Article & Art by Linnea Anderson
It was my host sister’s fifth birthday and all I could think about was whether my girlhood was fleeting.
She was the textbook definition of girlishness. Plastic beads adorned her collarbones. She wore a crown and ate cake and danced.
At my fifth birthday party, we hunted down beetles and bugs. But we ate cake too, I wore a dress just like hers.
I have 16 levels of separation from a five year old. Poisons sold at corner stores are legal to me now, at least in my motherland 12 time zones away.
Numbers seem to matter a lot to me recently.
Most days, I wake up at seven to the hum of my host mom’s mantras streaming from her shrine room.
I have an eight minute walk to school.
Every night I am expected to come home at seven for food and music videos.
During dinner every screen in the house is blaring at once: the kid’s iPad, my Amala’s WhatsApp, and the occasional American pop song on the TV.
Sometimes my host sister dances alongside Selena Gomez.
Selena Gomez played through the speakers of my Barbie CD player at her age. The 16 degrees of separation start to dissolve.
Sometimes on Wednesdays, my Amala makes me a bowl of tsampa for breakfast.
Her mother ate tsampa too, on other days of the week, different times of day, in different places. Now, there’s no account of it. No records, no dates, no ages, just memory.
Pockets full of tsampa flour sustained her mother on the trek from Tibet to Nepal. She combined the milled barley with the running waters of the Himalayas.
My Amala never enjoyed barley milled in the motherland. She was born here in Nepal. It is impossible to say how long ago. Her birthday was forgotten alongside the births of her siblings and the busy livelihood of refuge.
My Amala’s agelessness almost makes me feel closer to her.
Like her girlhood never ended.
She could celebrate my host sister’s birthday like it was her own.
In some ways, my Amala finds comfort in her agelessness. Age is just another attachment that her mantras warn against.
She knows impermanence better than I do, knows that being in any state means having to leave it one day. It was her life, her mother’s too, and it became her son’s, now far away in foreign places.
Tomorrow she will cook rice and give the leftovers to crows she’s never met.
She will make me giggle and remember that her age is just another marker of distance between her humor and mine.
And that maybe doesn’t really matter.
That neither of our girlhoods have to disappear, given we could still celebrate a fifth lap around the sun for the little girl I have come to know.
But I think she still deserves the gifts, maybe a birthday hat, and definitely a party.