Compounding Love

Hey girl, 

It’s been a minute… wait! A minute? It’s been centuries.

I miss writing to you.

The struggle to find a balance in my life has been a really tough one. I wish life was as easy as the picture we have in our head.

I will compensate for my long break by sending a really long mail this time, so brace up. 

A lot has happened since I was away. A couple of people I love got married and someone I really admire had a baby. Asin, a full blown baby o. November and these  recent days have really filled my heart with joy. Every good news was a much needed escape from the painful stress I've had to go through lately. 

You know, I normally would describe the kind of stress I've been going through as “adulting” but girl, NO.

HELL NO!!! 

I’m not going to accept this kind of inconvenience as a part of life. Of course one has to adjust and growth comes with a lot of discomfort, but nope,  Alice will not use her hand and welcome shege as part of life. 

TUFIAKWA!!

Now to the real reason I decided to dust my laptop and text you…

The week my friends got married, my heart was glad. I would, at intervals, find myself burst into happy songs, sometimes shed a happy tear or two, sometimes, I'll find myself saying “thank you Jesus” at  random occasions. I my heart was full,

But amidst all this happiness was a sadness lurking. 

These girls, at a point in my life, were my best friends, their friendship healed me in ways I cannot exhaust. They made me fall in love with female friendships, they made me trust women again. We were so close that we gave ourselves a name-OAK (Oluoma, Alice and Kosi). 

While in uni, we prayed together, talked about almost everything and were as involved in each other's lives as we could. We shared secrets and prayed about our dreams together. We became sisters.

The peak of our friendship was between our teens and early twenties. We were so innocent and had this naive view of life. We believed we would be as close as were forever and our friendship would remain the same. 

We had many older people tell us we were just young and that one day we would not have this friendship like this. We didn’t listen. We just felt they were jealous of us. 

Our friendship experienced the first major shock when Kosi moved to another country. Somehow, we managed. Oluoma graduated and it started getting harder to carry everybody along. I graduated and girl, it got even harder. Somehow, we kept in touch but of course as life continued to happen, distance started to do its thing. 

Don’t get me wrong, we are and will always be sisters. But if anybody told me in 2017 that Oluoma or Kosi would get married and the closest I will get to attending the wedding is hopping on a WhatsApp call to talk about plans or how the wedding went, I would cut their tongue if I had a knife. 

So, yeah, every time I thought of the fact that I would not be attending their wedding, I felt sad.

But you see, my compensation was that I gave all of my heart every time I had the opportunity to be with, or share a moment with them.

I was glad I never passed on an opportunity to enjoy a moment with them because I believed we would always be together. I was glad I never overlooked any chance to wear my heart on my sleeves when it involved OAK. I was glad I let them know I love them for real. So when I couldn't make it for their weddings, they knew that if I could, I would come.

Life is teaching me that you can’t perfectly predict the future. There are and will continue to be things that don’t go your way and most importantly, people will not always be the way they were, and this would in one way or the other affect how your relationship with them. 

So ,  if you ever get the chance to love, love wholly. Plant  as many seeds of love as you can, in the hearts of the people you care about so that on the days when you can’t be there to show them how much they mean to you, the memories of who you were to them when you were there will keep them knowing that you do love them

I call it compounding love. 

At every chance you get, love wholly, love deeply. 

Love so much that if for any reason things go south between you and someone, you’d know you gave them love when you could.

I’m happy with where I am and I appreciate every close friend I have today. 

I’m learning to love them in the moment and be as good a friend as I am able to, per time.

I’ll stop here now, the mail is getting tooo long. 

I will write to you as soon as I’m able to and I hope that’s not going to be in 2025.

I love you.

Write to me if you can.

Love, Alice.