MANTALK: Paging Toni, can you hear me?

I’m writing this from New York. I just landed a few hours ago after a 15-hour non-stop maiden flight by Kenya Airways.

My body clock is all out of shape. I want to sleep but my body wants to stay up. My body is winning and I’m at the desk writing this, so if it doesn’t make sense, please forgive me. I’m drunk from lack of sleep.

It’s my first time in the United States. It’s very cold, 13 degrees. This country isn’t a place I have been dying to come to – one, because it’s so far and I hate flying for more than three hours. And two, their president called us a shithole country.

But when the opportunity to come to New York arose, I jumped at it because, well, it’s New York! Nobody says no to the Big Apple. At least not anyone sane.

TONI BRAXTON

When I write about Toni Braxton most people imagine that I’m just messing around. That there is no way a 40-year-old can still be hung up on someone they will never meet.

Well, here I am, in the heart of New York, staying in a hotel – The Marriott Marquis – overlooking the Times Square.

In my 20s I obsessed about Toni like all teenagers obsessed about some female pop star like Patra or Diana King or Janet Jackson or Aaliyah or Da Brat or one of those girls in Changing Faces, some even Queen Latifah.

Toni burned my heart with teenage longing. I would listen to “Unbreak My Heart” with my eyes closed and my fists clenched. Her voice, that raspy voice that seemed to have the texture of a crocodile’s back, would scratch my heart and make me bleed. I loved it.

I once wrote her a fan letter when I was 17 years old, maybe 16. Those days there was no email, so if you were to write a love letter, it took effort.

You bought those coloured pink foolscaps that had butterflies on them. You wrote it in your best handwriting (if you made a mistake you would have to crumble that letter and start afresh).

When done, after you had declared your undying love and made promises that you would never keep, you licked the beautiful envelope (not the cheap ones, no; a more sophisticated one that was slightly more expensive), and you addressed it 'Toni Braxton Fanmail'.

Then you walked to the post office and bought stamps, which you licked again (love took so much saliva) and then you smelled the letter for the last time, kissed it, and then dropped it into the letterbox. Then you waited.

Your letter would take weeks to get to the States. Toni would read it, or someone who works for Toni would read it. Then you would wait a month for reply, then two, then a year then before you know it, you’d be 41 years old.

SEVEN WHOLE DAYS

Now I find myself in the United States of America for the first time and in the very heart of the Big Apple at that, and I realise that I’m in Toni Braxton’s neighbourhood.

That I could bump into her in Times Square or spot her through a shop window of 5th Avenue. Or I could see her in a car, seated at the back, talking on phone.

Would I talk to her? Would she unbreak my heart? Would I ask her if she received my letter in 1993? And what did she think of it? What did she think of us?

Would she agree to come back to Kenya with me? So that I take her to my village by the shores of Lake Victoria? A place of serenity and peace and love? Would Toni finally validate my love?

Who knows, dear reader? What I know for sure is that being in New York is the closest I have come to finding Toni Braxton.

New York City has turned me into a boy again. It’s 1993 all over again and we are pimply boys, sticking our fingers in radio cassette to rewind Toni’s "Let It Flow".

You know what’s curious, though? There is a song of hers titled "Seven Whole Days". It goes something like: “Seven whole days / And not a word from you / Seven whole nights / I'm just about through / I can't take it, won't take it.”

Well it was a premonition song. Because I’m going to be in New York for seven whole days and this is Toni’s chance to find me, to come out and finally be with a man.

Toni, if you are reading this, I’m staying at the Mariott Marquis, 28th floor. If you call the reception, just say the code word. It’s about time.