Time Zones

Two days ago last year, I’m waking up in Paris.

It’s my birthday and I like the city for the obvious reasons – the cafés, culture, brilliance, the buzz – but it also endears because it’s exactly the same time in Windhoek and I’m not split into two.

A year older, wiser and more cynical on one side of the world, younger, innocent and hopeful on the other.

In Cape Town, a few birthdays before this one, the difference in me is an hour. For 60 minutes, I can choose to dive right into the pressure of being two years into my 30s or I can be the me I am in Windhoek. Still a young 31.

A woman with time, dwindling by the minute, to do the things I said I would before the dull thud of age, incensed ovaries and inevitable death is deliberately drowned out in an effervescence of sparklers, cake and confetti.

On my 29th birthday, the liminality is loud.

It thunders through the windowless Bangkok room I’m suffocating in a few hours before the last year of my 20s, scattering the rats as my sister Mel snores gently beside me.

I have six hours. More time than it takes to drive to the coast, watch the entire ‘Back to the Future’ trilogy or have a fitful, day-destroying night’s rest.

So as I rise to meet a new year in the Thai capital, in Windhoek, I am still 28.

Young enough to be forgiven my follies but old enough to be embarking the hill. The one the world is always telling women they are over. That invisible mound, the summit of which seems to plunge into some sudden inability to thrive, excel, change one’s life, mind, career, partner or start a late but great family.

In Hanoi, five hours into the future, I’m writing frantic messages to my younger self.

I want her to sleep well, enjoy the evening with her best friend James and I’d like her to discard all age-related anxiety and revel in what she knows to be true.

Life has only gotten better.

Opportunities have blossomed.

Friends have become family.

All this has come with a few more aches, pains, killer hangovers and those incessantly wagging wedding and wheres-the-baby? fingers so there’s no need to be two selves. To hold onto what is already gone hoping to cram what wasn’t meant to be in the temporal spaces between cities.

Five hours into the future and two days after my birthday, my shadow Windhoek self would have gotten the message. Heard it in a dream, tasted it in the water or read it on the page of a newspaper.

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