Anniversaries, turning 26 and the fragments in between

Beloved.

It’s been a hundred and one days since the year started. And in those hundred and one days, it’s been:

• 3 years since I packed my entire life into the back of my car and moved to a whole different city.
• 23 years since my father passed away.
• 1 year since I started living in the house I currently live in.
• 4 years since I launched my dot com.
• 26 years since I was born.

I don’t have anything grand to say about these dates. They come and go, and I carry them quietly. What I remember of them arrives in fragments – a feeling, a sentence, the weather that day. I think that’s all they leave behind sometimes. Nothing big, just the dull ache of it all – the things that have changed, and the ones that haven’t.

But if I were some sort of writer, the kind that writes through the ache, on the 7th of February I’d have written something along the lines of how a house ceases to be a home. How when I visited my mom for the first time after I had moved out, the front door of her house no longer scraped the tiles in the way my teeth had gotten used to. How the kitchen mats had changed. How I still reached instinctively for my bedroom key hidden above the door, only to be met with laughter and a question: “How do you know where the keys are?” And I said, “Kwanu ndi kwanu basi.” But the truth is, it didn’t feel like mine anymore.

I would have written how after having a house – two actually – all to myself (not really), my childhood room feels small these days. How I feel a sort of restriction when I roam around the house I grew in. How I don’t know where everything is anymore. How there’s nostalgia in my mother’s house, but it’s losing all its intimacy. How jarring it is, now, that when I visit (which I don’t as much), I tell my mother, ‘Bye, I’m going home,’ when for close to 23 years, going home always meant going to her.

On the 17th of February, I’d have written about my father and how my aunt had recently told me I’ve always been like him, in the littlest ways. Like how we both had the same sort of kindness and passion for people. How she told me he loved writing letters like me and she had found one in particular he had written to her. I would have written that in it, he’d described my mother as “still” lovely, warm and caring. And how, if anyone ever asked me, prior to reading that letter, to describe my mother in three words, I’d have used those exact ones.

I would try to say something woohoo but profound at the same time about how memories and habits and thoughts and feelings live in bodies, and how we inherit more than just the shape of our faces and names. Because how else do you explain me being more alike with a man I barely knew than anyone else I’ve ever met?

On the 26th of February, I’d have written something along the lines of moving out, moving in and moving on. I might still write this – one day. And if I do, I’ll tell you how, for my entire life, I always thought I’d be the kind of girl who packs a bag and just ups and lives. Travels the world, calling every couple of months from an obscure payphone in Morocco or sending a postcard simply signed “best, Tamanda” from a village nobody has ever heard of in Vermont. Then maybe on Christmas I’d show up unannounced, gifting everyone rocks I picked up on the shores Bali.

I wanted to be untethered. But somehow, having moved out of my mother’s house has changed that. Cemented more when I moved out of my one bedroom flat into a three bedroom. I would write about how every time someone asks if I live alone I do not know how to answer that because yes, I do live alone but I do not think I have ever spent more than a week sleeping alone in any home I’ve had. I’d have written about how there’s always people in my house. How after three years of cooking meals for my friends and always having a place for someone to lay their head or charge their phone, I don’t mind being grounded. I don’t mind being the person being returned to instead of the one returning.

Somewhere in March, I would have thought about writing something reflective – something about what I’ve learnt from having my own dot com for so long. But I’ve done that before, and really, how many times can you say the same thing in different words? So maybe, instead, I would’ve written around these words by Rémy Ngamije:

“Our advice is simple: find a project, path, challenge, or struggle. Find something.”
– Rémy Ngamije

I would’ve told you how this website is my something. How, when I first launched it, I couldn’t have imagined how much I’d grow to love it. How it’s been hacked, crashed, neglected. How my hoster probably shakes his head every time he sees my name flash on his phone. And yet, somehow, it’s grown ahead of me. How it’s opened doors, introduced me to new friends, and just by existing, it’s pushed me to put my work into the world. How working on it feels like both a destination and a journey. How I love it, truly. And how when civilization collapses and the internet disappears, I will miss this website more than I’ll miss Newlynova’s Booktube videos – and that’s saying something.

And on my actual birthday? Today? I wouldn’t know what to write. I had initially thought I’d publish a list of little things from a little life that I wrote when I was 24 but scrapped off. And even today it felt a bit meh. Maybe I’ll publish it next year. Maybe I should have written how 26 feels as ordinary as 22 before I found out Taylor Swift has a whole song about it. Or How I do not feel 26 at all. How I feel 8 and 13 and 19 and 23 and 64 all at once. How 26 feels like a long time to be alive. How tired I am.

Maybe I should have told you how nine days before today, my entire heart felt like it ripped in half at 11:09 p.m. because of a romance book I didn’t even like. And it felt good – to feel like that. A sort of catharsis. How I hadn’t cried in months, after years of crying every day. And how I then realised holy crap, I haven’t cried in months.

As you can see the first few months of the year leading up to my birthday are punctuated with dates I try to remember. They arrive, quiet and sharp, reminding me of the passage of time. Milestones sneak up. Memories arrive in vignettes, too soft or too sharp to hold for long. It’s strange how the time moves. Some things feel distant and others feel like they happened just last week. My thoughts don’t come in neat little boxes but in waves. Messy, overlapping, impossible to organise. I always have so much to say about the human experience and, at the same time, nothing at all.

Beloved, why am I saying any of this? I don’t know. I just know that at 26 I do not have anything coherently profound to write about life or living it. I only have the fragments in between.