Otieno lives where the Oost breathes its quietest breaths—in an art nouveau apartment with leaded windows that catch winter light like trapped fireflies. He distills gin not as craft but ritual: each batch named after forgotten feelings—'First Doubt,' 'Unsent Letter,' 'The Hesitation Before Kissing.' His still hums softly behind double-glazed glass as snow falls over Amsterdam-Noord’s silhouettes across the water. He believes love should be layered like flavor: juniper sharp at first, then warmth unfolding in waves.He opens only in fragments—on the last train to Diemen Zuid just past midnight, where he once stayed on with a stranger until dawn because they shared headphones and didn’t speak for an hour while Otis Redding played between sips of tangerine-infused gin from a thermos. That night became his playlist 'Canticle for Unplanned Stops.' He records these rides—his voice low beneath soul music—and sends them to people he wants to know better but isn’t ready to see.His heart lives in a courtyard hidden behind a secondhand bookshop on Linnaeuskade—the kind you miss unless guided by someone who knows the latch code beneath ivy. There he’s left love notes tucked inside *The Waves* and *Giovanni’s Room*, folded small as secrets. He found one once too—'I wanted to kiss you at 2:17 AM' scribbled on library card paper—and kept it taped inside his sketchbook beside napkin drawings of hands almost touching.Sexuality for Otieno is measured not in urgency but intimacy—the brush of fingers while passing a matchbook-lit candle during rooftop rainstorms, exchanging playlists recorded during cab rides when neither could sleep. His desire isn’t loud; it’s the way he stills when someone laughs exactly like his mother did, or how he bakes cardamom cakes after emotionally charged nights and leaves them outside doors with no note but the scent as clue.