What's in your cupboard?

You cannot be what you are not, not for long.

This year, for my birthday, I confessed to a robbery. It was brutal the way I imagined death and any meaningful transformation to be. There’s a small picture that carries a heavy memory buried in the cupboard to the right of my bed. I don’t take it out, but I think of it often. When I sit in front of another empty page with my fingers itching to say something, anything. I think about it as I try to imagine the future in the way my agemates are supposed to. Career, recognition, approval, marriage, and permanence.

I’ve been thinking of honesty recently. Of true sincerity. I have always been a liar, you see, or better yet, I’ve always struggled to tell reality from fantasy. Like most children of the gates, I was deeply lonely, hidden behind walls from an enemy we were never told about. My only source of living was through the stories I heard from staff members and relatives who transitioned through my house. Stories of boarding schools, of mischief, love, heartbreak, discovery, and so much more than what my compound allowed. Huddled over candlelight and cards that I never bothered to remember the rules of, I would be transported to worlds. I could see the crowded dormitories and feel the chill of morning showers before morning prep. I could feel my heart flutter from the sweet words of a boy whose face I did not know. I could see it so vividly that I became addicted to it. I would not sleep without stories, and when they ran out, I demanded that they make some up. And when they could not, I took to building my own. I would spend hours outside my body, living lives as teenage dragons tasked with saving the world. As witches rediscovering magic that was hidden from them. As a young girl in love with someone I was not allowed to have. I felt all these lives to be my own, to the point where I began to lose track of reality. I remember once convincing my friends at school that I was a dragon. I saw them try to unlock their fire-breathing with me, breathing over plastic rulers determined to melt them. I realized then the power of a story. Though I did not know it yet.

When I reached high school in a foreign country where no one knew who I really was, I saw an opportunity for rebirth. I built a life, a childhood with all the necessary milestones and love. I assembled a loud house, full of life, and lived in it. Come time for university, a new script was given to me, one I did not need to invent. Adulthood, maturity, professionalism, and rationality. Fantasies just as unbelievable as fire breathing. How were so many people, with so many different roots, expected to grow into the same trees? How was someone like me, a chameleon by necessity with no control of my colors, supposed to become a productive member of society? I was a survivor, though, even when I did not want to be. So, I grabbed tightly onto the script. I studied hard, joined clubs during the day, and stumbled into others during the night. I made friends and complained about classwork that wasn’t all that difficult. I “utilized” my imagination in my creative writing classes. I wrote stories and poems and plays and reveled in the praise I received. I fell in love with writing. For once, I did not have to be consumed by the lives I created. I did not have to become a liar.

Fast forward to 2023, and I’m sitting in front of my computer, and my mind is blank. My imagination is no longer vivid. I cannot see any longer, but I have a memory. I remember all my fantasies, and so for a while I continue to write. Build worlds from memory. I see nothing wrong at first, and then I try to live genuinely. I no longer want to be a pretender. I want to be confused out loud, be scared out loud, love the wrong people, and be incomplete or poorly made without fear of judgment. But I have become so many people over the years that I do not know where I discarded myself. Was it when I was 9 and discovered stories? Was it when I went to boarding school through the nanny’s stories? Was it when I became a dragon? Or when I became an adult?

One night in October 2025, during a conversation with people I am attempting to connect with without all the lies, I am asked what my imagination looks like.

“When you think, do you see pictures or nothing? Like when you think of an apple, do you see it?”

For a moment, I see myself running home from school to jump in bed and ascend into my many vivid worlds, but that was the past. It dawns on me then that I had been blind for quite some time. I no longer have imagination. I am a writer working on reserves. A thief of memory. So, the little picture in the cupboard grows bigger. It scratches at the corners every night and giggles maniacally as I slam my computer shut night after night with nothing to say.

The week before my birthday, it was deafening. I reached for the picture with shaky hands and a guilty heart. It is nothing special really, just a mirror. In it, I am standing in the garden of my childhood home, wearing my favorite matching white set with blue mesh details. I remember, or maybe I imagined it, a young cameraman standing before me promising to return in two days with the pictures for only 200 frw. I was 9 and deeply alone, but I did not smile like it. My lips stretched thin to reveal the gap between my two front teeth. My eyes, unable to withstand the weight of my cheeks, squeezed shut. Right now, as I type this in 2026, I know that my childhood was brutal. It is not something that I can say I survived, at least not whole. But as my hands wrapped around that picture, I realized the greatest tragedy of my life was not by the hands of adults who raised me, but in my own self-betrayal. In my cowardice.

My imagination saved my life. I survived being raised in an unintentionally loveless home, behind walls that were supposed to shield me from the tragedy of being born when something like a genocide was no longer a myth whispered in history lessons, only because I could imagine otherwise. Yet, when I left my house to go abroad at the ripe age of 13, I left myself behind. I became ashamed of her, of the dreamer. The brave. The writer. I have been pretending all along. Plagiarizing.

Once I had cried to the picture, written letters, and apologized in ways that cheating husbands with no prenup would be envious of, it was time to make amends. So, when my alarm went off at 7am on February 4th, I put my shoes on and took the little picture to do the one thing I wanted more than anything but never got the chance to do. I went to see outside. I took a path I had never taken before and held the picture up like Rafiki showing Simba his pride. I talked to strangers and skipped over broken roads with a grin on my face. I described to myself the feeling of each flower I stopped to touch. Some petals were soft and left color on my fingertips; they made me feel like a killer. Some I could not reach, so I held myself up to see. To smell. To experience. There was one flower, the lantana, a pungent flower that I loved very much but was rumored to attract snakes, so I was encouraged to stay away from it. Funny enough, I found out today that they repel them. In the past, it was the danger of the plant that drew me to it. I had always liked frightening things, frightened things, abandoned things, and unloved things, so it was fitting that I picked some for myself. An offering. A commitment to rediscovery. To unification. I opened my palm wide and quickly tried to pick a bundle, but the stem only twisted in my hand, refusing to be taken. However, when I pinched my fingers small and slowly pulled a single flute from the bunch, it gave way almost with glee.

I don’t know why I am writing this or why I am sharing this, but I am noticing a fear of the self in many of us. In elders who still see the roads washed in blood and cannot bear to see fault in their parents because they died so tragically, so they repeat what they remember parenting to be. In young people who cannot acknowledge the pain of being raised by such people because what is abuse in the face of genocide or at the hands of national heroes? We need to become comfortable with talking about pain, our own and that of others. We need to build a tolerance for it.

The past and the present sit together like petals on the same stem. Moving together, scary as that may sound. You cannot be what you are not, not for long. You can lock it in a cupboard, or at the bottom of a bottle, or in the filter of a joint, but it will always be there. That itch underneath your skin when you find that you are alone with yourself for a moment. When your phone is dead. When there’s no work to give life-or-death urgency to. When there are no events to attend. When you are old and on your deathbed surrounded by a good enough life that you have managed to scrape together without looking back, you will find yourself there.

Waiting.

I need to speak to you about this picture without you running to check if your own picture in the cupboard didn’t stir awake.