A conductor told me a passenger recognised him by his voice after years of using a different route. I can remember amounts from old accounts but I'm not sure I could recognise somebody like that, just from two words through a window. Since then I've been noticing the voices on my commute, who calls out a stage clearly and who can turn the same words into a complaint. At home I could pick my mother's voice out of a church full of people when I was small, even when she wasn't singing loudly. Maybe everyone keeps a different record of the same place. I know the routes by their figures; the passengers probably carry a completely different Nairobi.

At choir practice we held one note longer than I expected and I ran out of breath before the others. I had been standing with my shoulders up, the same way I sit when I'm checking a difficult reconciliation. Once I loosened my collar and took a proper breath, the next attempt felt easier, sound coming out without that tight feeling in my throat. By the end I was warm enough to leave my jacket over my arm on the walk outside. Funny how I can spend a whole day hardly noticing my breathing and then have to pay attention to it just to finish a line with everyone else. My voice is a little rough now, but in a satisfying way.

Grace laughed when I showed her another version of the wedding budget, then asked if I was looking forward to the wedding or only to closing its accounts. I laughed too, but the question hurt a bit because I am looking forward to it, very much. I just don't know how to explain the worry without sounding as if marrying her is the expense I resent. It isn't. Later she sent a picture of us from her cousin's place and said she liked my face in it. I looked ridiculously happy, no calculations visible. I kept opening that message between other things. Sawa, perhaps I needed to see myself enjoying something before trying to explain it.