DELETE FOR EVERYONE

Excerpts from “The Chronicles of Unfinished Buildings”

00:39

“I’m having Starbucks, it’s 3pm here”

00:40

So eager to embrace it.

So fast to accept it.

It;

the change.

00:41

“My teacher says he’s been to Kampala”

00:50

Did the mention of home in a land so far away hurt?

How does it feel

to be taunted with memories of a place so familiar

yet so remote?

Is there anything there to remind you of me?

Do you search the grocery stores for matooke and ghee

or do you now prefer Starbucks and KFC?

I’m happy for you.

Grateful for the opportunities overseas

but

I can feel you feel us drowning

in the oceans between

and do nothing.

00:52

“What do you keep deleting”

00:53

“Typing errors… effects of texting while half-awake… hahaha”

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Author’s Note

My teachers always told me that you don’t explain poetry. If any of them find this footnote, I’m in big, big trouble.

Delete for Everyone began as a heartbreak poem, but like most things written in moments of reflection, it grew into something larger. It’s about distance—not just the physical kind that oceans create, but the quiet, everyday drift that happens between people, places, and even versions of ourselves.

Imagine this: you’ve found the one—or so you think. You’re young, a little naïve, and drunk in “love”. Then life interrupts with an opportunity: The One leaves for the land of dreams on a neurology scholarship. You’re both excited and bursting with promises to make it work. Love, for a moment, feels stronger than distance.

Then time zones shift. Days blur. The space between texts grows longer. You hold on but they begin to let go. You wonder if someone else stepped into the silence? An American girl, perhaps, with whom he shares notes late into the night where your voice once lingered.

The poem unfolds through small exchanges and unsent messages, where affection meets silence and understanding gives way to uncertainty. Beneath the timestamped lines lie questions of identity and belonging—between Starbucks and matooke, KFC and ghee, the land of dreams and the memory of home.

Are these two Ugandans? Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps it’s more about what we lose when we trade the taste of what once anchored us for the adventures beyond us.

In the end, Delete for Everyone is about the unspoken—the things we wish to say but can’t, the spaces between what is sent and what is deleted, and the ache of realizing that distance doesn’t always begin in miles.