You started writing this fear in 2023. When you stunned everyone in your androgynous apparel and graduation cap, you had a job to report to the next day and were a mentee under a young creatives program. For someone who had left campus four months ago, newly recovered from the post-university depression, everything seemed to be in place until it wasn’t.

You started writing this fear when it wasn’t; everything had vanished. So, you became serious about your writing and stopped hiding behind a job you didn’t even like. You wrote poems that introduced you to rejection emails from literary magazines as all the jobs you were applying for didn’t even bother rejecting you. You wrote Loud Music about your conundrum of opting for an unconventional career, hoping, not knowing it would be published the next year. When you were not lost in the worlds of your stories, you hurt. You hurt so bad you wanted it all to stop. Not living crossed your mind. You think there’s brevity in choosing to go, a brevity you don’t want to ever possess. You’d never cared about death – you’re lying.

You just don’t know death. You haven’t experienced it closely. And you dread what it will do to you when you finally cross paths. You hadn’t lived, and ceasing to exist cameoed in your thoughts when you were not distracted. Was it death or how you will be remembered? You’re not the nicest flowers-to-smiles person so whoever said that shit at your funeral would be lying. For many, it is blood, as long as they’d scattered their DNA here and there, they were here.  For you, it’d be the writing and art you created. When you haven’t lived enough, how you’re recollected is all there is. Unlike African writers whose books have travelled the world and gay men whose names make up the global fashion industry, your truth is all you had.

You were home rotting away at the height of the homophobic rage that hung over Uganda after the Anti-Homosexuality Act, 2023 became law, when a friend contacted you to ascertain how gay people go about funeral rites. He was assisting a professor with research, and thought you the right source of this information. You didn’t know why, actually you did.  You couldn’t help thinking the allies had moved on from preaching queer rights to documenting our grieve. It felt like – now that they’re going to be killed, we might as well research the aftermath. You texted your knows-everybody-friend, and he led you to the source. Your friend calls them veterans; they’ve been in the industry for a while – the old gurls. By industry, he means the queer community. You talked to a veteran, and you were impressed by death.

With dead examples, the veteran broke down for you how in death, families that disowned our brothers claimed them to bury them, at least in a private funeral. Those who hated them enough not to bury them, hated them not enough to point at a further portion on the family burial grounds for those who loved them to bury them there. You were already cognizant of the gravitas of blood; the need to be buried on one’s ancestral land. Are you Ugandan if you haven’t heard of families fighting over a corpse in court, or a dead body refusing to be carried from the hearse until its mother cryingly confessed that it belonged to another clan? You were taunted by this love for the dead. You thought we had to respect them, not necessarily love them. But you understood, a corpse has no sexual orientation.

For some brothers, their families didn’t know enough, and if they did, they were blind to it or in denial as is the standard operating procedure for Ugandan parents that know of their children’s colorfulness, and are humane enough not to disown them. These families didn’t mind when a flamboyance of striking men showed up to pay their last respects. In your culture, everyone is welcome to bury. Not by invitation but who stops people from queuing for funeral rice? Don’t they need an audience to attest to their love for the late? The veteran told you that years later, they meet at a bar or somewhere to drink to their fallen friends. You thought they met to remember them for who they were, not who their families knew them to be. You assumed, yet the departed was both those persons. They may have been the version their family saw, as well as prided in the person their queer circles knew. They might even have loved being both or hated being split or didn’t mind – you didn’t know. What you knew is at their funeral, the mourners came to bury the same body but different people.

Isn’t this every funeral though? Don’t both the outside children and the home children bury the same man; the former burying a deadbeat while the latter grieves a beloved father? You’re tempted to summon the internalized homophobia you’ve taken years to unlearn, by comparing your funerals to those of corrupt torturous state officials. After all, most hetero-heroes who defend you, contrasted you with murderers and rapists when making a case for why gays shouldn’t be lynched. You remembered how some Ugandans celebrate the death of state officials on twitter while the scum’s family and the beneficiaries of their loot eulogize a benevolent selfless man.

Back to the closet — sorry, casket. He lay in the small box, straitjacketed in the only black formal suit he owned; Colman Domingo, forgive them! For they know not what they do. They had chosen that one over his swanky suits, for even in death, appearances had to be kept and heteronormativity upheld. At least they didn’t robe him in the Baganda kanzu — he would’ve come back to haunt them. Northeast of the casket stood his obituary photo on a tripod. His family had no portrait of him. He would’ve loved the one of him donning a black velvet twisted-shawl-lapel blazer, his cleavage dotted with black crystals flowing down from his neck, and his forehead snatched by the freshly done stitch cornrows. That photo could send his father into a coma so it didn’t stand a chance.

They used some photo they screenshotted from his WhatsApp status years ago, before he blocked them from viewing it. The funeral guys did some photoshop and voila — a conforming semblance. What words that aren’t him would that man (his father) say over his body? Would he speak of their hypothetical storge? Of the cold spans of silence between them before inevitability made them talk. Would he be as petty as his son who may sing silence during his father’s eulogy for what exactly was there to say? Does it matter anyway? In the orchestra of death, there’s no last note.

He hoped that no one said “Rest in Power” about him. What does it even mean? Is there anyone more powerless than the dead? How do you rest in power when you can’t even choose how you’re laid to rest?

It dawned on you that burials too may not be ours, just like the graduations and weddings. The difference is our parents don’t ask for the former while they expect and demand the latter of us. You didn’t like birthdays, they marked every year you haven’t made it, but you decided to give them a chance. Today, you celebrate birthdays with your friends; the only ones who truly know you. You recently read an acqueertance’s dissertation. In his acknowledgements, he thanked his friends for knowing him so well, he was comforted by the fact that his life will be rewarded with an honest eulogy.

You thought of your one… two… three… four, maybe five friends that you hope will show up at your funeral like the women who wore trouser suits to Yves Saint Laurent’s funeral mass; a tribute to him as the designer who revolutionized women’s wear. You stopped reducing the whole of your life to what shall happen on a singular day. You appreciated that your friends, the readers who met you in your writings, those who were mesmerized by your fashion statements, your acqueertances, the Ugayndans you danced with at queer parties and never saw again, the guys who crushed on you from afar, and the priors who tasted the love you are selfish with, will recollect the phenomena you are.

You haven’t been chronically sad in a while because after 2023, life started being kind. Finding a plug for crop tops you can wear replaced the anxiety of job searching. You got the courage to finish this fear despite having left the place you were trapped in when you began writing it. You want to remind someone out there that somehow shit gets better. You may still get killed at your funeral but through your writings and your brazenness, the universe knows your truth — you were here.