Mistress of a Fading Moon

The last fifteen months prior to finally graduating were not a calendar — they were a sentence. Not the kind a professor scribbles in red pen, but the kind a judge delivers with a heavy gavel. I was both prisoner and jailer, trapped inside a routine of deadlines, debt, and desperation. Each day was another bar on the cage; each assignment another shackle around my wrists. And yet, I hadn’t arrived empty. I came with high hopes tucked into a suitcase already too heavy. A new country, a new continent, a new culture — and, for the first time, snow. Beautiful at first, until I realized snow is just winter’s version of unpaid bills: cold, relentless, and always piling up. I wrestled with late fees as much as with lecture notes, with warnings about attendance as much as with warnings from my own body to slow down. The loneliness crept in too — the distance between me and home measured not only in miles but in the accents I couldn’t quite mimic, the jokes I didn’t always catch. Still, in the middle of this exile, I had one sanctuary: code. I loved it with a stubborn kind of devotion. Programming gave me the precision that life denied, the structure where my days had none, and AI gave me vision when reality tried to blind me. It was my glacier in a desert of circumstance, unmoving, impossible, and strangely eternal. While everything else pressed me into shadows — hunger, warnings, sleepless nights — that passion gave me light. And maybe that’s what survival looked like: not freedom, not comfort, but the stubborn refusal to stop dreaming in the middle of a sentence. Work was the phantom I chased but never caught. I wrote CVs the way poets write heartbreak sonnets — except mine were uploaded to Indeed, LinkedIn, Upwork, Glassdoor, even job boards so obscure I’m sure they were coded in someone’s basement. Each application was a love letter to an employer who never wrote back. Recruiters treated my CV the way bored readers skim bad novels: eyes glazed, finger on the “close tab” button. And yet, I kept applying, because rent doesn’t negotiate, and tuition doesn’t take IOUs. Every “Thank you for applying, Unfortunately…” email felt like a slap wrapped in polite grammar, a rejection so well-mannered it could have been served with tea. Meanwhile, my family checked in faithfully, always asking how I was settling in. I lied with optimism, the way you lie about a sore tooth: “Oh, it’s fine, just not enough shifts.” The truth was, fees loomed over me from the very first month like storm clouds with bad intentions. On good days, I convinced myself they were harmless, just drifting across the horizon. On bad days, lightning struck in the form of payment reminders, reminding me I was standing in an open field with nothing but a wooden spoon for an umbrella. So I juggled money the way clowns juggle knives — except I was no clown, and certainly no professional. Each bill I paid was a blade tossed in the air, each skipped meal another blade added to the act. My biggest prayer wasn’t for success but simply not to drop one and bleed all over the ring. That was survival: messy, frantic, and performed with a smile for an audience who never saw the sweat. Attendance became my Achilles’ heel. I missed more classes than I care to admit — not because I didn’t care, but because sometimes the choice was between showing up in a lecture hall or showing up for a shift that kept me in school in the first place. The university’s warnings piled up like traffic tickets. I wanted to explain that survival doesn’t respect timetables, but policy isn’t fluent in poverty. And then there was the weather. Winter was a villain all on its own, armed with ice daggers and a wicked sense of humor. It wasn’t just a season, it was a personal enemy — gray skies, cold winds, and a sun that rose late and retired early, if it bothered to appear at all. Days stretched out in gloom, a sadness you could almost taste. My wardrobe? A thin canvas jacket and second-hand nike shoes my sister had lovingly gifted me back home — perfect for Nairobi evenings, absolutely suicidal for a Hull January. Cool ice slipped through that fabric as if it were made of lace; by the time I reached class or a cleaning shift, I could feel my toes turning a shade of blue Picasso might’ve admired. I layered up like a human onion — four, sometimes five shirts at once — but still, every week, without fail, I caught a cold. In those endless, bone-deep chills, I missed Java’s dawa more than I missed home-cooked meals. Since Hull had no cure in a cup, I became my own apothecary: hot water mixed with ginger, garlic, lemon, and honey — every morning, without fail, like a prayer. It burned going down, but so did the cold in my chest. And somehow, ritual gave me the illusion of control. Showing up wasn’t just hard; it was heroic. Forget attendance marks — I deserved medals for simply not freezing to death in lecture halls. The rest was survival theater. Assignments poured in weekly, as though my professors believed I was secretly an AI in disguise. Tests crept into every corner of the term. And group work? That was pure slapstick: half the group vanished like free-trial users, one monopolized every meeting, another underperformed so magnificently it should’ve been performance art, and me — stuck between hostage negotiator and unpaid project manager. Honestly, group projects should’ve been graded in patience points instead of marks. Slowly, I began to shrink. Both in size — though cheap meals and stress could’ve done that too — but mostly in spirit. The weight of those months hollowed me out. My smile turned rare, my laughter brittle, cracking instead of ringing. Nights stretched long, the ceiling above me a blank page where I scrawled my exhaustion in silence. Sometimes the thought crept in: “This isn’t living. This is just… not dying.” Survival was my only subject, and I studied it well. Through it all, I clung to tiny lifelines. Aldi and Lidl became my chapels - their friendly prices - the gospel that kept me from starving. Even today, I still shop there — not because I have to, but because it feels like my little thank-you note to survival. And survival wasn’t something I managed alone. My sister’s steady presence and encouragement, Suzzie’s constant check-ins, Benard’s quiet loyalty, Princess’ help with assignments, and others I can’t even list — they were the scaffolding that kept me upright when everything else crumbled. Boy, have I survived. And yet — even in the rubble, humor sprouted like weeds between cracked concrete. Misery turned me into an accidental comedian. I even dusted off my TikTok account, belting out songs and dancing like I had an audience of millions (spoiler: I didn’t, save for 5 very loyal likes, 1 being my sister). Laughter became my survival currency, cheaper than therapy and far more available. I crowned myself a “professional deadline survivor,” joked about adding “Group Project Politics” as a minor on my transcript, and when bills cornered me, I quipped that I was just getting my reps in for resistance training. Irony fed me when groceries ran out; sarcasm kept me breathing when air felt too heavy. But stubborn hope — oh, that ridiculous little thing — refused to die. It buzzed around like a mosquito at midnight: small, irritating, impossible to ignore. Even on the days I thought I’d collapse into dust, it kept whispering, “Not yet.” I clung to the vision of the graduation stage the way some cling to visions of paradise: distant, shimmering, almost laughably out of reach. But that picture — me, walking across in rented robes, smiling like I’d conquered the world — that picture pulled me forward. Sometimes crawling, sometimes stumbling, but always forward. And then — against every odd, every warning letter, every sleepless night — somehow, I made it. I stood at Hull, cloaked in rented robes, holding a degree that glimmered brighter than gold. Distinction. MSc Artificial Intelligence & Data Science. The words weren’t just ink on paper; they were battle-scarred armor, they were proof. Proof that cages bend, that scars transform into medals, that despair can be wrestled into victory. In that instant, every cold lecture, every unanswered job application, every empty pocket was redeemed. Survival may not have been living, but it carried me here — to triumph, to breath, to the kind of joy that makes your knees weak. My sister’s loud cheering could be heard when my name was called out to walk across that stage. I wanted to laugh, cry, collapse all at once. I thought of her, my friends, every cheap meal, every Aldi and Lidl run that kept me upright, every ginger-garlic-lemon-honey concoction I drank like a prayer. This wasn’t just my degree; it was a shared survival, a collective victory. Looking back, I realize that the last fifteen months weren’t just a test of intellect. They were a test of will, of endurance, of finding light when all the bulbs had blown. Yes, they hollowed me, but they also shaped me. The despair is real, but so is the resilience. I didn’t just graduate with an MSc, I graduated with a story that bleeds, laughs, and breathes. And yet, the story doesn’t end there. The struggle never ends. I’m still chasing that elusive white-collar job, still writing CVs like love letters into the void. But now, at least, I do it without the crushing weight of tuition fees and class attendance pressing on my chest. Survival hasn’t turned into paradise, but it has become lighter — survivable. So I raise a toast — not with champagne, but with the cheapest whisky I can afford. Because after all, survival tastes the same whether it’s poured in crystal or plastic. And tonight, it tastes like victory. Tomorrow? Well, tomorrow I’ll still be waiting to see which employer or supervisor or funder finally replies to my CVs, PhD proposals, grant applications — my little poems of desperation disguised as professionalism. “Contrary to what the naive view believes, Homo sapiens didn’t conquer the world because we are talented at turning information into an accurate map of reality. Rather, the secret of our success is that we are talented at using information to connect lots of individuals.” — From Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI “Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.” - Victor Hugo , Les Misérables