“Did I waste my
20s, because I really feel like I wasted my 20s”? I blurted out as soon as my Skype
call connected to Maureen 3 days before my 30th birthday. The 7th
of November 2012 was now seemingly a doomsday for me! I decided, without giving
Maureen a chance to respond to my madness, that I was going to write my 20s a
letter and I would share it with her. “Ok, Maureen catch you on the 7th
I will have at least a 4 paged letter to my 20s for you to read, so later, I
have a letter to write, thank you and I love you, goodbye.” Poor Maureen she
didn’t get a chance to ask me what I was on about, where was this coming from
and why on earth was I so freaked out about turning 30?
A letter to
my 20s, why write letter to my 20s, why the 20s, why a letter? Who on earth writes
themselves a letter, to God yes, but to oneself, uhmmm? Oh, are we checking
sanity levels now? I will ask you this; who picks other people’s letters and
reads them? (Gotcha!) I know letters to be private and for the eyes of the
addressed only; but there you are sticking your nose into my business (laugh
out loud) and reading my letter! Yes, a letter, because it is the best platform
to explicitly communicate a message. It is empirical evidence in black and white
of intrinsic psychological, physical and emotional processes that happens
within a person to be disciplined enough to actually end up writing a letter to
someone, and in this case it’s to me. This means being vulnerable to self,
embracing, exposing and facing inner secrets, fears, failures, faults and
fascinations and personalized thoughts.
Well, maybe,
just maybe I went through my 20s without processing the process, and now I
wanted/ to do this as an inventory, an audit or should I say an introspection
of where I was coming from and who I had become; if I was becoming something at
that? I felt like my 20hs were like a cloud and nothing tangible had happened.
Had I floated around hoping to be a rain cloud or a winter cloud or I would
disappear into thin air and never materialize to a meaning precipitation of
some sort.
I was caught up in a web of emotions and lost
into nothingness of thoughts, fading like ink on an ancient roman manuscript;
or was it falling into a huge black hole, being sucked in by the forces of
something indescribable? I felt a lot of my experiences were left wide open
without closure, just needed to put a
lid on it. There had been a lot of cooking and stewing and roasting and and
and……. The food was never served, nothing was plated, as if the stove and pots
were stolen (which reminds me when I got robbed at 28, pots, pans, plates,
stove and all; but that has its own chapter). In retrospect, this is no “4
paged letter, and I enclose it with a kiss” type letter that Aaliyah (God rest
her Soul) sang in her early 20s (ironic) It’s going to be some kaleidoscopic
letter, that clearly did not take me 3 days to write, and Maureen still hasn’t
read it!
Where had my
20s gone to, and where I am is it where I want to be, how close or far am I
from the road most/less traveled? There I was facing my 30s and I was not even
sure I was ready for them, later alone done with my 20s. Did I need just one more
year to deal with my 20s? Why couldn’t I freeze time, or been a scientist and
build a time machine; go back in time? Even if I went back in time, which age
of my 20s would I return or reincarnate to? The whole women are like wine
notion; that we get finer with age; sounded like some ridiculous idea. If I was
feeling so lost and lost; how the hell would I find myself and embrace me in my
30s? SO HERE GOES…
Dear 20s……
I have a web
of emotions right now, I feel sooo, something intense, I am not even sure what
it is. Life has been had if you must know there is a lot that happened when you
had the reigns which affect me to date. There are things I need to get off my
chest, remove the clogging so I can fully be and live my life.
Nhai 20s, you
always did like to make an entrance, didn’t you, starting with age 20. You were
like, heelllo 20 and boom, PREGNANT!! Just as you were beginning to enjoy the
ummm, ahhhh, deeper, faster, no, there, keeping, doing that, yeeeeesssss, at,
that, angel, deeper; then spasms, sweat, screams, heart, rate, up, name
calling, vibrations, exhale and sigh…….…intense gratification. Then you go and
get pregnant, at 20?! Did you not now there was contraception? I thought you
were a peer educator who gave advice to other students on contraception. Tawanda
is the most amazing child I know and he is my celebrated blessing. He indeed is
a light to my world and has brought the best and worst out of me. I have become
a better and more focused person because of him, otherwise I would have been
some selfish bitch.
The reason I
am is because you made the best decision and kept him for us, I could not
imagine my world without him, it would be so meaningless and empty. The reason
I want to be a better person is because of Tawanda and I strive to give him the
best in life, yet at times when he was younger I wanted to prick his eyes out
because he looked like his father so much.
Getting
married to Tafadzwa was not the best decision, I should have listened to my
grand mother. There were still a lot of insecurities, and no knowledge of self when i made this decision. Wait, patriarchy also helped me make this decision. "You are pregnant and therefore must get married" patriarchy said. I remember going to show him to my granny, she wasn’t amused, for
some reason she did not like the idea of us getting married. They say old
people know things, I am sure she knew things I did not know. There was a
void, that I can remember, everything was moving so fast. Then my father
beat up my other sadly because I was pregnant and was resisting to get married.
My mother was hospitalized, the worst was she said you had ashamed her and that
I had to do right by her and get married.
You must have
felt life a thorn in the flesh because that’s when you attempted suicide, I
know, at that point it did make sense to end the lives that were causing pain.
If it wasn’t for Vimbai, this letter would be nonexistent, she saved your life,
having drank half a bottle of painkillers. The feeling as I write you this
letter has overwhelmed me all over. My father was already having and affair
with his now second wife and wasn’t that caring anymore.
Needless to
say, you were adventurous sexually I give you that; sex in the car, getting
caught having sex in your boyfriend’s office by his boss. Oh and how about that
time you have sex at the back of a moving open pickup track? I even remember
how you got pregnant; are you ready? In a swimming pool! It must have been the
thrill of almost getting caught or was it the unusual warmth and sensation of
his penis as it slowly penetrated your vagina? What was it that made you want
it raw like that? Should I give you the benefit of the doubt that passion and spontaneity
took over common sense and logic or it was because condoms and water don’t mix?
The thrill of 20s you try anything.
The day you
got married, was the day you signed a death wish, I think the universe was
like, you missed death by suicide, there for will give you your own death
angel. To this day, I wonder how a man that loved you so much, used to send
hundred red roses on valentines, drive over 40km to and from to see you, would
beat you up to the point of death. That was one brutal marriage, I salute you
for walking out. It’s a shame people insist if is not working and he is beating
you, you can just walk out like nothing happened. Its not like that confirm
