Codex

I went out for my birthday dinner expecting the usual: food, a candle I didn’t ask for, and the mild disappointment of getting older. Instead, I found myself hosting a poorly moderated summit of past selves—each fluent only in her own private language, each convinced she was the most reasonable person in the room. They arrived one by one. Different ages. Same eyes. None of us quite speaking the same language. The first to climb onto the chair was four-year-old Rancy . She had only just discovered complete sentences in Swahili and saw no reason to burden herself with English. Life, to her, was gloriously simple: food, fun, and the profound injustice of not owning all the money in the world so she could buy all the candy. She ordered biscuits and sweets with the confidence of someone who had never once doubted her right to joy. I watched her with something dangerously close to grief. She was free. Completely. And she had no idea how temporary that freedom was. She couldn’t understand why the rest of us looked tired. Then came ten-year-old Rancy , small and folded into herself, clutching a choral verse as though it were a life raft. She was excited about a music festival and terrified in equal measure—because hope, by then, had already learnt to coexist with fear. When it came time to order, she panicked and asked for soda and bread. That was all she thought she deserved. I wanted to tell her she could ask for more. For better. But she wouldn’t have heard me. She barely believed in her own voice. Thirteen-year-old Rancy didn’t sit properly. She hovered—half in the chair, half in her head—lugging a thick file of past papers she’d done, redone, and memorised into exhaustion. Going to a national school was the prize. Perfection was the demand. She ate mechanically, mouthfuls taken only to sustain further cramming. SOHCAHTOA. Algebra. Targets. I wanted to reach across the table, take the file away, and tell her it would be okay. That she would get in. That life was bigger than marks. But she was already gone, buried deep in numbers that promised safety. The only language she understood was competition, and she was there to win, whatever that was. Fourteen-year-old Rancy arrived heavier—not in body, but in spirit. The world had begun to feel unstable: politics, unrest, disappointment. She was back in Limuru, miles from home, trying to adjust to a class full of the country’s brightest while mourning a report card that dared to fall short of an A. She scrolled through her phone, texted someone saved as “bother,” flipped through the Good News Bible for CRE homework, and looked utterly alone. I wanted to hug her. I wanted to tell her that being surrounded by brilliance didn’t mean she was dim. But we spoke different dialects of pain by then. She couldn’t hear me. She only understood how she compared to the next person. She was lost in the world of benchmarking. She didn’t know herself yet, or even understood the concept of individuality. When seventeen-year-old Rancy walked in, she brought a little ease with her. Looser clothes. She ordered fries ‘njiva’ and chicken—because that, apparently, was peak cuisine. She talked animatedly about The River Between and Shreds of tenderness setbooks, exam questions, and how everything could be examined if one looked hard enough. She loved maths, planned her future neatly: maths first, physics second, chemistry third. I wanted to beg her to stay loyal to herself. For a moment, she felt hopeful. Grounded. I wanted to freeze her there. Then she mentioned Strathmore and I realised fate doesn’t negotiate—it just smirks politely and carries on. Twenty-year-old Rancy arrived polished, formal, shaped by the unspoken dress code of Strathmore. Financial economics had become her identity, though she wasn’t entirely sure she had chosen it. She spoke about Kant, nodded at Aristotle, handled cutlery like she’d been trained for high tables. She was sharper now. More articulate. Still deeply insecure. Still measuring herself quietly against everyone else in the room. But at least she wasn’t hiding in a book. That felt like growth. Then came another twenty-year-old Rancy , and this one was unbearable in the way only extreme intelligence can be. She breathed books. Finance. Economics. Mathematics. Programming. Philosophy. German. She refused to let me pay for dinner because “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” which felt like an unnecessarily aggressive thing to say on a birthday. She was anxious about exams, obsessed with a KPMG interview around the corner, convinced that merit alone could save her. I watched her with pity. She was working so hard for a system that had never planned to notice her. I wanted to tell her that the game was rigged, but she wasn’t emotionally equipped for that update. Twenty-one-year-old Rancy arrived, six months after graduation, eyes dull from rejection. CVs had disappeared into the void of Upperhill and Mombasa Road. No replies. Not even the courtesy of a regret email. She looked tired in a way sleep couldn’t fix. She spoke about registering for CFA exams, not out of ambition, but to keep herself from unraveling. I wanted to tell her the first job was not the destination—it was a comma, barely even that. But despair has its own grammar. She wasn’t listening. I didn’t tell her how this was only the beginning. I didn’t have the cruelty in me. Twenty-five-year-old Rancy followed, now an executive at a bank. She glowed, though the glow was complicated—success wrapped around quiet disappointment. She still loved novels and maths and still found refuge in philosophy. She mentioned a bad boss, casually, the way one mentions weather—unpleasant, unavoidable. Twenty-seven-year-old Rancy was different. Quieter. Post-Covid. Running AI algorithms for a startup. She was exhausted but freer. Broke, but strong. Gym-membership-strong. Library-expanded-to-dangerous-levels strong. She listened—actually listened. She spoke about healing, travel, and becoming. She ate her roast with intention. With gratitude. I fell in love with her because she had learnt to survive without apologising. Then twenty-nine-year-old Rancy slipped in softly, carrying France on her shoulders. She worked remotely, surrounded by strangers, negotiating daily with a language that wasn’t hers. Yet she smiled more. Her hosts—once strangers themselves—had become friends, teachers. They helped her unlearn some deeply ingrained African reflexes: suffering as virtue, obedience as professionalism, exhaustion as proof of worth. She learnt to work smart and hard. To ask questions. To rest without guilt. She didn’t say much, but her presence felt like oxygen. Thirty-one-year-old Rancy barely stayed. UK life. Shifts. No time. She was slimmer, more poised, subtly accented, and deeply practical. Grades mattered less now. Stability mattered more. She could finally buy her way into rooms she’d once begged to enter. I wanted to tell her that this chapter—manual shifts, exhaustion, humility—was only a tiny fragment of the whole picture. That ego has no business in survival. She already knew. She just didn’t have time. She left early, called in for another shift, exhaustion trailing behind her like a shadow. When the clock struck midnight, thirty-two-year-old Rancy arrived. Tired. Calm. Purposeful. She didn’t carry panic or nostalgia—just understanding. She didn’t give a f*ck about most things—and it showed, gloriously. Not out of bitterness, but out of discernment. She no longer mistook noise for meaning or people for purpose. She didn’t really have friends in the traditional sense; she had peace, and she guarded it with the kind of devotion others reserve for religion. Healing had become a full-time occupation. She played the guitar now, badly but honestly. The violin too—less for performance and more for remembering how it felt to sit with discomfort and turn it into sound. She found solace in her poetry, in music that didn’t ask questions, in lines of code that behaved logically when the world refused to. She gamed to disappear, travelled to reappear, and wrote herself back together one verse, one melody, one quiet evening at a time. She wasn’t trying to be impressive anymore. She was trying to be whole. She looked around the table at all the versions who couldn’t speak to each other, who had mistaken urgency for destiny, fear for truth. She smiled. A small, private smile. She finally understood where she had come from. When. And why. Not exactly how to keep going—but enough. She walked towards me, leaned in and whispered, “Let’s show them how it’s done.” My audience didn’t stay very long. They left the way people do in real life—apologetically, abruptly, or without explanation at all. Four-year-old Rancy vanished as soon as the sugar wore off, bored of our seriousness, probably offended by how little fun we seemed to be having. Ten-year-old Rancy slipped away quietly, verse still clutched in her hands, as though afraid someone might ask her to recite it. Thirteen-year-old Rancy never truly sat down in the first place; she was gone before dessert, chasing marks that no longer existed. Others lingered longer, picking at conversations, staring into plates, checking invisible clocks. Some were called away by assignment deadlines, job interviews, and ‘urgent’ phone calls. No goodbyes. No closure. It felt rude, really—how time excused itself mid-sentence and took entire versions of me with it. Very on brand. All of them—every version of me—so close in time, yet impossibly far apart. We shared a face, a history, a table, and still spoke past one another like strangers waiting for different trains. Each was fluent only in the language of her moment: fear, ambition, survival, hope. None of us bilingual enough to translate. That was when it struck me—growth isn’t a smooth conversation or a neat progression. It’s a long series of misunderstandings we endure, apologies we never get to make, and truths that arrive years too late to be useful. The cake went cold. Plates were cleared. Chairs stood empty. The room fell quiet in the way it does after something important has already left. And there I was—alone, but not lonely—finally seeing myself not as a single, continuous story, but as a crowded room I was only just learning how to listen to.