Barbara's

Chapter One: The Lounge of Broken Mirrors

The first time I walked into Barbra’s Lounge, I carried the smile of a man who still believed the world could be tricked by performance. I had learned how to laugh loudly enough to distract even my own demons, and Barbra’s became the stage where my mask glittered the most. The waiters knew me as that cheerful fellow who cracked jokes with strangers, lifted glasses in toasts that celebrated nothing in particular, and swayed to the music as though joy itself had leased my body for the night.

But that laughter was not joy—it was camouflage. Behind it lingered a man who had stumbled through the ruins of a failed graduation, whose degree was now nothing more than a half-burnt paper in the mind, a certificate whose absence mocked him like a missing tooth. Behind it lay a failed relationship, the kind that doesn’t just leave you lonely but leaves you hollow, scraping echoes in the chest where tenderness once lived. Behind it crouched poverty, the stubborn companion who followed me even into my dreams, tightening its grip like an unpaid landlord.

Barbra’s Lounge did not know this side of me. They only knew the mirage. And perhaps I wanted it that way. For in those walls, wrapped in red lights and smoke that curled like lost spirits, I could belong to a fiction of myself. The fiction was easier to swallow than the truth.

The Mirrors at Barbra’s

Barbra’s Lounge had mirrors, long stretches of them behind the bar, and they mocked me more than any person ever could. Each time I raised my glass, I saw not one Brian but a dozen fractured Brians, each one wearing that rehearsed smile. Sometimes, when the night was slow and the music dipped low, I caught glimpses of the truth in those mirrors: the drooping shoulders, the tired eyes, the sadness that wine could blur but never erase.

It was in those moments that poetry found me. Not as a lover, not even as a friend, but as a fellow drunkard staggering through the corridors of my soul. I scribbled lines on beer-stained serviettes, on the backs of receipts, sometimes on the palm of my hand. The poems came raw, sharp-edged, soaked with the bitterness of unswallowed tears. Yet when I read them aloud to myself, I felt lighter, as though I had poured poison into words and handed it over to the night to keep.

Barbra’s became both wound and healer.

The Circuit of Survival

But Barbra’s was only one stop in my strange circuit of survival. There was the Beer Garden, where men in dusty boots and women with tired laughs gathered around plastic chairs as if around a common fire. There was Sogomo, where the music was louder, the lights harsher, and the air smelled of roasted meat and rain-soaked earth. Between these three places, I oscillated like a pendulum, swinging from despair to distraction, from numbness to fleeting sparks of belonging.

By day, however, I lived another life. In the daylight, I wore no cologne of whisky, no laughter rehearsed. I woke early to do chores: scrubbing the compound, fetching water, tending to the small farm at the back of the house. I dug soil with a stubbornness that was not farming but exorcism. Each turn of the jembe was a battle against the voices that whispered failure into my ears. The rhythm of work gave me temporary silence. The sweat baptized me in small doses of dignity.

But when evening came, I returned to the circuit. I returned to the smoke, the music, the glasses, the scribbled poetry. And somehow, that cycle kept me alive.

The first time I walked into Barbra’s Lounge, I carried the smile of a man who still believed the world could be tricked by performance. I had learned how to laugh loudly enough to distract even my own demons, and Barbra’s became the stage where my mask glittered the most. The waiters knew me as that cheerful fellow who cracked jokes with strangers, lifted glasses in toasts that celebrated nothing in particular, and swayed to the music as though joy itself had leased my body for the night.

But that laughter was not joy—it was camouflage. Behind it lingered a man who had stumbled through the ruins of a failed graduation, whose degree was now nothing more than a half-burnt paper in the mind, a certificate whose absence mocked him like a missing tooth. Behind it lay a failed relationship, the kind that doesn’t just leave you lonely but leaves you hollow, scraping echoes in the chest where tenderness once lived. Behind it crouched poverty, the stubborn companion who followed me even into my dreams, tightening its grip like an unpaid landlord.

Barbra’s Lounge did not know this side of me. They only knew the mirage. And perhaps I wanted it that way. For in those walls, wrapped in red lights and smoke that curled like lost spirits, I could belong to a fiction of myself. The fiction was easier to swallow than the truth.

The Mirrors at Barbra’s

Barbra’s Lounge had mirrors, long stretches of them behind the bar, and they mocked me more than any person ever could. Each time I raised my glass, I saw not one Brian but a dozen fractured Brians, each one wearing that rehearsed smile. Sometimes, when the night was slow and the music dipped low, I caught glimpses of the truth in those mirrors: the drooping shoulders, the tired eyes, the sadness that wine could blur but never erase.

It was in those moments that poetry found me. Not as a lover, not even as a friend, but as a fellow drunkard staggering through the corridors of my soul. I scribbled lines on beer-stained serviettes, on the backs of receipts, sometimes on the palm of my hand. The poems came raw, sharp-edged, soaked with the bitterness of unswallowed tears. Yet when I read them aloud to myself, I felt lighter, as though I had poured poison into words and handed it over to the night to keep.

Barbra’s became both wound and healer.

The Circuit of Survival

But Barbra’s was only one stop in my strange circuit of survival. There was the Beer Garden, where men in dusty boots and women with tired laughs gathered around plastic chairs as if around a common fire. There was Sogomo, where the music was louder, the lights harsher, and the air smelled of roasted meat and rain-soaked earth. Between these three places, I oscillated like a pendulum, swinging from despair to distraction, from numbness to fleeting sparks of belonging.

By day, however, I lived another life. In the daylight, I wore no cologne of whisky, no laughter rehearsed. I woke early to do chores: scrubbing the compound, fetching water, tending to the small farm at the back of the house. I dug soil with a stubbornness that was not farming but exorcism. Each turn of the jembe was a battle against the voices that whispered failure into my ears. The rhythm of work gave me temporary silence. The sweat baptized me in small doses of dignity.

But when evening came, I returned to the circuit. I returned to the smoke, the music, the glasses, the scribbled poetry. And somehow, that cycle kept me alive.

The Masks We Wear

In Barbra’s, no one asked the kind of questions that pierced. No one asked how my graduation had failed, or why my face sometimes froze in thought even when laughter rolled around me. The lounge thrived on surface-level conversations—football matches, political gossip, the price of maize flour, who had been seen with whose wife. These were conversations that skimmed like stones on water, never daring to sink.

I embraced that. To sink was to confess. And I had no language yet for confession. What I had was performance. The cheerful man, the toast-maker, the listener whose nods were mistaken for understanding. Yet when the music swelled and the lights dimmed, my soul whispered its own truth in poetry:

“I am a cracked calabash,

Leaking silently

While men drink from me

And laugh at the taste.”

I did not show those lines to anyone. They lived in my notebook, folded in the back pocket of my jeans, pages wrinkled with sweat and fingerprints of beer. To share them felt like undressing in public, and I had already been stripped enough by life.

Beer Garden: The Open Sky

The Beer Garden was different. There were no mirrors there, only the open sky above and the open earth beneath. We sat on cheap chairs that wobbled on uneven ground, our tables ringed with bottles, roasted maize, and sometimes fried fish whose smell lingered on our fingers long after.

Here, the music was not as carefully curated as in Barbra’s. Radios blared from corners, competing with live bands, competing with drunk men singing off-key. And yet, in this chaos, there was honesty. At the Beer Garden, men spoke their wounds plainly. A farmer mourning a lost cow. A boda boda rider cursing his stolen motorbike. A student railing at examiners who had “eaten” his marks. There was no pretense of happiness here—only survival stitched with alcohol and smoke.

And I, in my own way, belonged.

But my belonging was always double-edged. I laughed with them, argued with them, even helped settle their quarrels, but I always carried the quiet knowledge that I was battling something deeper. While they spoke their pains openly, mine were locked in poetry. While they went home with drunken snores, I went home with lines that refused to let me sleep.

Sogomo: The City’s Pulse

Sogomo was something else entirely. It was the pulse of Eldoret’s night, where the music was loud enough to numb memory itself. The air carried roasted nyama choma, the salt of sweat, the sting of spirits poured in careless generosity.

In Sogomo, anonymity was possible. The crowd was thick enough to drown identity. I could disappear into dance, into shouting choruses of songs I barely knew, into the arms of strangers whose names I never asked. For a few hours, I could forget I was Brian, the failed student, the abandoned lover, the penniless dreamer. I became simply another shadow moving in rhythm, another throat burning with alcohol, another body swallowed by the music.

But even here, poetry followed me. I would pause mid-dance to scribble a line on my phone:

“The drum is not beating,

It is begging—

For someone to remember

That rhythm is only borrowed time.”

Sogomo was a fever dream, both escape and reminder. It gave me nights of blindness, but the mornings always pulled me back into the sharp light of truth.

Days of Chores and Silence

If the nights belonged to Barbra’s, the Beer Garden, and Sogomo, the days belonged to the soil, the house, the monotonous rhythm of chores. I washed clothes with soap that stung my palms, bent over buckets until my back ached. I fetched water from far, balancing jerricans as though balancing the weight of my disappointments. I cooked simple meals—ugali and sukuma, beans when fortune allowed—and ate them alone, chewing slowly as though hoping the silence would season them with meaning.

On the farm, I dug with a stubborn persistence. Each seed I planted felt like a question to the earth: “Will you grow something in me too? Will you make me fruitful despite my drought?”

The soil never answered, but at least it kept me busy. Labor was a form of therapy. Exhaustion dulled the sharp edge of depression. Yet, in the evenings, the cycle pulled me back. I returned to the circuit—Barbra’s, Beer Garden, Sogomo—as if tethered to them by invisible strings.

Conversations at Barbra’s

There were nights when Barbra’s felt like a confessional dressed in dim lights. Men and women leaned into each other, their voices softened by the comfort of alcohol. Secrets floated in the smoke above our heads.

One woman, her lipstick smudged by the rim of her glass, told me:

> “I come here because at home, my husband thinks silence is love. Here, at least, the music speaks.”

Another man, a retired teacher with trembling hands, once said:

> “I taught literature for thirty years, but when my pension delayed, books couldn’t feed me. Now, I sell stories to anyone who buys me a beer.”

Their words settled in me like seeds. I did not reply with advice—I wasn’t qualified to—but I stored their voices. Later, I would scribble them into poems, bending their confessions into lines that belonged to both them and me.

“Silence is not love,

It is a coffin,

Where words go to die

Unburied.”

“A story untold

Is a meal uneaten.

I trade my hunger

For a listener.”

Sometimes I wondered whether Barbra’s collected broken souls deliberately, or whether brokenness simply gravitated toward the bar like moths to light.

Nights of Collapse

But not all nights were conversations. Some nights were collapse. Nights when my body refused the charade of joy, and I slumped into a corner, watching bottles empty in front of me. The music was too loud, the lights too sharp, the laughter too cruel.

I remember one evening when the weight of it all—the failed graduation, the phone that never rang with her voice, the unpaid rent—came crashing at once. I excused myself from the table, walked into the bathroom, and locked the door.

The mirror there was crueler than the ones at the bar. It showed me the truth without mercy: eyes red, lips trembling, a man unraveling. I pressed my palms against the sink and whispered to myself:

> “You are not dying. You are just drowning.”

Then I wrote, with shaky hands, a line on the tissue paper:

“The strongest swimmer

Still drowns

If the ocean has no shore.”

I carried that tissue in my pocket for days, until it disintegrated into dust. But the line stayed with me.

A Farm-Day Epiphany

The mornings after such collapses were cruel. Head pounding, body heavy, the sunlight itself felt like punishment. Yet I forced myself into chores. One morning, while turning the soil in the garden, I paused. My sweat dripped into the earth, darkening it in patches.

And suddenly, I realized—I was planting not just maize or beans, but myself. Every seed was a small rebellion against despair. Every furrow I dug was a reminder that I could still create, still nurture, still coax life from dirt.

I leaned on the jembe, breathing hard, and for the first time in weeks, I felt a flicker of possibility. Not hope—that was too big a word. Just possibility. That maybe, just maybe, I was not entirely lost.

The Poetic Refuge

At night, when the cycle drew me back into town, poetry began to change its role. It was no longer just bleeding; it was beginning to heal me.

I started carrying a small notebook everywhere. At Barbra’s, I scribbled between sips. At the Beer Garden, I jotted down overheard conversations. At Sogomo, I stole moments between dances to catch lines that came like lightning.

The notebooks filled quickly. And in those pages, I saw a different Brian emerge—not just the failed graduate, not just the broken lover, not just the drunkard. There was also the writer, the observer, the one who could turn pain into art.

I realized: I was not only surviving through drinking; I was also surviving through words.

A Night Heavy with Rain

It was a Friday when the rain came down heavy on Eldoret. The town smelled of wet earth and smoke, of roasted maize curling in steam. I had almost stayed home that night, the fatigue of chores weighing on my shoulders, but something inside me itched. The silence of my room had grown unbearable.

So I found myself at Sogomo, shoes damp, hair dripping, notebook hidden in my jacket. The music was louder than usual—an old Congolese band playing with desperate energy, as though their guitars were sparring against the rain. People crowded inside to escape the storm, and the place throbbed with heat, sweat, and the restless need to forget.

I sat at a corner table, nursing a beer that tasted thinner than my sadness. Around me, laughter exploded in bursts, chairs scraped the floor, glasses clinked in messy toasts. But my mind was elsewhere. The words inside me that night were too loud, too restless to keep contained.

The Notebook Spills

I pulled out my notebook, the one with pages wrinkled by rain and beer. I began to write, almost violently, my pen scratching across the paper:

“I am a city of unfinished buildings,

Concrete dreams left naked to the sky.

Rain baptizes my failures,

But no roof comes to shelter me.”

I was so lost in the fever of writing that I didn’t notice the man sitting next to me had been watching. He leaned over suddenly, his breath hot with alcohol, and snatched the notebook from my hands.

“Eh, Brian! What is this you are always writing, eh? Poems? Songs? Let us hear!”

The table roared with laughter. I froze, panic gripping my chest. My notebook was my only sanctuary, the place where I bled in private. To have it exposed in Sogomo, among half-drunk strangers, felt like being undressed in the market square.

But the man had already begun to read aloud, stumbling through my handwriting. The laughter around the table grew quieter. The words, strange and raw, did something the music couldn’t—they cut through.

When he finished, silence lingered. Then a woman across the table clapped softly. “Eh… Brian, those are heavy words,” she said. “Why do you hide them?”

My face burned. I wanted to snatch the notebook back, to drown myself in another drink, to disappear. But instead, I found myself speaking.

“Because words are safer on paper than on the tongue,” I said. My voice trembled, but it was the truest thing I had spoken in weeks.

A Crack in the Mask

The rest of the night blurred, but something had shifted. People asked me to read another piece. I resisted, then relented, my voice shaky, reading lines about drowning, about silence, about unfinished buildings. And for the first time, I saw eyes watching me not with laughter, not with pity, but with recognition.

It was terrifying. It was liberating.

The music continued, the rain outside eased, but inside me a dam had cracked. I realized I could not keep the words buried forever. They demanded air. They demanded ears. They demanded life.

Walking Home

When I walked home in the wet dawn, the streets glistening with puddles, I felt strangely lighter. My shoes squelched, my body ached, but my chest carried something new—a quiet trembling of possibility.

Maybe my pain was not only mine. Maybe my words could carry more than just my own drowning. Maybe, just maybe, poetry was not just therapy—it was testimony.

I reached home, collapsed on my bed without removing my wet clothes, and whispered to myself:

> “This is how a man begins again—not by erasing his wounds, but by speaking them.”

And that was the night I understood: Barbra’s, Beer Garden, Sogomo—they were not just places of escape. They were the crucibles where my poetry was being forged, one night, one drink, one scribbled line at a time.