Cover image by Ian Schneider on Unsplash.
Exactly a year ago, I sat in an empty gym and called my best friend of nine years then – ten now – and cried because news had just broken that our vice president had died.
I had felt so unsteady and had been surprised by my own emotion because even though the circumstances surrounding his death were nothing less than tragic, I didn’t think I had liked the man enough to cry for him the way I did. In that moment, the only person I knew would understand and not question these heavy feelings flooding me, was her.
All she said was, “I’m really sorry Tamanda,” as I wept for a man I had been suspicious of and very uncertain I’d vote for in the next election season.
*
One of my favourite jokes to say is that when I get famous my Wikipedia page will say something along the lines of, “Kanjaye had no known lovers at the time of her death but she used to write fondly in her journals about Maliro, with whom she lived with majority of her life.”
Angasa and I have been friends for ten years now. And in that ten years I’m pretty sure I have spent over 90% of my time in her presence in one way or the other. In college I bummed on the couch in her living room a lot. When she actually wanted to show up, we sat next to each other in class. During Covid I lived in her house for months as I plotted “what next?” because we were done with our degree. When she started her Master’s degree she came to live with me in the house I currently live in now. She’s one of the few people I always say that I can share space and extended amounts of time with. There’s just something about us that works.
When we first started being friends, people often told us that she would one day corrupt me because she is atheist, cusses like a sailor and has suspicious recreational activities and I was a Catholic whose only vice is sleeping too much. But Ngasa is the most intelligent, most funny and most compassionate person I have ever had the honour of knowing. Ten years later she is still an atheist who sometimes asks me to drop her off at church and I am still a Catholic who sometimes stares at the sky and wishes she could cuss God.
I like to think her and I are two sides of the same coin. Twin flames. Soulmates. Whatever. Don’t get me wrong, I think a few of my friends get me but Ngasa gets me in a way I cannot explain. A few weeks into knowing her, we walked from class to the bus stop where she took a bus to Ndirande and I branched off to my hostel. During that walk, I went on a soliloquy about the torments I experienced in my childhood. I’ve done this monologue before, with various people, but it was with Ngasa only that I didn’t have justify myself to. She did not think I was exaggerating. Did not tell me I was being dramatic. Did not tell me a variation of “let it all go” or “just forgive.” I relied to her some of the things that had been done to me and she called the person who has hurt me in ways unimaginable “a stupid cunt.”
I had not known until that day, that I needed somebody to just believe what I had to say. That I needed somebody to express anger towards this person because I failed to do so myself. That I needed somebody to just empathise with me. I also had not known until that day what the word “cunt” meant either.
Without realising, Ngasa has taught me a lot of things. I think, if I had never met her, I would never have known myself as well I do now. She was the first person to call me mean the way she did, and that one instance changed the trajectory of my life. She took my dreams of being a writer more seriously than I ever could. She introduced me to books I would have never read if not for her. Showed me media and movies that challenged a lot of things I knew. Took me seriously when I told her I was ace. And had words for emotions I felt but did not know how to describe.
She cried besides me when I cried after graduating from my Master’s. Probably even more than me. So much actually that even my other friends – though enamoured by her display – found it slightly curious. Anybody who had the time to listen (and some who didn’t) knew I hated doing that Master’s degree, but Ngasa saw how it drained the life out of me. She stayed on the calls were I cried real tears and told her I wanted to kill myself. That I hated this. That I could not do it. And as annoying as it was, she told me I could. Now she sits across me on my makeshift dining table and tells me she’s stupid and cannot do this same degree. I tell her she can and she hates me for it but I will not let her forget.
That’s the thing with us. She has followed me down to my proverbial lowest – raw and often – and I have done the same with her. And there, at rock bottom we have made suicide jokes together and allowed the other to self depreciate before convincing each other, that rock bottom isn’t that dark and low if only we allow ourselves to stand up – and then we’ve helped each other stand.
*
I have many lovely memories of Ngasa but one of my favourites is when she told me scintilla means a single piece of glitter. We were watching Drag Race and discussing the splits and glitter – of course. She told me sometimes she thinks she’s just scintilla and not all the sparkles. Just a minuscule piece of glitter. I asked her, “what the heck does that even mean?” And she said, “I don’t know, mesa you’re the poet.”
I have never told her that I looked it up only years later – because I used to take her wordy knowledge as gospel truth. Scintilla is not a single piece of glitter. It is a hint of something. A flash of something that barely suggests its presence. A trace – a spark of a specified feeling.
And maybe that’s what our friendship is in the grand scheme of things. A brief glimmer the world will never notice.
But to me, it is all the glitters.
And absolutely, all the gold.
