The Same Bottle

October 7, 2026

I’m twenty-three years old; I’ve lived with HIV since the day I was born. I have never said those words out loud to a friend, only my family knows. I carry it everywhere like a stone in my shoe, and I’ve walked on it so long that nobody notices the limp.

My dad died when I was two. I don’t remember his face, only a photo of him laughing, and the picture didn’t even show what made him laugh. My mum died when I was eight, and that’s the year I found out why I had been taking tablets my whole life. Nobody ever told me. Mum always said they were strong tablets that mad me tall and clever, and she said never to skip one.

After her funeral, I crept into her room looking for her perfume. I found her tablets in the drawer instead. It was the same little bottle with the same white cap and same smell. The only difference was the name on the label.

I lined them up the tablets on her bed like a game. Mine, hers, mine, hers. My aunty walked in, saw them side by side, and her whole face broke. “Why do we have the same medicine?,” I asked. She sat on the floor, held both my hands, and told me. I remember the cold floor more than I remember the words. Years later, my aunty told me mum’s tablets came too late, and mine came early. I still can’t get over how thin that line is.

My aunty raised us after mum, and she never made us feel like a burden, but I felt like one anyway. Grief does strange things. Every Mother’s Day my feed fills up with mums, and I scroll fast. I miss her, and this day brings up a lot of memories for me like I’ve kept one of her lipsticks for 15 years and never opened it. I’m scared if I do it will smell like nothing. Oh, and I can’t eat jam anymore. When I was little, mum hid my tablets in it, and when I swallowed, she’d clap like I’d just done a magic trick.

As a child, I learned to lie the way other kids learned to ride a bike. At school, I kept my tablets in a lip balm tin, and I’d make an excuse to go to the bathroom like faking a stomach or headache. There, I’d swallowed them dry in the toilet stall. I also stopped going to sleepovers, because sleepovers meant explaining the alarm on my phone. Once, a girl in my class made a joke about people with HIV and the whole room laughed. I laughed, too. Honestly, I laughed the loudest, so nobody would look at me. I’m still ashamed of that laugh. I went home and sat in the shower, until the water ran cold.

My sister has it, too. For years we lived in the same house, took our tablets in different rooms, and never once spoke about it. Eventually, we did share our secret, and this made a difference. If one of us was late, the other would say, “Have you eaten?” That was our whole code. I think we were each trying to protect the other from something neither of us could name out loud.

Then, about a year ago, something shifted. After a clinic visit, a lady named Faida stopped us at the door. She runs a small circle of women living with HIV, and she’d noticed my sister and me sitting in the waiting room with our knees touching, saying nothing. “You two look like you’re carrying a lot,” she said. She added us both to her group that same evening, so neither of us had to walk in alone.

We meet on Saturdays in a borrowed church hall, on plastic chairs, with lots of tea, something fried and sweet treats that someone always brings. There’s a grandmother who has lived with HIV for 30 years and laughs so loud the chairs shake. There’s a mum of three who braids hair and cried happy tears the day her youngest tested negative. It was there in that hall with them that for the first time in my life I heard women say the word out loud, like it was just a word. Nobody lowered their voice. Nobody asked me to explain the alarm on my phone. Esther keeps telling us the same thing. “You don’t owe anyone your story. But you deserve people who already know it.”

I still haven’t told my friends. I have two best friends I’d do anything for, and my throat closes every time I try. I’ve typed the message and deleted it more times than I can count. They talk about weddings and babies, and I nod along, wondering who will stay once they know. The nurse says babies are possible for women like me. Most days, I believe her.

I take my tablets every morning and every night, run before the sun is up, try to sleep early, and grow tomatoes in old paint tins on my balcony, because Mum did. My viral load stays low, and my nurse smiles at my results like I’ve done something clever. I want to finish my course, open a little bakery, fall in love loudly, and one day tell my best friends over a cup of tea.

So, I’m hanging in there. Some days that’s all I do.