Dear Twelve-Year-Old Me

14. When I am 25 I will open this book and tick EVERYTHING. If something is not ticked it means I did not try hard enough.

This is the last item. After it come three blank pages and then, on the inside back cover, a multiplication table printed by the Picfare people. My twelve-year-old self apparently trusted the table more than she trusted herself with long division. I had forgotten the item was there until I turned to the back of the book this week to write the next number, the way I told you to. I found her waiting for me, pen uncapped, with a mark scheme.

I am twenty-eight. I opened the book at twenty-five, though not in the ceremonial way she imagined. It was in a room with the curtains closed, and I did not tick anything. I closed it again, and you know the rest.

So this chapter is a letter. I have been trying to write it for about two weeks, which is longer than it took her to write the whole plan. She did it in one weekend, between Saturday cleaning and Sunday service, with a ruler and a protractor she was using for reasons no one has ever explained. I have a laptop, a master's course, a counsellor who costs money, and a pencil that is getting short. She had more confidence. I have more information.

Dear Twelve-Year-Old Me,

You will want to know about the ticks first, so I will be quick and you can sulk later.

Makerere: tick. Good grades: tick, and I will say more about this. Mama proud: tick, but she was proud on the days you would not have counted, and for longer than you would believe. A real job with an office and a name on the door: not yet. I have a desk. It is in the corner of a room I rent in Kikoni, and the name on it is written in Tipp-Ex by the previous tenant. It says JOEL. I have not removed it. Married at 27 to a saved man with a good job: no. Two children, boy first, then girl, in that order: I will come back to this. Be somebody by 25: I was somebody. I was somebody who could not get out of bed.

I have just read that back, and it sounds like a report card, which is the only form you would have respected. I'm sorry. I'll start again.

That was the first draft. There were eleven. I am telling you this because the letter kept turning into a hearing. Every version began with an apology and slid, within a paragraph, into cross-examination. It went: Why did you write "two times"? Why did you put marriage at twenty-seven like a bus timetable? Who told you that girls who go wrong end up in the village, and why did you believe her? I would get to the bottom of a page and find I had been prosecuting a child in a Primary Seven uniform for crimes she committed with a Bic.

The other drafts went the opposite way. They were so soft and so sorry that they were really apologies addressed to myself, signed in her name. Draft six used the word "journey" four times. I deleted it and went and ate rolex standing up at the stage, which my counsellor would call self-soothing and Mama would call "eating like a goat."

Then Saturday happened, and the letter got harder, because I lost my best excuse.

You will remember that I went home with the exercise book in my bag, wrapped in kitenge, undecided. Here is what I can now report. I did show Mama. I did not show her item 1. I showed her the protractor lines on the cover, and she laughed exactly the way I predicted, and said "You were always like this," exactly the way I predicted, and then she said something I did not predict: "You used to draw lines even on your chapati." I said that was a lie. My cousin Nakato, who had come to drop off sugar and stayed for the gossip, said it was true. She said I once refused to eat a chapati because Mama had torn it "off the line."

And I laughed.

I was not being polite, and it was not the one I do at weddings, the short "ha" with the teeth that means I am fine, thank you, and yes, still looking for a job. It was the old one, the big one that starts somewhere under the ribs and comes out in stages, like a matatu that won't start and then suddenly does. It came out of me before I had decided anything about it. Mama put her hand flat on the table. Nakato pointed at me with the sugar packet.

"There it is," she said. "We haven't heard that one in a while."

People had been telling me this for two years, in that careful tone relatives use for weight gain and unemployment. "You've become quiet." "Where's your laugh, eh?" I used to hear it as an accusation, one more item I had failed to tick. On Saturday it sounded like a report of a sighting. Somebody had seen a bird thought extinct near Lake Kyoga.

I did not make a speech. I did not cry. I ate more groundnuts, because the laugh had made me hungry, and Mama sent me to the bedroom for her reading glasses.

That was when I saw the photo.

It hangs in her bedroom now, not the sitting room. It moved sometime in the grey season and I never asked why. It is the graduation photo, the one from Freedom Square: gown, hood, hair done at a salon in Wandegeya by a girl who kept calling me "Graduate" instead of my name. Mama is on my left in a gomesi the colour of passion fruit. I am in the middle, smiling hardest of anyone in the frame. I smiled so hard my eyes almost disappeared. If you look at it quickly, it is the happiest picture in the house.

I have told you what was underneath that smile. I will not tell it again here. I only want to say that I stood in Mama's bedroom holding her reading glasses and looked at the girl in the gown for a long time. For two years I could not look at that photo without feeling I was looking at a liar. That Saturday I saw someone working very hard. She had a first-class grief and a second-upper degree, and she had arranged her face so that her mother could have one clear day.

I took it off the nail.

I didn't plan to. I wiped the glass with the hem of my top, which made it worse, and I turned it over. Mama had written on the back, in her careful hand: Our daughter, Makerere, and the date. Under that, smaller, in a different pen, she had added: She tried so hard. Nothing else.

I don't know when she wrote the second line. I don't know what she knew, or guessed, or chose not to ask. I have decided not to make her tell me. I hung the photo back on the nail, crooked, and then straight, and took her the glasses.

"You took long," she said.

"I was looking at the photo."

"Mm. You were very thin that year."

That was the whole conversation. With Mama, that is a long one.

On the bus back to Kampala I took out the exercise book and the pencil, and I did not write the letter. I wrote a list instead, which is what I do when I don't know what to say. It is also what she did. It took me most of the journey to notice that.

The list was everything she had given me.

She gave me the habit of writing things down. I am alive partly because, on the worst night, I wrote things down instead of doing what the worst part of me wanted. She gave me the five a.m. alarm, which I have since negotiated down to six-thirty, and the stubbornness that got me into Makerere when two teachers said "try Kyambogo, it's also good." She gave me the boxed and double-underlined certainty that I deserved somewhere I had chosen. I need that certainty now, about things she never imagined: a counsellor I pay in instalments, and a dissertation on youth unemployment that I am qualified to write in more ways than the department knows. She gave me "Even in holidays," which nearly killed me, and which also means I finished my coursework this semester while still taking my medication on time.

She wrote "Make Mama proud" and then went back to close the loophole. The loophole-closing is the same muscle I now use to read a job advert asking a fresh graduate for five years' experience and decide, calmly, that the advert is mad and I am not.

Somewhere past Mukono the bus stopped to let a woman sell roasted maize through the windows. I bought one. I realised I had stopped writing the case against her. I was writing a thank-you note, and it had nine items and a maize cob on it.

So here, finally, is the letter. It is the twelfth draft. It is the short one.

Dear Twelve-Year-Old Me,

Thank you.

You wrote a plan for a life you could see from Primary Seven, and you wrote it as well as anyone could have with what you had: a Bic, a Picfare, Pastor Kasirye, Mama's proverbs, the Old Girl in the pawpaw suit, and the textbook house with the chimney. You were not wrong to want things. You were twelve, and nobody had told you that wanting and getting are cousins, not twins.

Some of what you wrote nearly broke me. I am not going to pretend otherwise, because you hated pretending. You wrote "ESPECIALY then." But I am done holding you responsible for a future no one showed you. You did not know about the year with two lines, or the year after, or the grey season. You did not know I would one day sit up at night and need to tell somebody I was not safe. You did not know I would tell. I did, and I am still here.

You would not recognise me, and that's all right. I don't need you to approve of me. I wanted to tell you that I kept the book, that I can read your handwriting, and that I still use your ruler lines when I write, only in pencil now.

Your laugh came back on Saturday. Nakato heard it. I thought you'd want to know.

Love,

Me (older, slower, still here)

When I got home I did the thing this whole book has been walking towards. I sat at JOEL's desk and copied out both plans side by side, hers in pen on the right and mine in pencil on the left, so I could see them together for the first time. It took an evening and two cups of tea. Here it is, trimmed, because the full thing includes three item sixes and a recipe for mandazi I apparently thought belonged in a life plan.

HERS (pen) — MINE (pencil)

1. Make Mama proud ALWAYS. — Let Mama love me on ordinary days. Visit without an achievement.

2. Get into Makerere. MAKERERE. — Done. Keep the gown in the suitcase, not on my neck.

3. Never give anyone a reason to talk. — People will talk. Tell the truth to the few who listen.

4. No boyfriends until I have a job. — Love is not a distraction. Neither is it a plan. Go carefully, both ways.

6. Married at 27, boy first then girl. — I don't know yet. I am allowed not to know.

6. Learn from your mistakes. Never two times. — I am not stupid. I was young, scared, and alone. Grieve it in pencil.

5. Graduate with GOOD GRADES. — I did. I also grieved. Both are on the transcript, only one is printed.

6. A good job with a office. — Any honest work while I finish. A desk is a desk, even if it says JOEL.

8. Masters straight after. — Masters, slowly, with breaks. Breaks are where I stay alive.

10. Dont waste time being sad. — Being sad is not wasted time. Telling someone is the opposite of waste.

11. Always write in PEN. — Pencil. Kiosk, 500 shillings.

12. Never go backwards. — Sometimes I will. It is not a refund.

13. WORK HARD. — Work hard, rest on purpose, ask for help early.

14. At 25, tick EVERYTHING. — At 28, tick nothing. Write the next number.

I want to be honest with you about the left-hand column. It is a plan, and plans fail. Some of those lines I wrote on a good day, and I will read them on a bad one and think they belong to a woman who has never met me. I have counselling on Thursday. My dissertation supervisor has sent an email whose subject line is just my name followed by a question mark, which I am treating as a weather warning. There is a grief I carry from Makerere that the ledger has helped me look at but has not lifted, and I don't expect it to lift by the time this book is printed, or by the time you read it, or perhaps ever. Some mornings are still grey. I take the tablets, I open the curtains, and some days that is the whole entry in the Happened column.

If your grey is darker than that, if you are reading this on a night when staying feels impossible, please tell one person tonight. Tell a friend, a relative, a counsellor, a health worker, or a crisis line in your country. I could not have stayed on my own. Nobody is asked to.

That's the end of the advice. I am not on the far shore, waving. I am in the middle of the river where I told you I would be. The water is cold and I can feel my feet.

It is late now. Kikoni has gone quiet except for a boda that keeps passing and someone's radio playing Sheebah with too much bass. The exercise book is open on the desk at the inside back cover, where the multiplication table is. Above it, on the last blank line, I have written a number: 15. Nothing after it yet.

I have been sitting here deciding what to put there. I thought of "Be somebody," and laughed, the big laugh, alone in my room, so the neighbour knocked on the wall. I thought of "Be happy," which is the kind of thing a fridge magnet says. I thought of writing nothing at all, which would also be true.

The pencil is short now, down past the printed letters. The rubber at the end is a grey stub from all the corrections, and the wood has the dent where my teeth go when I'm thinking. My thumb has a smudge of graphite in the whorl. She would have hated it. She would have said pencil is for people who are not sure, and she would have been right about that, and wrong about what being unsure is worth. I hold it the way she held her Bic, pressed a little too hard, ruler lines in my head. The point is touching the paper beside the 15, and I haven't decided yet, and I am not in a hurry.