The View From Here

I wake up before my alarm.

I always do.

5:47am and the city is still doing that thing it does in the early morning, that quiet before the heat remembers itself and decides to become unbearable. I lie still for exactly thirty seconds. I count them. Then I get up.

This is not a habit I developed. This is just who I am.

My apartment is on the thirty-fourth floor of a building in Downtown Dubai that I chose because of this window. Not the kitchen, not the wardrobes, not the marble bathroom that my mother called unnecessarily dramatic the first time she visited. The window. Floor to ceiling, wide enough to fit my entire world inside it, and every morning it shows me the same thing: proof that I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

I make coffee before I look at my phone. This is a rule. The world does not get to reach me before I have had one quiet moment with my own thoughts. I learned this from my father, who used to say that a mind borrowed by everyone else first thing in the morning is never fully yours for the rest of the day. He said a lot of things like that. I kept most of them.

The coffee machine does its thing. I stand at the window.

Dubai at 5:47am is something not everyone gets to see. Most people experience this city as it wants to be seen: polished, loud, full of itself, all gold and glass and the particular kind of confidence that comes from being built in the middle of a desert and deciding that is not a problem but a statement. And it is all of those things. I am not arguing with any of it.

But at this hour, before all of that begins, the city is just light.

The towers catch the early sun differently when there is no one rushing between them. The creek sits still. The highway has not yet remembered what it is supposed to be doing. From up here I can see the shape of everything without the noise of it, and I have stood at this window enough mornings to know that this city is not performing for me right now. It is just existing. And I get to watch.

I love it for that.

I love it the way you love something that does not particularly need your love but receives it anyway. Dubai did not ask for my loyalty. I was born here, which means I arrived without being consulted, but somewhere along the way I stopped thinking of this city as the place I happened to come from and started thinking of it as the place I chose to stay. There is a difference. The second one means something.

My coffee is ready.

I pour it, black, no sugar, which my best friend Nisha has described on multiple occasions as a personality flaw and a cry for help. Nisha is wrong. I just know what I want and I do not need to soften it.

I take the mug back to the window.

Below me the city is waking up slowly. A car on the highway. A light coming on in the building across from mine, someone else up early, someone else with somewhere to be. The sky is doing that thing between dark and light where it cannot quite commit to either and the result is this specific shade of blue that I have never seen anywhere else. Not in Nairobi, where my mother's family is not originally from but where my father grew up, and where we would visit sometimes and I would stand in a different morning and feel the difference. Not in London, where I went for university and spent three years being cold and learning things I could not have learned here.

Only here. Only this blue.

I have a full day ahead of me.

This is not unusual. I run Odhiambo Properties, which my father built from the ground up in a city that was still figuring out what it wanted to be, and which I took over three years ago when he passed and left it to me because there was no one else. Some people in this industry have never let me forget that second part. That there was no one else. That I did not choose this so much as step into it because the alternative was watching everything he built disappear.

They think that makes me less.

They are wrong about that too.

I took what my father built and I made it better. Not unrecognisably so, not in a way that erases him, but better in the way that something grows when it is properly looked after. Odhiambo Properties is currently the second largest luxury real estate firm in Dubai. Second. That number sits in my chest every morning like something I have not finished with yet, which is exactly what it is.

Number one belongs to someone else.

It has always belonged to someone else.

I do not say his name before I have finished my coffee. This is also a rule.

The city below me is moving faster now. More cars. More lights. The sky has made its decision and gone full morning, the blue giving way to the kind of bright that means the heat is coming and there is nothing to be done about that. I finish my coffee. I put the mug in the sink. I go to get dressed.

I have a meeting at 8am, a site review at 11, a call with a client in London at 2pm, and at some point today I need to review the documents for a development contract that was announced yesterday, the kind of contract that comes around once and does not come around again.

The kind that changes everything.

The kind that will not be going to number one.

Not this time.

I look at the window one more time before I leave the room. The city is fully awake now. So am I.

Let's go.

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