She touched her heart in blessing. These days there’s no Luo or Gĩkũyũ, she said. We are all the children of Kenya.

We are all the children of Kenya. All the children of Africa. All the children of the world. Even though she has long passed on, I remember her words and looks and smile. It was another case of wisdom and enrichment from the street. Knowledge gained inside and outside a formal setting impacted my life equally.

I did ache when I said goodbye to the friends I’d made. I ached when I said goodbye to my grandparents, to my cousins, to my aunts, to my mother. I ached for lasting connection, for a place where rejection was not inevitable. No matter how many times I stood on bare floors, surrounded by blank walls, telling myself I belonged everywhere and to everyone, emptied houses never stopped feeling like ruin. Failing to fully belong in my father’s family, and my mother’s, never stopped feeling like disgrace.

He would smile, perhaps relieved by my unaffectedness. Sometimes Yasmeen cried. I thought two crying daughters would be too much for him, so I trained myself to wait until I was alone, in my closet or in the bath. My father would wipe Yasmeen’s face, hug us both, ask us if we wanted chocolate milk.

“Good girl,” he’d whisper in my ear. I was good because I was restrained. My father, I believe, carried a lot of hurt from his relationship with my mother. He did not like to see the related pain radiating from his daughters’ eyes.

Those letters taught me about longing. Reading them in front of my father taught me to hide it, often even from myself. I know now what a dangerous kind of denial that is. It leaves you ravenous. It makes your seismometer vibrate when the phone call you are shocked to discover you have been waiting for your whole life offers you precisely what you are terrified to want: Hello, Nadia. This is your mama.

When I came up gasping, my father grabbed me and tossed me back in. When I remember that day, I remember soaring through the air and landing with a splat. I remember myself unattached from everything and yet made of everything. I was the air and the water. I was made of living fragments. I was past, present, and future at once. I felt, more than ever before, and perhaps ever since, deliciously free.

“Of course, growing up I knew I looked and behaved differently from many of my peers, but my family, my community, and my country accepted me as I was and never made me feel like an outsider. The beauty of my childhood was that I never felt othered or unwanted—this is the source of my strength. I have never questioned who I am.