Dear you,

You are nineteen, and you have a list taped to the inside of your wardrobe door. London. New York. Paris. Somewhere — anywhere — that isn't here. You are sure your real life is waiting in one of those cities, and that Nairobi is just the waiting room.

I want to tell you a few things.

You will travel

You will see some of those places, and they will be wonderful. You'll stand on bridges and in museums and feel exactly as small and alive as you hoped. But you will also feel homesick in a way you don't expect — for chai, for the noise of the stage, for people who say your name properly.

The stories were here all along

You think nothing interesting happens here. You're wrong. The mama who sells you tomatoes has raised five children on that stall. The matatu conductor quotes poetry. Your own grandmother has a story about 1963 she has never told anyone, and one day she will tell you, and you will write it down.

You don't have to leave home to find something worth writing about. You have to pay attention to it.

Staying is not giving up

You'll worry that staying means you weren't brave enough. It doesn't. It takes its own kind of courage to stay and make something in the place that made you — to decide that your city deserves to be written about as beautifully as Paris.

Be gentle with yourself

You'll make mistakes. Some years will be hard. Keep writing through them. Keep the notebook. Keep the list on the wardrobe door, too — not as a way out, but as a reminder that the world is big and you are allowed to want things.

With love, from the woman who stayed (for now),

Ayeesha