Nesta
That’s what we called her.
She probably had an official name but growing up, you get what the aunties bless you with until you are old enough to start fighting for your identity.
She was maybe two or three classes below me, but we grew up on the same cartoons and playdate ambitions.
Her mama was a thrifter, a business she turned into a way to support them through school and life. I don’t remember the father at all and I remember not pressing much around it because I understood what that was like.
Her mom used to sell toys and oh my gosh, personal catnip for me who was an early worm and could peek through the window to see whether she had set up shop or not.
I looked forward to even helping arrange the toys, dust be damned, just so I could play with them in the process.
We would make up stories and lives for them, me and Nesta, and sometimes her brother too.
But boys will be boys.
They will play with you until another boy sees them, teases them, and suddenly they disappear. So now it becomes a secret world.
We play, but nobody can know I play because apparently that is shameful boy behaviour. 🙄
We didn’t care. We made all the stories and lives we wanted and somehow got sales in there too because other kids would want the toys after seeing us play with them.
Winning.
Of course, that is before we got snitched on for ‘playing and working’ and the other mothers started wanting their kids to do the same.
Or accusing us of staying with dolls too long so that we ‘wouldn’t live in reality.’
Truth is, we didn’t want reality.
Or rather, Nesta didn’t like parts of hers.
She had sickle cell anemia and was told not to do a million things, while all she ever wanted was to just be a child.
She wanted to run with us, get in trouble with us, get chased by the dog, climb trees without someone acting like it was the end of the world or treating every small thing like it was final.
Imagine being six or seven with a walking death sentence and not only do doctors remind you every now and then, but the world treats you like a ticking bomb too.
Sometimes she got bullied or neglected because of it. Hell, even the maid used it as punishment whenever Nesta did not do what she wanted.
“Lione, mtu mwenyewe mnyonge.”
So we stopped playing around the store. Or at least I had to stop going there as much.
It was her mom’s shop so Nesta was there most of the time after school because they had to make sure she had not gone out to play.
And to be fair, she was delicate. A lot of things genuinely were dangerous for her.
One time she sneaked out and scraped her knee. As much as she was in pain, that was probably one of the first real scrapes on her body.
But healing was always the issue and somehow everything came back to her health.
There was one week she got really bad and her brother was home with one of their cousins and the maid while the mother stayed at their aunt’s to take care of her.
I guess it was quieter there.
Less daunting than suffering while hearing us outside screaming at the top of our lungs playing games she wanted to join.
Her dreams were simple like any other girl’s.
Beauty. A job.
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Somewhere in there, a loving husband she would make babies with.
We had no sex education so we just assumed babies happened and life was bliss after that.
But that’s what playtime was for us.
A time for the brain to wander toward the magic of the world instead of the horrible realities we either did not understand or were already happening to us.
And for young girls, there was always an age limit to imagination.
There was an age limit to dollhouses.
Meanwhile boys could roughhouse forever. Hello fraternities, I’m looking at you.
Boys were allowed to wander longer.
Not us.
The minute your body started changing, period arrives, and suddenly it is goodbye outside, goodbye playtime, goodbye everything.
You are a woman now.
Check yourself.
With modern medicine, things are different now. But back then, the survival rate for sickle cell felt brutal. You were lucky to even see eighteen.
But Nesta made it to twenty one.
May her soul rest in peace. 🕊️
And yesterday it got me thinking:
How did that girl pull that off?
Society had already closed doors on her before she even got to touch them and even the doctors never exactly painted bright futures for kids like her.
Then I remembered her personality.
She was one of the most enthusiastic people I had ever met.
Always smiling, teasing and being silly. And this was from when she was a child.
One of my acquaintances who went to school with her later in life once told me:
“Huyu alikuwa na mambo ya kitoto. Anapenda kuchekacheka tu.”
And I soon realized she survived childhood and even a little adulthood with that same mentality.
She understood something most of us are still struggling to learn.
She was all she got.
And that had to be enough.
I’m currently going through the slowest middle part of my life.
The overwhelmingly anxious and nauseous part. The part where everything feels delayed and uncertain.
But I want to remind myself every day that no matter what I don’t have, I still have enough.
And the cherry on top is, I still have me.
The clock’s not over yet.
That has to amount to something, right?
