David:
Adrian asked again the next evening — not about love this time, but about friends.
"Was Ali really your best friend?"
I smiled.
He didn't know that Ali was more than just a friend. There was a time when he had been "The Friend." The boy who made me feel like I belonged. Who slapped me on the back after I made a bad joke and laughed like it was gold. The one who once gave me his last shirt when my trunk had been stolen by Form 4 bullies.
Yes, we fought. Often. Boys do.
But when my mother's photograph got torn during a search, it was Ali who taped it back together. When I cried in the bathroom on a Thursday night, it was Ali who stood on the other side of the door and just said, "I'm here."
And I lost him.
Because of whispers I never whispered.
Because of truths twisted into weapons.
Because people only believe what they're afraid might be true.
But Ali…
He wasn't the only loss that stuck with me.
There was also Kuda — the boy who never smiled in class but wrote poetry on the back of his notebooks. He once gave me a page.
"I think you'd understand this," he said.
The poem was about loneliness.
It ended with the line:
"And even among a thousand voices, I still speak only to myself."
I didn't know what he meant until he was gone.
Hung himself in the dorm bathroom the week after midterms.
I still keep that page.And sometimes l still fold that page when my hands shake too much to write my own
Some losses are loud - like Kuda's. But others...they infect your silence
Then there was Rufaro, the soft-spoken genius who trusted no one except me.
He told me about the time his uncle used to visit him at night when he was eight.
He said, "You're the only one who never asks why I don't laugh."
And I carried that secret, Adrian — even when he started to hurt others the way he was once hurt.
I stayed quiet because I didn't know how to speak up.
He was my friend.
But he became something else.
I was too late. And though l never touched what he became, I still wonder if my silence was its soil.
One day they caught him.
Expelled.
His name became a cautionary tale whispered in bunk beds and locker rooms.
And me?
I became The Listener.
Not because I wanted to be.
But because I had heard too much.
Seen too much.
Known too much.
And still said nothing.
---
David (pausing, looking at Adrian):
You see, Son — sometimes a man isn't made by the things he does, but by the things he lets happen around him.
Sometimes silence is louder than sin.
---
Adrian (softly):
"You still carry them."
---
David:
Every name.
Every moment.
Every unspoken truth that bloomed into tragedy.
They're all written on the walls of my memory.
In chalk I can't wipe off.
And you — Adrian —
You're the only person I've ever dared let walk those halls.
---