Photo courtesy of Sora ShimazakiI was ten when my breasts started to develop. I remember feeling ashamed when the small bumps became noticeable underneath my school uniform. During that time, I used to play with the kids in the neighborhood after school, staging wrestling and pillow fights and organizing football and running matches. As my shape changed, I became self-conscious and stopped playing with the neighborhood kids, who were mostly boys. I began wearing loose-fitting shirts and isolating myself indoors after school. I wasn’t happy when I had to give up my colorful training bras for adult ones. At my all-girls…

Spare by Prince Harry of Wales is written in a three-act structure—his childhood, his military experience, and his relationship with Meghan. The nearly sixteen-hour delivery of the memoir is read in the Duke of Sussex’s own voice. It explores the collision between royal reality and royal fantasy through the life of a backup Prince. The book narrates how, at twelve, when Prince Harry learned of the death of his mother, Princess Diana, in a car crash, he believed that she’d gone into hiding from the Press to make a fresh start, and she would soon send for him. He and his…

 Some mornings, I wake up feeling blue. Sometimes, I don’t know why because the night before, I had gone to bed feeling light-hearted. Sometimes, I wonder if it is my hormones. Sometimes, I wonder if it is normal to feel melancholy. This morning is a perfect example. I went to bed feeling cheerful at 2 am but woke up cheerless at 6 am. While looking through friends status on WhatsApp, I discovered a tweet by Paulo Coelho.I admire his quotes most of the time, but this one left me feeling sadder than I had woken up. I disagree with what he…

 Back in May 2020, during the first global lockdown due to the Covid-19 crisis, AFREDA proposed The Pen Pal Project on their Twitter account. The aim was to ‘promote human connection in a time of isolation’. My writer friend Angel suggested participating and so we did.© AFREADAI wrote a letter to a stranger. On June 1st, 2020, AFREADA exchanged the letters. I received one from my pen pal, a 28-year-old woman from Tanzania. Rehema received my letter as well. Three months later, we moved from email exchanges to WhatsApp messages. Today, over a year later, Rehema and I are still friends, despite…

 I’ve always enjoyed reading AFREADA’s Friday newsletters, so when they asked for contributions from their readers, I thought to myself, ‘Why Not?’. I didn’t immediately get an idea of what I should write about, so it slipped my mind for a while. One night, after dinner, I came across the email and decided to give it a shot. A few minutes later, I had scribbled down 350 words. I read through it quickly and submitted it before I could change my mind.It felt too personal because I had shared a part of a private letter I was writing to my daughter,…

 After Litro Magazine published my 300-word flash fiction back in July, everyone I know who read it  asked me to turn it into a novel. I have been toying with the idea and although I do not have a story plot yet I am looking forward to taking up the challenge someday soon. I wrote the story in one sitting back in 2017. It’s about a woman whose brother died at the 2016 Nice attack and who contemplated a lethal pact she made with her brothers some 27 years back. I had initially written the story for a writing competition that…