my boarding school pitch. It helped that my cousin was going with me and that calmed my parents’ nerves. They said yes, and off I was to a small private school in Kangundo.

At the time, Kangundo was a small town with the usual Ukambani charm I was accustomed to from my younger years being shuttled from Nairobi to upcountry every holiday. The girls would go to town on Saturdays for blow dries, which really meant straightening their hair with a hot comb. And Sunday services were a 15-minute walk away from the school at AIC Kyamulendu.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the language, ky is the equivalent of ch in Kikamba. In a string of sentences, be it in English, Kiswahili or Kikamba, the words always sound like a happy musical. The r’s are always melodiously traded for l’s and the letter h is always passed over for the vowel that comes after it. One teacher in particular, Mr. Ndambuki, had the best expression for his students when they passed his Kiswahili exams. He’d say, “Nasikia laaa ndani ya looo.”

Of course, what he meant to say was nasikia raha ndani ya roho, which means I feel joy in my heart. No one doubted it when he said it. His eyes would be closed, mouth elongated while wearing a gleeful smile, and he’d stretch out the laaa’s and looo’s to a gooey sweetness that I still consider to be deep joy to this day.

The market in the town was vibrant and cheap. Real cheap. So much so that our matrons would go to the market on Tuesdays (market day) and buy cute pieces of clothing to sell for profit. Each item was sold to us at the dormitory for about 20 shillings, and it was the kind of stuff your parents wouldn’t let you wear. In case you’re wondering, then yes. That made it all the more attractive. I remember buying a sleeveless black corset (which I honestly couldn’t fill out at 12) and spending nights after lights out wearing it and dancing in front of the bathroom mirror singing backup vocals to the stars. Those were some electric nights.

Kangundo was all country charm and new to my sparkly 12-year-old self. It took some time, but I got accustomed to the routine of things—the dormitory, the double deckers, the rice and soupy cabbage stew, or potato soup, or githeri on alternate days, the quarter loaf of bread and cocoa served at ten in the morning, the smokie served exclusively on Sunday before going to AIC Kyamulendu, the class washing on Saturday, the pit latrines, the shared bath- rooms and lights out at 9 PM with a 5 AM wake-up call. I missed home, and I often wondered what possessed me to take the hasty plunge into boarding school life, but I settled quite fast.

Then I noticed him. Calvin. He was, to me, an Adonis. Fairly tall, lanky, in dire need of his glasses and a smile that could get him out of an arrest. Calvin probably knew I liked him. What? As if the staring and the awkward smiles weren’t a dead giveaway. But he was enamoured by Shirley. Her hair was long and full, and she had this sweet deep belly laugh that Calvin found hypnotic.

Now, I’ve never fought for a guy with another lady. And I probably never will. It seems a little too pointless and it’s hard work for someone you’ll likely not be into after a year tops. Remember, I was 12. At that age, I was sure I still stood a chance with Bow Wow. So a part of me wished it would be me that Calvin would eventually call his girl.

Wait, was The Bachelor a thing in 2002? Never mind. I wouldn’t know. I guess I typecast myself as one of the ladies you find on The Bachelor. The kind that likes the guy even though she knows that he’s casting a wide net in the ladies pool and is already aware of the girl he’s taken a liking to. Calvin probably soaked in all the attention from all quarters to feel like a stud, and his other classmates were pretty jealous of him because all he had to do was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Yet chicas would just swoon at his feet. That’s a teenage boy’s dream right there.

Even with the odds stacked against me, I was convinced I had a chance at love so I made a play for him, during the holiday of course. I thought it would help if Calvin could see me in a different light, just in case Kangundo was cramping my style. And it worked. It only took two years after we finished primary school.

But you know how you get that sinking feeling you’re a side piece? Calvin only talked to me during the school break and shut me out during the school term. It gets worse. I’d send him stamps and letters and cards at least once a month because I wanted him to know I was thinking about him. I know, I know. But in my defence, I was being a thoughtful teen girlfriend.

During the first term of second form a year after we were “official”, Calvin sent my friend (schoolmate) who happened to be his neighbour with a letter. In it, he said how sorry he was. That he was stupid and should have tried harder. He promised to buy stamps from home because they weren’t available in school. I wanted to believe him, but I couldn’t get over what he did with the ones I sent him.

Get this, the last page of his letter had the words to Reuben Studdard’s song Sorry 2004. In the middle of reading the lyrics to the song, I knew right there and then that I was done. Maybe it was the song or the repetitive apologies without actual change that showed me Calvin and I were going nowhere. But I was done.

He was a master at never doing things right by me so there was no point of giving it one more try. And what if this was a crafty way of asking me for more stamps during the school term? Uh-uh! Not this time. So I wrote him a response—one last letter with no card. Honestly, if I could turn back the hands of time, I’d send it with a condolence card so I could be the first to tell him sorry for his loss. No? Too much?

In the letter, I said that I was foolish and that I didn’t blame him for being a lousy boyfriend even though I expected him to be different. And to match his borrowed Sorry 2004 song (which I still hate to this day, sorry Reuben), the last page of my letter had my own song composition called Undone Love that ended with the words, “Funny how I’m trying hard to let go, when I never had you anyway.”

And that was it. A smooth Hollywood break up so O.G, it would make Taylor Swift jealous. I really should record that song by the way. Hands up if you’ll fund my Kickstarter page to do so. I’m serious…

Bad romance drama aside, feeling unseen can make you do crazy things. I’m sure if I was seated across from you right now at a café booth, I’d be cracking my ribs at your silly and crazy too. We should probably do that sometime, but let me get back to the point. Whether it has to do with career or love, we tend to get the love, jobs, and opportunities we think we deserve. It’s really that simple.

Did you know that most girls have sex just to hear the words I love you? Come on! That’s not right. The coochie has never been and will never be a speed train to the heart. The only way to love you should be to drown. All in. No man is worthy who asks for a piece of you.

I love how this quote puts it:

“You only need one man to love you. But him to love you free like a wildfire, crazy like the moon, always like tomorrow, sudden like an inhale and overcoming like the tides. Only one man and all of this.”⁴

That said, we live in a fallen world and you will seldom leave it without a few bruises or the stink of death. We will be ignored. Fame and popularity will evade us. We will lose friends. We will be passed over for promotions, get dumped by the guy or lady we thought we’d build forever with, and we will miss the mark every so often. We will ask ourselves: Do I matter? And that question will turn our insides out and press heavy on our hearts hoping that the answer is the biggest yes. That we do matter. Small as we are. Unseen and unknown as we are. That we matter. And knowing that should make all the difference in our lives.

It took me a long while to realize it but being unseen didn’t mean I didn’t matter. It didn’t mean that I wasn’t chosen. When you think about it, it all comes down to who’s looking. You don’t need every eye on you. Just the right one. I had to learn that to matter does not imply great in size but great in impact, right where I am, with everything I do. That made me breathe easy.

And because there’s the crazy side of unseen that does anything (and I mean anything) to be seen, there’s the subtler side; a side I fell back on when the crazy didn’t yield much fruit. It’s the side that makes you pick safe like clockwork. If you resign to it, with every passing year you will learn to stay folded and amplify the deceitful narrative running through your mind that you’ve been cheated by God out of that relationship, that career or the kind of life you’re supposed to have. But let me tell you this honey, to become a wallflower to the not-so-keen eye is not an art form to aspire to. Unless you’re a ninja or in the CIA, and your life depends on it. But it’s not how to do real life. I should know. I was a professional at the origami displays of a cheated life.

This edition of Telios Chapters is an excerpt from Chosen Not Cheated By Koki Oyuke.

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