DIARY OF MY ALMOST FOREVER by ZG Miya

This diary belongs to Nokuthula Mthembu.

If found, please return it.

If you read it anyway, be kind.

A Note to the Reader

The numbered chapters that follow tell the complete story of this book, beginning to end. At the close of the chapters, you will find a section of “loose pages” — letters, lists, recipes, and other keepsakes Thuli tucked between the diary's leaves over the course of the year.

These pages are not required reading. They add texture and small moments of grace to the story, the way keepsakes do, but the chapters alone tell the whole of it. Read them if you'd like to linger a little longer in Thuli's world — or skip ahead to Book Two without missing a thing.

Chapter One

12 January 2026

I am writing this on the back step of my mother's kitchen, with the paraffin lamp turned low because the electricity has gone again and nobody has bothered to find out why. Tomorrow I leave for Pietermaritzburg. I have packed and unpacked my trunk three times today, not because I forgot anything, but because packing it gave my hands something to do other than shake.

The first time I packed it, just after breakfast, I put in too many dresses and not enough of the practical things — no proper shoes for rain, nothing for the cold that Ayanda, whom I have not yet met but already feel I know a little from my mother's stories about her own student days, tells everyone arrives in Pietermaritzburg long before it arrives here. I unpacked everything onto my bed and started again, this time with my mother standing in the doorway offering opinions I had not asked for and could not have done without.

“You will need the grey jersey,” she said, “the one your aunt knitted you, even though you think it's ugly. Ugly and warm is better than pretty and sick.”

I took the grey jersey. I did not argue, because she was right, and because some part of me understood, even then, that this was not really about jerseys — that my mother was using the only language she had left for the thing she actually wanted to say, which was something closer to please be careful, please come back to me whole.

By the third packing, in the late afternoon, I had stopped pretending the trunk needed any more attention and simply sat with it closed in front of me, my hands resting on the lid, listening to the ordinary sounds of the house going on around me — Sibongile arguing cheerfully with our father about whether she was allowed to borrow his good shoes for a friend's birthday, the radio playing something tinny and half-tuned in the front room, a hen complaining outside about something only hens find urgent.

My mother bought me this notebook from the shop in town, the good kind with the stiff blue cover, and she did not say very much when she gave it to me. She only said, “Write down the things you will want to remember, and the things you will want to forget, because one day you will not be able to tell which is which, and you will be glad to have both.”

I think that is the wisest thing anyone has said to me all year, and the year is twelve days old.

So. This diary belongs to me, Nokuthula Mthembu, and if you are reading this without my permission, I hope at least you are kind about what you find.

* * *

There is not much else to say about tonight except that I am afraid, and excited, in the exact same breath, which I did not know was possible until now. I have lived in this house my whole life. I know which floorboard creaks outside Sibongile's room and which window in the rondavel lets in the cold in June. I know the particular sound the gate makes when my father comes home late from a meeting at the school, a sound I have listened for, half-asleep, since I was small enough to need listening for it at all. Tomorrow I will not know anything. I will be a stranger in my own province, four hours from home, expected to become a teacher, expected to become a woman, expected, my father says, to make him proud — though he says it the way he says most important things, sideways, while looking at something else, so that I have to decide for myself whether he means it or whether he is only saying what fathers say.

He means it. I have decided that. I am allowed to decide things like that about my own father.

He found me on the back step not long after my mother went inside to see to the dinner, and sat down beside me without saying anything for a while, which is also how he does most important things — arriving at them slowly, sideways, the way you'd approach an animal you didn't want to startle. He has not been entirely well these last few years, his knees giving him trouble in the cold months, and I noticed, watching him lower himself onto the step, how carefully he did it now, a small deliberate thing I do not think he would have wanted me to notice.

“Your mother tells me you packed three times,” he said eventually.

“The trunk kept being wrong,” I said.

“Mm,” he said, which from my father can mean almost anything, and then, after a long pause during which I assumed the conversation had simply ended the way our conversations sometimes do, he added, “It was never the trunk.”

I did not answer that, because there was nothing to add to it that wouldn't have undone whatever fragile, sideways tenderness he'd just managed to offer me, and we sat together a while longer in a silence that felt, for the first time all day, like exactly the right size for everything neither of us knew how to say.

* * *

My mother is at the table behind me, hemming a school dress for one of the neighbour's children, and every so often she looks up at me like she is trying to memorize my face before it changes. I want to tell her it is not going to change that much. I am only going four hours away. But I think she knows something I don't yet — that a person can leave a homestead and come back four hours later as someone else entirely, and that there is no amount of love that can stop that from happening, and there shouldn't be.

Sibongile says I am being dramatic. She is probably right. She is seventeen and has never had to be the first to leave anything, so I will allow her this one moment of being wrong about how it feels. She came to find me an hour ago, flopping down onto my bed amid the half-packed trunk, and asked, with the particular bluntness only a younger sister can get away with, whether I was nervous about “boys at university,” as though that were the only category of nervousness available to a person leaving home for the first time.

“I'm nervous about everything,” I told her, which was true, and which she found unsatisfying as an answer, the way she finds most honest answers unsatisfying when she's hoping for gossip instead.

“Well, I hope there's at least one good one,” she said, “so you have something interesting to write home about, instead of just lecture notes,” and then she laughed at her own joke and went to go interrupt our father's argument with the radio about the cricket scores, leaving me alone again with the trunk and the lamp and this notebook.

* * *

Here is what I know for certain, on the last night I will spend as only a daughter of this house, before I become also a student, also a woman alone in a city, also — though I do not know this yet — someone whose whole life will turn on a year she has not lived through yet:

I know my name. I know this kitchen, the exact crack running across the third tile from the door, the smell of paraffin and woodsmoke that lives permanently in the curtains no matter how often my mother washes them. I know that my mother's hands are rough at the knuckles from work and soft everywhere else. I know that my father loves me sideways and my sister loves me loudly and that both kinds of love have raised me equally well. I know that whatever happens to me in Pietermaritzburg, I will write it down here, in this notebook with the stiff blue cover, so that I do not lose the thread of myself in all that newness.

Tomorrow I leave.

Tonight I am still only this: a girl on a back step, twenty years old, twelve days into a year she cannot yet imagine the shape of.

Chapter Two

The bus to Pietermaritzburg left from the junction at six in the morning, and my father insisted on carrying my trunk to the road himself, even though it was not heavy and even though his knees have not been good since last winter. I let him. There are some things a daughter should not argue a father out of on the morning she is leaving him.

The walk to the junction takes twenty minutes on a good day, longer when you are carrying something, and we made it mostly in silence, the dark still thick around us, a few early cooking fires already sending up thin lines of smoke from homesteads we passed. My father set the trunk down twice to rest his knees, and both times he used the pause to look at the road ahead rather than at me, which I understood by then to be his way of giving us both somewhere safe to put our eyes.

“You'll write,” he said, the second time he set the trunk down, not quite a question.

“I'll write,” I said.

“Good,” he said, and picked the trunk back up, and that was the whole of our conversation until the bus arrived, which I have come to understand is, from my father, a very great deal said indeed.

My mother did not come to the junction. She said her goodbyes in the kitchen, where she could close the door afterward and not have to watch the bus pull away. I understood this completely and did not ask her to change her mind. She had held my face in both her rough, soft hands before I left the house and said only, “Write down everything, even the parts you think are too small to matter. Especially those.” Then she had turned back to the stove before either of us could cry, which I think was the kindest thing she could have done for both of us that morning.

* * *

The residence is called Sandstone House, which is a strange name for a building made of nothing but concrete and pale yellow paint, and my room is on the third floor, shared with a girl named Ayanda from Newcastle who has already covered her half of the wall with photographs of people I don't recognise and one poster of a singer I do. She is loud in a way that makes a room feel less empty, which I think I am going to need.

She arrived an hour after I did, dragging her own trunk up three flights of stairs with the help of a cousin who deposited it, gave her a brief, brisk hug, and left again almost immediately, off to wherever cousins go once their duty is discharged. Ayanda surveyed the room, surveyed me, and announced, “Right. I'm Ayanda. You can have the bed by the window, since you got here first, but I get the bigger half of the wardrobe because I brought more clothes and that is simply a fact we both have to live with.”

I told her that seemed fair. She seemed pleased that I hadn't argued, and within the hour had told me the names of her four siblings, her opinion of the dining hall food (“survivable, not enjoyable”), and the entire plot of a radio drama she'd been following for two years, none of which I had asked for and all of which I was, to my own surprise, glad to receive.

“You'll cry for the first two weeks,” Ayanda told me, unpacking her own trunk with the efficiency of someone who has done this before, “and then one day you won't, and you won't even notice the day it stopped.”

I asked her how she knew that.

“Because it happened to me last year,” she said, “and also to everyone else who has ever lived in this building since it was built.”

* * *

The university itself is bigger than I let myself imagine, even after looking at the prospectus photographs for a year. There is a long avenue of trees leading up to the main building, and students moving across the lawns in directions that all seem to mean something — everyone walking like they already know where they are going, even the ones who, I would learn later, very much did not.

I found the Faculty of Education building on my second attempt, after first wandering into a lecture on something called industrial psychology, where I sat for four full minutes before realising I was in the wrong room and did not belong among the agricultural science students filing in around me. I remember thinking, sitting there those four minutes before I worked up the nerve to leave, that this was a strange kind of metaphor for the whole year ahead — sitting confidently in the wrong room, waiting to be told so, too proud to simply ask.

I did not yet know that this would matter, that the agricultural sciences students filing past me that morning included, somewhere in their number, a particular face I had not yet learned to look for.

* * *

The corridors of Sandstone House are never quiet, not even after midnight — someone is always laughing two doors down, or playing music too loudly through a phone speaker, or arguing cheerfully in a mix of isiZulu and English that slides between the two without anyone seeming to notice the join. In the dining hall at lunch I sat between a girl speaking isiXhosa into her phone and two boys arguing, in English, about a lecturer's marking, and over all of it the smell of phuthu and stew and somebody's reheated curry, and I thought: this is the loudest silence I have ever been homesick inside of.

Outside, the rain comes in the afternoons now, sudden and warm, and the smell of it on the hot pavement outside the library is different from the smell of rain at home — sharper, mixed with petrol and dust, but rain all the same, and I find I am grateful for anything that smells like home even slightly, even imperfectly.

Tonight, my third night here, Ayanda has gone to a meeting for the student Christian union, and the room is quiet enough that I can hear the traffic from the road outside, which is a different kind of quiet than the quiet at home — a quiet that has other people inside it, just not in this particular room. I find I do not mind it.

I am homesick, the way Ayanda said I would be. But there is something underneath the homesickness, something that feels almost like hunger, and I think it might be the beginning of wanting my own life to start. I did not expect those two feelings to arrive at exactly the same time, in exactly the same chest.

My mother told me to write down the things I will want to remember and the things I will want to forget.

Tonight there is nothing yet in the second category. I am glad of that, and I suspect it will not last.

* * *

I telephoned home on Sunday, using the residence payphone in the downstairs hallway, queuing behind two other girls who were each, by the sound of it, having their own version of the conversation I was about to have. When my mother finally came to the phone, her voice sounded smaller through the receiver than it ever sounds in person, and I found myself, absurdly, fighting back tears over nothing more dramatic than the ordinary sound of her saying my name.

“How is the room,” she asked, which I understood to mean, how are you, are you eating, are you sleeping, are you alright, all of the things a mother actually wants to know compressed into a question about furniture.

“The room is fine,” I said, which meant, I am managing, I am homesick, I am alright, in the same compressed language we have always used with each other, the kind that says more by what it doesn't say than what it does.

Sibongile grabbed the phone from her halfway through, demanding to know whether Pietermaritzburg boys were as good-looking as the ones in the magazines, and my mother's voice, scolding her gently in the background, was the last thing I heard before the line clicked and the call ended, the residence's strict three-minute limit cutting us off mid-laugh. I stood there with the receiver still in my hand for a moment after the dial tone started, not quite ready to let go of the sound of my own family, four hours away and entirely unreachable except in three-minute increments through a coin-operated phone in a draughty hallway.

Chapter Three

2 February 2026

There is a jacaranda tree on the road just past the residence gate, and every afternoon for the last four days, a young man has parked his car beneath it at almost exactly half past three, and sat there for ten or fifteen minutes before going wherever it is he goes. I have started timing my walk back from the library so that I pass the tree at that hour, which I am aware makes me sound unwell, but I would like the record to show that I am not the only one — Ayanda has started doing the same thing, purely, she insists, out of loyalty to me.

It began, if I am honest about the beginning of it, almost by accident. I was walking back from a lecture on the first of these four days, tired and thinking about nothing in particular, when I noticed a car pulled in under the tree and a man getting out of it in no particular hurry, the way you move when nobody is waiting for you and you are not waiting for anyone either. He stood for a moment with one hand resting on the open car door, looking up into the canopy of purple blossom above him, and there was something in the stillness of it — something unhurried and entirely unselfconscious — that made me slow my own steps without deciding to.

I told myself, that first day, that I had only noticed him because the tree itself was noticeable, heavy with bloom the way jacarandas get in late summer before they start to drop, and that anyone standing beneath it would have caught my eye the same way. By the second day, when I found myself adjusting the time I left the library by perhaps ten minutes, purely, I told myself, to avoid the worst of the afternoon heat, I had stopped fully believing my own explanations.

I don't know his name. I have built an entire story for him anyway, the way you do when a person is interesting from a distance and you have not yet been disappointed by any of the true facts about him. In my story he is studying something serious — law, maybe, or medicine — and he parks under the jacaranda tree because his father planted one just like it at their home, and the smell of the blossoms in October makes him think of being young.

I have, in short, given a complete stranger a whole inner life, based on nothing but the angle of his shoulders and the unhurried way he gets out of his car, like a man who has never once in his life been late for anything that mattered.

Ayanda thinks this is hilarious. “You don't even know if he's nice,” she said today, watching him from the hedge with me like we were doing reconnaissance for the army, both of us crouched slightly behind the bougainvillea in a manner that would have looked, to any sensible observer, completely deranged. “He could be the worst person in Pietermaritzburg.”

“He doesn't look like the worst person in Pietermaritzburg,” I said.

“That's exactly what the worst person in Pietermaritzburg would look like,” she said, and I had no answer for that, because it was, annoyingly, a fair point. We stayed crouched behind the hedge a moment longer, debating in increasingly ridiculous whispers what crimes a well-dressed stranger under a jacaranda tree might plausibly be guilty of, until a passing groundsman gave us a look that suggested we were, ourselves, the more suspicious party on that particular stretch of road, and we abandoned the hedge with as much dignity as we could manage, which was not very much.

* * *

Today, for the first time, he looked up while I was passing and caught me looking. I did not have time to arrange my face into anything dignified. I think I simply looked at him the way you look at a person you have already invented a story about, which is to say: caught.

He smiled. Not a big smile. The kind of smile that seems to be agreeing to something without either of us having said what. There was nothing performed about it — no flirtation I could point to and name, only the quiet acknowledgment of two people who had, apparently, both noticed each other noticing.

I did not smile back in time, because by the time I had decided to, I had already walked three more steps and it would have meant turning around, and I am not yet the kind of person who turns around.

Ayanda, walking a discreet distance behind me, caught up at the gate practically vibrating with the need to discuss what had just happened. “He smiled at you!”

“He smiled in my general direction,” I said. “That's a different thing.”

“It is not a different thing,” she said, with the absolute conviction of someone who has clearly had more practice than I have at being smiled at by strangers under trees. “Thuli. That was a smile with intention behind it. I've seen enough smiles without intention to know the difference.”

I would like to write here that I don't know his name, but somehow I already have a story for him, and that I am content to leave it that way for now, watching from a safe distance, asking nothing of him and risking nothing in return.

I suspect, even as I write it, that this will not remain true for very long.

Chapter Four

University has a rhythm I am only now starting to learn, the way you learn the rhythm of a homestead without ever being taught it directly — which lecturers tolerate latecomers and which do not, which queue at the registrar's office moves and which one is a trap, where to sit in the library if you want quiet and where to sit if you want to be seen wanting quiet.

My education lecturer, Mrs. Buthelezi, has a voice that carries to the back row without her ever raising it, and she said something on Tuesday that I have not stopped thinking about. She had been talking about classroom management, the ordinary mechanics of getting thirty children to sit still long enough to learn fractions, and then, almost as an aside, she set her notes down on the lectern and looked out at all of us properly, the way she does when she means for something to land. “You are not here to learn what to teach,” she said. “You are here to learn who you become in a room full of children who need you to know things you do not yet know about yourself.”

The lecture hall went very quiet after that, the particular quiet of forty people all privately deciding the sentence applied to them specifically. I wrote it down twice — once in my lecture notes, properly, in the margin where I keep the things worth keeping, and once here, because I think it might be true of more than teaching.

Afterward, walking out of the hall with a girl named Zandile from my tutorial group, I asked her whether she thought Mrs. Buthelezi meant it the way it had sounded, or whether we were all simply tired and reading too much into an ordinary sentence about classroom discipline.

“Does it matter which,” Zandile said, “if it's true either way?”

I did not have an answer for that, and have been turning the question over ever since, in the particular unproductive way you turn over a question that doesn't actually require an answer, only attention.

* * *

I saw him again today, across the quad outside the agricultural sciences building, deep in conversation with two other students, gesturing at something on a clipboard the way people do when they actually care about the thing on the clipboard. He did not see me. I did not arrange to be seen. I told myself I was only walking to the library, which was, in fact, true — it was simply not the shortest way to the library.

I stood, for slightly longer than the walk strictly required, near a noticeboard advertising a debating society I have no intention of joining, watching him without watching him, the way you read a noticeboard you have no actual interest in while your attention is entirely elsewhere. He laughed at something one of the others said, a real laugh, his whole face changing with it, and I found myself cataloguing the change the way you catalogue weather — noting it, filing it, wanting, for reasons I could not yet have explained to anyone, to see it happen again.

Ayanda has started calling this “the scenic route” and I have stopped pretending to be offended by the phrase, mostly because she is entirely correct and there did not seem to be much dignity left in arguing otherwise.

* * *

Zandile and I have started studying together properly, twice a week, in a corner of the library we have unofficially claimed as ours, and I find I am grateful for her in a way I did not expect to be grateful for anyone this early into the year. She is from a town outside Pinetown, the eldest of five, and has a way of asking questions in our education seminars that makes the lecturer pause before answering, as though her questions require a different kind of thinking than the ones that usually get asked.

“Do you ever wonder,” she said today, closing her textbook with the particular finality of someone who has stopped absorbing anything new for the day, “whether we're going to be good at this? Not the exams. The actual thing. Standing in front of thirty children who don't care about your degree, only about whether you can hold their attention for forty minutes without losing them.”

I told her I thought about it more than I let on, and she nodded, satisfied, as though my honesty had confirmed something she'd already suspected about me.

“My mother was a teacher,” she said. “Thirty-one years in the same primary school. She used to say the degree teaches you the subject. The children teach you the job. I think about that a lot, this year.”

I have started thinking about it too, turning the sentence over the way I turn over most things worth keeping. The children teach you the job. I wonder, writing it here, whether the same might be true of love — whether whatever I am learning about loving someone properly is being taught to me not by any book or any wise relative's advice, but simply by the doing of it, clumsily, one ordinary Tuesday at a time.

Chapter Five

9 February 2026

His name is Sandile Khumalo, and I know this now because Phila — a boy from my isiZulu tutorial who seems to know absolutely everyone, the way some people simply collect other people without trying — introduced us outside the cafeteria this afternoon, with all the ceremony of someone handing over a parcel he was tired of carrying.

It happened almost by accident. I had gone to the cafeteria with Zandile after our tutorial, and Phila, spotting me from across the queue, abandoned whatever conversation he'd been having and crossed the whole width of the courtyard purely, it seemed, to address a piece of unfinished business that had apparently been bothering him for some time.

“Right,” he said, arriving slightly out of breath, with Sandile trailing a step behind him looking faintly bewildered at having been collected so abruptly. “Thuli, Sandile. Sandile, Thuli. Now you both know each other and I can stop being asked about it,” and he walked off to buy a Fanta, leaving the two of us standing there with the particular awkwardness of two people who have been silently aware of each other for a month and are suddenly required to speak.

For a moment neither of us said anything at all. Zandile, with considerably more grace than I managed, mumbled something about needing to find a seat and disappeared in Phila's direction, leaving me alone with a stranger I had already spent a month inventing an entire life for.

“You walk past my tree a lot,” Sandile said, which was not what I expected him to say, and also not something I had any good answer for, since it was entirely true and I had hoped it was less obvious than it apparently was.

“It's not your tree,” I said, because it was the only dignity available to me in that moment.

“It is, actually,” he said, and there was something in the way he said it, easy and unbothered, that made the whole exchange feel less like an accusation and more like the opening move of a joke we were both now permitted to be in on. “My mother planted one just like it at our home, the same year I was born. I've been finding this one for three years now, every time I need to think.”

I did not tell him that I had already invented this exact story for him, almost word for word, weeks before he confirmed it. I think I will keep that to myself for now — there is something useful about a person not knowing how much you already imagined them before you knew anything true.

* * *

We talked for perhaps ten minutes, standing near the cafeteria entrance while students moved around us in both directions, about nothing important — his agricultural sciences degree, my teaching diploma, the unreasonable hour his Monday lecture starts at, a shared, entirely unoriginal complaint about the dining hall's tendency to run out of the good bread by midday. He asked where I was from, and when I told him, he said the name of a neighbouring district as though testing whether I'd recognise it, which I did, and we spent a few minutes establishing, with more enthusiasm than the subject probably warranted, exactly how close our two homes actually were.

He has a way of listening that makes you feel like the most interesting thing happening on campus, leaning slightly forward, his attention entirely undivided, asking small follow-up questions that suggested he'd actually been listening rather than simply waiting for his turn to speak again. I am sure this is a skill and not an accident, and I am equally sure I should be more suspicious of it than I currently am.

“You notice things too,” he said at one point, when I'd mentioned some small detail about the cafeteria queue that had apparently amused him. “Most people don't notice the small stuff. They're too busy thinking about what they're going to say next.”

“Maybe I'm just better at hiding that I'm thinking about what I'm going to say next,” I said.

He laughed at that — properly, the real laugh I'd watched him give to his clipboard friends across the quad, and I felt a small, private satisfaction at having produced it myself, on purpose, with nothing but a sentence.

Tonight, writing this, I find I am smiling at nothing in particular, which Ayanda has already noticed and refuses to let go uncommented upon. She has been asking me, at five-minute intervals since I returned to the room, increasingly elaborate questions about the conversation, none of which I have answered to her satisfaction, mostly because I do not yet have satisfactory answers even for myself.

His name is Sandile Khumalo. I am allowed to write that now. It feels like being given a key to a door I had only previously admired from the outside.

* * *

Phila caught me the next morning outside the tutorial room, wearing the satisfied expression of a man who considers a job well done. “So,” he said, “I did you a favour yesterday. I expect to be thanked properly, not just in passing.”

“You introduced two people who already knew each other's faces,” I said. “That's hardly matchmaking.”

“Knowing a face and knowing a name are different things,” he said, with the air of a man delivering a great truth. “I gave you the name. The rest is between the two of you. But I expect an invitation to whatever happens next, purely as a professional courtesy.”

I told him there was nothing happening yet to be invited to, and he gave me a look that suggested he did not believe this for a single moment, and was, in fact, already composing the story he intended to tell people later about the day he introduced Thuli Mthembu to her own future, whatever that future turned out to hold.

Chapter Six

I wrote to my mother today, a real letter, the kind you fold into thirds and post, because some things still feel more true when they travel by hand rather than by phone.

I sat at the small desk by the window for almost an hour deciding how to begin, which is a ridiculous amount of time to spend on the first line of a letter to your own mother, but I wanted to get the tone right — not so cheerful that she'd worry I was hiding something, not so plain that she'd worry I was unhappy. In the end I simply started writing and let the tone find itself, the way it usually does once you stop overthinking it.

Dear Mama, I wrote. The residence is loud in a way I think I am starting to love. My roommate Ayanda says I will stop crying eventually and she was right, though I would not tell her that to her face. My lecturer says something interesting almost every week, which I did not expect from a degree I chose mostly because I knew I would be good at it rather than because I was certain I would love it. I am starting to think those two things — being good at something, and loving it — are not as separate as I assumed they were.

I have made a friend named Phila who knows everyone, and through him I have met a young man named Sandile, who studies agricultural sciences and has a habit of parking under a jacaranda tree near my residence to think. I don't know what to make of him yet. I will tell you when I do.

I wrote two more paragraphs after that, about the food, about a lecturer who lost his temper at a student for arriving late, about how strange it still felt to fall asleep without the particular sounds of home around me. I did not write down everything. There is a difference between what you tell your mother and what you tell a notebook with a stiff blue cover, and I think both kinds of honesty are allowed to exist at the same time, in the same week, about the same boy.

I posted the letter on my way to the library, dropping it into the postbox on the corner with the particular care you give something you've spent an hour composing, and felt, watching it disappear into the slot, a small and entirely unreasonable satisfaction — the satisfaction of a thing said honestly and sent somewhere safe.

* * *

One small correction to the record, since I promised myself this notebook would hold the true things and not only the flattering ones: Sandile is not, in fact, perfect.

I asked him today, in passing, whether he'd received the message I sent about meeting at the library on Thursday, and he went faintly pink around the ears — an actual blush, which I did not expect from someone who otherwise carries himself like nothing has ever caught him off guard — and admitted he'd seen it three days ago and simply hadn't known what to say back, so he'd said nothing at all, which is apparently a habit of his and not a one-time failure.

“Three days,” I repeated, mostly to watch him squirm a little longer, which I will admit I enjoyed more than I probably should have.

“I know how it sounds,” he said. “I just — I read it, and then I thought about what to say back, and then I thought about it too long, and then it felt strange to reply after thinking about it for three days, so I just... didn't.”

“So you panic and go silent,” I said, “instead of just answering.”

“It's worked for me so far,” he said, which is not an answer, and we both knew it wasn't, and he laughed at his own non-answer a half-second too late, in the awkward way of someone who has heard himself say something silly only after it has already left his mouth.

I find I am relieved by this. A person who blushes and goes quiet and laughs late is a person, not a story I invented under a tree. I would like to keep noticing the true, unflattering, human things about him, alongside the others. I think it will matter later, though I could not yet tell you why.

* * *

Ayanda demanded a full account that evening, lying across her own bed with her feet propped against the wall in the particular posture she adopts when she intends to extract every available detail from a conversation. I told her about the blush, the three days of silence, the laugh a half-second too late, and she listened with the rapt attention of someone watching a particularly satisfying drama unfold.

“So he's not actually smooth,” she said, sounding almost delighted by the discovery. “He's just good at looking smooth from a distance.”

“Apparently,” I said.

“Good,” she said, with the satisfaction of someone whose suspicions had been confirmed. “I don't trust the ones who are smooth all the way through. Means they've had too much practice somewhere.”

I have thought about that comment more than once since — not because I think it says anything especially true about Sandile, but because I think it says something true about caring for someone properly: that you want, eventually, to find the cracks in the smoothness, not because you're looking for reasons to doubt them, but because the cracks are where the actual person turns out to be living.

Chapter Seven

18 February 2026

The jacaranda is past its bloom now, mostly, but a few stubborn flowers still let go in the wind, and one landed on the open page of my notebook this afternoon while I was sitting beneath the tree waiting for Sandile, who was, predictably, fourteen minutes late.

I had taken to bringing the notebook with me on the days we'd agreed to meet at the tree, partly out of habit and partly, I think, because there was something fitting about writing in the very spot that had started everything, even before I knew his name. I had been writing about nothing in particular — a complaint about a lecturer, a half-formed thought about Mrs. Buthelezi's latest assignment — when the flower simply fell, settling itself onto the open page as though it had been aimed.

“You're collecting evidence against me,” he said, arriving to find me holding the flower up to the light, turning it slowly between two fingers the way you'd examine something you weren't yet sure how to keep.

“I'm pressing it,” I said. “Someone has to remember this tree existed before October.”

He sat down next to me on the grass, close enough that our shoulders nearly touched, and watched while I folded the flower carefully between two pages near the back of the notebook, where it would not be crushed by the weight of everything written before it. He was quiet while I did it, which I noticed, because he is rarely quiet without a reason.

“Why that one,” he asked, “out of all the flowers that have fallen since you started waiting under this tree.”

I didn't have a good answer. I still don't, except that it felt important to keep, the way certain ordinary moments announce themselves as worth keeping before you understand why. I told him as much, and he nodded slowly, as though this were a perfectly reasonable thing for a person to feel about a flower, which I appreciated more than I let on.

“My mother does that,” he said, after a while. “Keeps things. There's a tin in her wardrobe full of nothing important — a feather, a ribbon from my christening, a stone I gave her once because I thought it looked like a heart. I used to think it was strange. I don't anymore.”

I asked him what changed his mind.

“I think I understood, eventually, that the things themselves don't matter,” he said. “It's that keeping something is a way of saying a day mattered, even an ordinary one, even one you can't explain why you wanted to remember at the time.”

I pressed the flower between the pages and did not know, closing the notebook, how long it would stay there, or how much would change before anyone looked at it again. I only knew, sitting there beside him with the late afternoon light coming gold through what remained of the blossoms, that I wanted to remember exactly this — his voice explaining his mother's tin of keepsakes, the particular quiet of a Tuesday that had no reason to be memorable and somehow was anyway.

Chapter Eight

We had coffee at the tuck shop today, the small one behind the agricultural sciences building where the queue is always longer than the seating, and Sandile told me, properly, about his life for the first time — not the version you give a stranger, but the version you give someone you've decided is no longer one.

We had to share a single small table with two mismatched chairs, balancing our cups carefully on a surface barely large enough for both, and somewhere behind the counter a radio played the same three songs it always seems to play, loud enough to cover our conversation from anyone sitting close, which suited us both, I think, though neither of us said so.

He is studying agricultural sciences because his family keeps cattle and grows sugarcane on a homestead near Eshowe — “not far from where you're from, actually,” he said, when I told him where my own home was, and we spent a few minutes establishing, with great seriousness, exactly how many ridges and rivers separated our two families, as though it mattered, as though we were drawing a map only the two of us would ever need. He knew the name of a stream I hadn't thought about since childhood, and I knew the name of the trading store his mother still buys her paraffin from, and somewhere in that small, ridiculous cartography I felt something settle in my chest that I did not yet have a word for.

His mother, he said, has been tired for months now — “the doctors keep saying it's nothing, but they also keep wanting more tests, so I don't know what to make of that” — and his father runs the homestead the old way, expecting Sandile to come home and take it over eventually, which Sandile says he wants, mostly, except on the days he doesn't, and isn't sure which days are more honest.

“What does the old way mean,” I asked, “exactly?”

“It means my father makes the decisions and everyone else carries them out,” he said, with a half-laugh that didn't quite reach his eyes. “It means there's a way things have always been done, and questioning it is allowed, as long as you eventually do it the way it's always been done anyway. It's not a bad way to grow up. It's just a particular way, and I don't always know how much of myself fits inside it.”

I told him about my own father's sideways way of being proud, and my mother's kitchen-door goodbyes, and Sibongile's engagement plans already taking over every family conversation despite being barely a month old, and he listened the way he always does, like the smallest detail might turn out to be the important one, asking a question here and there that proved he'd actually been following the thread rather than simply waiting his turn.

“You notice things,” I told him.

“So do you,” he said. “You're writing this down right now, in your head, aren't you.”

I was. I am. I told him so, and he didn't seem to mind being noticed, which I think is rarer in a person than it should be. He asked, half curious and half teasing, whether he'd one day get to read what I'd written about him, and I told him absolutely not, not ever, which made him laugh properly, and ask whether that meant the things I'd written were good or bad.

“It means they're mine,” I said, “and that's a different question entirely.”

He seemed satisfied with that answer, or at least willing to let it stand, and we sat a while longer over coffee gone cold, in no particular hurry to be anywhere else.

* * *

He told me, too, about his grandfather, dead now eleven years, who had built most of the homestead's current kraal with his own hands and a borrowed ox-cart, and who used to tell Sandile, when he was small enough to still believe every word an old man said, that a homestead was not land but a promise — a promise made by every generation to the next one, that the cattle would still be grazing, the fields still turning over season after season, long after any one person's name had been forgotten.

“I used to think that was beautiful,” he said, turning his empty cup slowly on the small table. “I still do, mostly. But there's a heaviness to it too, that I don't think he meant for me to feel, or maybe he did and just never said so. A promise like that doesn't ask whether you wanted to make it. It just expects you to keep it.”

I asked whether his older cousins felt the same weight, and he said no, not in the same way — he is the only son of the eldest son, which apparently settles a great deal about a person's future in a family like his, whether or not the person in question had any say in the settling.

“Does that frighten you,” I asked, “being the one it falls to?”

He considered the question longer than I expected, turning the cup again. “Some days,” he said finally. “Most days I just don't think about it at all, the way you don't think about the floor holding you up until someone mentions it might not.”

I did not know, hearing that sentence for the first time, how often I would find myself returning to it later, turning it over the way he'd turned his cup, trying to decide whether he'd been speaking generally, or whether some small honest part of him had already sensed, even then, in February, that the floor was further from solid than either of us yet understood.

Chapter Nine

Phila found me in the library today, which he never does unless he has something to say that he considers important enough to interrupt studying for.

I was deep in an assignment on curriculum design, the kind of work that requires you to actually concentrate rather than simply sit and look like you're concentrating, when he appeared at the end of my table, glanced around to make sure nobody he knew was close enough to overhear, and dropped into the chair across from me without asking whether I had time for him, which, knowing Phila, was less rudeness than simple urgency.

“Just so you know what you're getting into,” he said, “Sandile's family is serious. Old-fashioned serious. His father is the kind of man who still does things the traditional way — ilobolo negotiations, homestead hierarchy, all of it, properly, no shortcuts.”

“Why are you telling me this,” I asked, “like it's a warning.”

“It's not a warning,” Phila said, though it had sounded exactly like one. “It's just — some families expect a lot. From the man and from whoever he chooses. That's all. I just think you should know what kind of homestead you'd be walking into, if it ever came to that.”

I asked him how he knew so much about the Khumalo family in particular, and he shrugged in the way that meant he'd rather not explain the full chain of cousins and acquaintances that had brought the information to him, only that the information itself was reliable. “My mother's sister married into a family two homesteads over from theirs,” he said eventually, as though this settled the matter, which, in the small interconnected way these things work in KwaZulu-Natal, it probably did.

“It hasn't come to anything,” I said, which was true, and also, I noticed, said a little too quickly.

Phila gave me a look that suggested he'd noticed the speed of it too, but had decided, generously, not to comment, and shrugged again, the way he does when he's said his piece and is content to let it sit unexamined, and went back to whatever errand had actually brought him to the library in the first place — something about a missing textbook, which he mentioned almost as an afterthought on his way out, as though the textbook had been his real purpose all along and the conversation about Sandile's family merely something that had occurred to him while he was there.

I have thought about it on and off all afternoon, not with worry exactly, but with the particular attention you give a piece of information you suspect you will need later, even if you can't yet say why. Sandile's family is serious. Old-fashioned serious. I have filed this away, the way you file away the weather forecast for a trip you haven't yet decided to take, somewhere I can find it again if the sky ever does start to look the way the forecast warned me it might.

Chapter Ten

Home for the weekend, and my mother noticed something before I'd even put my trunk down.

I had barely crossed the threshold, still shrugging the strap of my bag off my shoulder, when she looked up from the pot she was stirring and went very still for a moment, the particular stillness of a woman reading something in her daughter's face that the daughter had not intended to broadcast.

“You're smiling at the floor,” she said, not looking up from the pot she was stirring. “People don't smile at floors for no reason.”

“I'm just tired,” I said, which was a lie so transparent that even I didn't believe it as I said it, and which my mother received with the particular silence she reserves for statements she has decided not to dignify with a response.

Sibongile, who has never in her life let a silence go unfilled, supplied the rest before I could stop her. She had been sitting at the table doing absolutely nothing useful, ostensibly helping shell peas but mostly eating them, and she looked up with the bright, unbothered malice of a younger sister who has been waiting all week for precisely this moment. “She's met someone. His name starts with an S. I heard her say it on the phone to Ayanda.”

“Sibongile.”

“What? I'm being helpful.” She popped another pea into her mouth with the air of someone who considered the matter entirely settled.

My mother set down her spoon and looked at me properly for the first time since I'd walked in, the way she looks at a hem before deciding whether it needs taking in — a long, assessing look that missed nothing. “Well,” she said. “You'll tell me when you're ready. Or Sibongile will tell me first. Either way I'll find out.”

“His name is Sandile,” I said, because there did not seem to be much point in withholding it any further, given that half the information had already escaped without my permission. “He studies agricultural sciences. He's from near Eshowe, actually, not far from us.”

My mother absorbed this with a small nod, the kind that meant she had filed it away to ask more questions about later, when there was time and fewer interruptions, and Sibongile, delighted to have extracted even this much, declared that she expected a full report before bedtime, with no detail considered too small to share.

That, I am learning, is simply how things work in this house, and I am not sure I would have it any other way. There is no privacy here, not really, only the polite fiction of it, maintained until someone decides the fiction has served its purpose and can be set aside. I went to bed that night having told Sibongile considerably more than I'd intended to, and feeling, despite the loss of privacy, lighter for having said it out loud to someone who already knew me well enough not to need the careful framing I'd been giving everyone else.

* * *

Sibongile climbed into my bed that night the way she has done since we were small, despite having a perfectly good bed of her own three feet away, and lay on her back staring at the ceiling while I tried, with limited success, to describe what it felt like to have noticed someone the way I had noticed Sandile.

“It sounds exhausting,” she said finally, with the particular bluntness of a seventeen-year-old who has not yet been exhausted by anything more complicated than schoolwork. “All that watching from hedges and timing your walks. Why not just talk to him properly from the start?”

“Because that's not how it works,” I said.

“Maybe it should be,” she said, with the confidence of someone who has not yet learned how rarely things work the way they should. “I'm just saying. Seems like a lot of effort for a tree.”

I told her it had stopped being about the tree fairly quickly, and she made a small, satisfied sound, the sound of someone filing away evidence for a future argument, and within a few minutes had fallen properly asleep beside me, leaving me alone with my own thoughts in the dark, listening to the familiar sounds of the house settling around us — my father's slow tread to bed, the particular creak of the gate latch, the wind moving through the mango tree outside the window the way it had moved through it every night of my whole life until this year, when, for the first time, I had started to wonder whether I would always be coming back to this exact sound, or whether some year soon I would be listening to an entirely different night from an entirely different house.

Chapter Eleven

9 March 2026 (later)

We had been studying — actually studying, his agricultural economics notes spread across the library steps next to my education textbooks, the sun going down orange behind the residence roofline — and when I stood up to leave, he stood up too, closer than studying requires, and kissed me before either of us had said a single word about it.

We had been there over two hours, longer than either of us had probably intended, the conversation drifting steadily further from our actual notes the way it always seems to once we're together — a debate about whether sugarcane prices would recover next season turning, somehow, into a story about his cousin's disastrous attempt at beekeeping, turning into nothing at all, just two people sitting close together as the light changed around them, comfortable in a silence that didn't need filling.

When the sun dropped low enough to turn everything that particular deep orange that only happens for a few minutes before evening properly arrives, I started gathering my books, and he reached over to help me stack them, and somehow our hands ended up closer together than the books required, and when I looked up to say something — I don't even remember what, something ordinary, something about the time — he was already looking at me in a way that made the sentence disappear entirely.

It was not dramatic. There was no music, no rain, no jacaranda blossom drifting down at the exact right moment, though I would have accepted one if it had been offered. It was ordinary and warm and slightly clumsy, the way real first kisses are and the way the ones in films almost never are, and afterward he looked faintly alarmed at himself, as though his own mouth had acted without consulting him.

“Sorry,” he said. “I don't know why I said sorry. I'm not sorry.”

“You could try that again,” I said, “without the apology this time,” and he did, and got it right the second time, the way most people do once they've stopped overthinking it.

We sat back down on the steps afterward, not saying very much, his arm finding its way around my shoulders as though it had always belonged there, the books forgotten in a small abandoned pile beside us. The light kept changing, orange giving way to a deep blue I have always loved best of all the colours an evening sky can manage, and I remember thinking, sitting there, that I would like to remember this exact shade of sky for the rest of my life, attached to this exact feeling, whatever happened next.

Eventually it grew properly dark and we had to gather the books for real this time, laughing at how scattered they'd become, and he walked me back to the residence gate the long way, the way that takes you past the jacaranda tree, though there was nothing left on it now but bare branches against the darkening sky. He kissed me again at the gate, briefly, and said goodnight, and I went upstairs and sat on my bed for a long time before I could make myself pick up a pen to write any of this down, wanting, I think, to simply hold the feeling a while longer before I tried to turn it into words.

Chapter Twelve

31 March 2026

It is official now, in the way these things become official — not through any single conversation, but through accumulation: his hand finding mine without either of us deciding to allow it, my name in his mouth when he introduces me to people, the two of us simply assumed, by everyone who knows us, to belong to the same sentence.

I noticed it properly for the first time at a small gathering Phila organised for someone's birthday — a dozen of us crowded into a friend's small flat off campus, music too loud for the size of the room, everyone shouting conversations over each other in the particular cheerful chaos of a student party. Someone I'd never met asked, gesturing between Sandile and me, “How long have you two been together,” and the question landed strangely, because I realised, answering it, that I did not actually know the precise date — only that somewhere in the last two months, without any single moment I could point to as the beginning, we had simply become a together that other people now assumed.

Sandile mentioned today, lightly, in the middle of a much longer story about his cousin's wedding, that his mother still hasn't had the results back from her latest tests, and that his father has started “making noises” about wanting Sandile home more this year, though Sandile waved this off as ordinary homestead worry, the kind every family produces in winter.

“It's nothing new,” he said, when I asked whether he was worried. “My father always wants me home more than I am. It's the one constant of my entire life. I'll go when I need to go, and otherwise I'm staying right here, where things are good.”

I did not think much of it at the time, beyond noting, somewhere in the back of my mind, the small persistent thread of his father's wanting that seemed to run underneath every conversation about home. I am writing it down now mostly out of habit — the habit my mother gave me, of recording the things I will want to remember and the things I will want to forget, before I know which is which.

First term is nearly over. I find myself thinking, some nights, about how strange it is that a person can arrive somewhere entirely unknown to themselves — a stranger leaving home for the first time, twenty years old and certain of almost nothing — and three months later be lying awake thinking about another person's father, another family's particular shape of love and obligation, as though it had somehow, without my noticing the exact moment it happened, become partly my business too.

First term is nearly over. I am, against every plan I had for myself at the start of this year, in love.

Chapter Thirteen

Exams have made everyone unbearable, myself included. Sandile cancelled our Tuesday plans for the second time this week to revise for a soil science test, and I said, with more sharpness than the situation deserved, that he could simply tell me when he stopped wanting to make time for me instead of blaming the soil.

It had been building for days, if I am honest about it — a string of small disappointments, missed calls, conversations cut short because one or the other of us had a deadline pressing, and by Tuesday evening, standing outside the lecture hall waiting for him to arrive for plans he then cancelled by message rather than in person, I had worked myself into the particular state where the smallest provocation becomes an excuse to say everything you've been swallowing for a week.

He went quiet — his particular quiet, the one I now recognise — and said only, “That's not fair,” before walking off toward the library, his shoulders set in a way that told me he meant to actually go and revise rather than storm off dramatically and return five minutes later wanting to talk it through, which is, I think, what I had half expected and even, shamefully, half wanted.

It wasn't fair. I knew it wasn't fair while I was saying it, which somehow made it worse, not better. I am tired and frightened of my upcoming practicals and I took it out on the person standing closest to me, which is, I am learning, a very human and very ugly thing to do.

I have not apologised yet. I am still deciding how.

* * *

Ayanda found me afterward, sitting on my bed with my education notes spread uselessly around me, not reading a word of them, and asked, with the particular bluntness she reserves for moments she's decided require it, what exactly I thought I was doing.

“I was unfair to him,” I admitted. “I know I was. I just don't know how to say sorry without it sounding like I'm only sorry because I got caught being unkind, rather than sorry because I actually was unkind.”

“Those are the same thing,” Ayanda said, not unkindly, gathering my scattered notes into a neater pile simply because the mess was apparently bothering her more than it was bothering me. “You don't have to feel a particular way about being sorry. You just have to be sorry, properly, and mean it, and then stop making it more complicated than it needs to be.”

“When did you become wise,” I asked.

“I've always been wise,” she said. “You've just been too busy mooning over agricultural sciences students to notice.”

I threw a pillow at her, which she deflected with the ease of someone who has lived with siblings her whole life, and the evening dissolved into the kind of ordinary, restorative silliness that exam season rarely leaves room for, and which I was, that particular night, more grateful for than I think I properly told her.

Chapter Fourteen

We made up, eventually — I apologised properly, he accepted properly, and then he asked, almost shyly, if I would like to come home with him for a Sunday, to meet his mother before the term ended.

The apology took place on the library steps, where most of our important conversations seem to happen, and I made sure to say exactly what I meant rather than the softer, half-apology I'd been tempted to offer instead. “I was unfair to you,” I said. “You're allowed to have exams too. I took my own fear out on you, and that wasn't right, and I'm sorry.” He had accepted it with more grace than I probably deserved, and within a day things between us had returned to their usual ease, though I noted, privately, that I wanted to remember the shape of that argument — not to dwell on it, but because I suspected it was the first of many small fights two people have when they are learning each other properly, rather than only the easy parts.

The Khumalo homestead sits on a rise above a valley I recognised immediately, having seen its shape from the other side my whole life without ever knowing whose cattle grazed there. The taxi dropped us at the bottom of the access road, and we walked up together, Sandile pointing out landmarks as we went — the tree his grandfather had planted, the dip in the road that flooded every December, the exact spot where he'd broken his arm falling off a borrowed bicycle at age nine.

MaKhumalo received me warmly, with the particular warmth of a woman who has decided in advance to like you and is not going to be argued out of it, asking after my studies and my family and whether I'd eaten, three times, before allowing me to sit. She had laid out more food than four people could reasonably eat, and kept refilling my plate before I'd properly finished it, the universal homestead language of welcome translated into starch and meat and tea poured too strong to be entirely comfortable but too kindly meant to refuse.

There was another woman there too, older, introduced simply as “my aunt,” who watched the whole visit from a chair near the door with a politeness so precise it felt almost like its own kind of statement. She asked where my family was from, and when I told her, she said only, “Mm,” and returned to her tea, and I could not have told you, then or now, exactly what that single sound meant, only that it meant something. She asked no further questions, offered no further comment, and seemed content, for the rest of the visit, to observe from her chair near the door with an expression I could not properly read.

Sandile didn't seem to notice, or didn't let himself. I noticed. I am choosing, for now, not to make more of it than a cup of tea and one syllable deserve.

* * *

On the walk back down to the taxi rank, Sandile seemed lighter than he had all afternoon, talking easily about nothing in particular, pointing out a tree he'd fallen out of as a boy, a bend in the path where he'd once seen a python large enough that the whole homestead had talked about it for a month afterward. I asked him, eventually, carefully, what he made of his aunt's quietness during the visit.

“MaDuma's like that with everyone at first,” he said, with the easy unconcern of someone who has never had reason to read deeper into a relative's manner. “She doesn't warm up quickly. Took her two years to properly talk to my cousin's wife, and now they're inseparable. She'll come around.”

“She didn't seem cold, exactly,” I said. “Just — watchful.”

“She's watchful with everyone,” he said. “It's how she shows she cares, I think. She watches, and then eventually she decides, and once she's decided, that's that — you're family, full stop, no more watching required.”

I told him I hoped I would pass whatever test she was apparently administering, and he laughed and said he had no doubt I would, eventually, though something in the way he said eventually made me wonder, just briefly, how long eventually might turn out to be.

Chapter Fifteen

Lunch at the homestead turned, as these things do, into an uncle making a joke nobody had asked for. “So,” he said, pointing his fork at Sandile, “which family will we be sending cattle to, then? Better start saving now — ilobolo isn't getting any cheaper.”

The table laughed, a dozen relatives crowded around a spread of food laid out on every available surface, children weaving between the adults' legs in pursuit of some game only they understood the rules of. Sandile went the particular shade of pink I now consider mine to notice, and mumbled something about it being far too soon for that conversation, and his mother swatted the uncle's arm and told him to let the children eat in peace, though she was smiling herself as she said it, clearly enjoying her son's discomfort at least as much as the uncle was.

“Leave them be,” MaKhumalo said, “they've only just started courting properly. You'll frighten the poor girl off before she's even finished her plate.”

“I'm not frightened,” I said, which made the table laugh again, this time at me rather than at Sandile, though it was the warm kind of laughing, the kind that includes you rather than excludes you, and I found myself laughing too, despite the small private discomfort sitting underneath it.

I laughed along with everyone else, because it was funny, and because that is what you do at a table that isn't yet entirely yours. Underneath the laughing, though, I felt something I couldn't quite name — not fear, nothing so large as that, just a small awareness that this was a family that took these things seriously, the way Phila had warned me, in his roundabout way, weeks ago. The joke had landed easily because everyone at that table already assumed a future neither Sandile nor I had actually discussed yet, openly, between the two of us — a future involving cattle and negotiations and a path already worn smooth by every couple who'd come before us in that family.

Sandile caught my eye across the table and rolled his own, as if to say, ignore them, and I did, mostly, for the rest of the afternoon, though I noticed, walking back to the bus stop later that day, that some part of the conversation had settled into me in a way I couldn't entirely shake — not unpleasantly, only persistently, the way a tune gets into your head and stays there longer than you'd like.

* * *

Sandile walked me to the bus stop himself, the two of us alone for the first time all day, and seemed to sense, without my having said anything, that the uncle's joke had lodged itself somewhere in me. “He means nothing by it,” he said. “He says the same thing to every cousin who brings anyone home. It's practically a greeting, by now.”

“I know,” I said. “It's not the joke. It's just — strange, to hear your own future discussed so easily by people who've never properly met me.”

“It won't always feel strange,” he said. “Give it a year, and you'll be the one making the joke about somebody else's cousin.”

I told him I hoped he was right, and he took my hand as the bus pulled into view, and said, with more seriousness than the moment strictly required, “Whatever they joke about, Thuli — whatever it ends up looking like, when it actually happens — I want you to know I'm not in any hurry to rush you into anything you're not ready for. I just like that you're here. That's enough for me, for now.”

I have kept that sentence carefully, the way I keep most things he says without quite meaning to. I'm not in any hurry to rush you into anything you're not ready for. I do not know, writing it now, months later, whether he meant it the way I heard it then, or whether some other meaning was already quietly attached to it, waiting for me to discover it later, the way so much else this year has turned out to mean more, or less, than it first appeared to.

Chapter Sixteen

14 April 2026

I did something today I am not proud of, and I am writing it down in full, including the parts that make me look small, because my mother did not buy me this notebook so that I could only record the version of myself I'd like to be.

There is a girl in Sandile's soil science class, Nomvula, tall and easy-laughing, who I have seen exactly twice — once across a lecture hall, and once today, standing far too close to him outside the science block, her hand resting on his arm while she said something that made him laugh properly, head back, the kind of laugh I had foolishly started to think of as mine alone to produce.

I did not say anything in the moment. I waited until that evening, until we were alone on the library steps with our books open and unread between us, and then I asked, in a voice I had meant to sound light and did not, whether he and Nomvula were close.

“We study together sometimes,” he said. “Why?”

“No reason,” I said, which was a lie, and then, because the lie sat badly in my mouth, I said the true thing instead, except I said it badly. “It's just that you laugh at her jokes like that and you've never once laughed at mine that way.”

It came out sharper than I meant it, and meaner, with an edge of accusation I hadn't planned to put there, as though he had committed some specific crime rather than simply existed in a hallway near another woman. I watched it land on his face — a flicker of confusion, then hurt, then something that closed over, the particular shutting-down I have come to recognise as his version of flinching.

“Is that what you think of me,” he said quietly, “that I'm out here laughing at other girls' jokes behind your back?”

“That's not — I didn't mean —”

“You did mean it,” he said. “You just didn't mean to say it out loud.”

He was right, which made it worse. We sat in an unhappy silence for several minutes, the kind where both people are aware the other is waiting for an apology and neither one wants to be the first to offer it, before he gathered his books and said, in a voice gone careful and distant, that he had an early lecture, and left.

I sat on the steps a long time after he'd gone, replaying the whole exchange, trying to locate the exact moment I had turned an ordinary afternoon into something ugly, and finding it easily, because I had been there the whole time, watching myself do it, and had not stopped.

I do not like this version of myself, the jealous, accusing one who exists, apparently, somewhere underneath the version I'd prefer to believe is the only one. I am keeping her in these pages anyway. I think that is the point of a diary — not to flatter, but to witness.

* * *

Ayanda found me still sitting on the steps an hour later, the books unopened beside me, and did not ask what had happened so much as simply sit down next to me and wait until I was ready to tell her, which I eventually was, the whole shameful shape of it, Nomvula and the hand on his arm and the sharp, accusing thing I'd said that wasn't really about Nomvula at all.

“You know what I think,” she said, when I'd finished. “I think you've never had anything worth being jealous over before, so you don't know yet how to carry it properly. It's not an excuse. But it's not a character flaw either. It's just — new. You'll get better at it.”

“That's a generous way of putting it,” I said.

“I'm a generous person,” she said, with mock solemnity, and the small joke did more to loosen the knot in my chest than any actual comfort could have, which I think was exactly her intention.

Chapter Seventeen

Sandile found me the next afternoon, by the jacaranda tree, which felt deliberate, a choice of ground neither of us had to name out loud.

“I'm sorry,” I said, before he could say anything at all, the apology I should have given the night before arriving a full day late but arriving, at least, fully meant. “I was jealous, and instead of saying that plainly, I made it into something about you doing something wrong. You didn't do anything wrong.”

He was quiet for a moment, turning a fallen jacaranda leaf over in his fingers, and when he spoke it wasn't the easy forgiveness I'd half expected, but something slower, more considered. “I laugh like that with a lot of people,” he said. “It doesn't mean anything. But I should have told you that without you having to ask, instead of making you wonder.”

“We're both learning,” I said.

“I suppose we are,” he said, and then, after a pause that felt like he was deciding whether to say more, he added something he had never offered before without my asking for it. “Can I tell you something I don't usually say out loud?”

I told him of course.

“Sometimes,” he said, looking at the leaf rather than at me, “I think about going home for good, taking over the homestead the way my father wants, and I feel this — dread, almost. Not because I don't love the land. I do. But because I'm afraid that once I'm there, properly there, the rest of me — university, you, whoever I might have become somewhere else — just stops. Like the homestead is a door that only opens one way.”

He had never said anything like that to me before — not about Nomvula, not about the argument, but about himself, unprompted, the kind of fear a person doesn't usually hand over unless they've decided you're someone worth handing it to.

“I don't think you'd stop,” I said. “I think you'd just become a different version of the same person. That's not nothing, but it's not the door closing either.”

“Maybe,” he said, and put the leaf carefully in his shirt pocket instead of dropping it, which I noticed and did not comment on.

We didn't say very much else after that. We didn't need to. I think that was the first time I understood that he carries his own private weather, separate from mine, that I will only ever see the parts of it he chooses to open the door on — and that today, for the first time, he chose to.

Chapter Eighteen

Sibongile is engaged. She telephoned the residence number and made Ayanda fetch me from the dining hall, and when I picked up the receiver she didn't even say hello, just announced it the way she announces everything, at full volume and without preamble: “Themba asked Baba yesterday and Baba said yes and I'm getting married, Thuli, I'm actually getting married.”

I cried a little, standing in the hallway with the receiver pressed to my ear and three other girls waiting impatiently for their turn at the phone, and Sibongile cried too, and neither of us could explain to the girls in the queue why two sisters were sobbing over a five-minute call, which made it funnier and somehow more tender.

Themba is a good man — steady, unremarkable in the way that is actually a high compliment, the kind of person who shows up on time and remembers what you told him last week. He works for the municipality in Eshowe and has been courting Sibongile properly for over a year, with none of the uncertainty that seems to follow me and Sandile around like weather we can't quite outrun.

I found myself, listening to my sister's plans pour out of the receiver — the date, the colours, which aunts would fight about what — measuring my own situation against hers without entirely meaning to. Sibongile's path looks like a straight line. Mine, lately, looks like something with more turns in it than I expected when the year began, full of family teas and aunts who say “Mm” and arguments about other women and confessions by jacaranda trees.

I do not think a straight line is necessarily better. I am only noticing that it is different, and that I am, for the first time, slightly envious of a kind of certainty I am not sure my own life is going to offer me.

Sibongile, before hanging up, made me promise to come home the weekend the families meet to discuss the ilobolo. I promised. I am curious, I admit, to watch how it's done properly, by a family less complicated than the one I am slowly, carefully, learning to love.

* * *

Themba came on the line briefly before they hung up, asking after my studies in the polite, slightly formal way he always speaks to me, as though still auditioning for the role of brother-in-law even though the matter is now thoroughly settled. “Your sister has not stopped smiling since yesterday,” he told me. “I am told this is my doing, though I take no credit beyond simply asking the question at the right moment.”

I told him he had chosen well, and meant it, and he laughed, a low, easy laugh, and said he considered himself the lucky one in the arrangement, which I believed, hearing it, was probably true on both sides in equal measure — the rare kind of match where neither party seems to think they got the better end of the bargain, because both of them are simply glad to have found anyone at all who fits.

I told Phila about the engagement the next day, mostly because he asked why I seemed lighter than usual, and he laughed and said, “See, that's what it's supposed to look like. Easy. Boring, even. You should be so lucky.”

“Are you saying my situation isn't boring,” I asked, half joking.

“I'm saying your situation has never once been boring,” he said, “which I think you already knew, and which isn't necessarily the compliment it sounds like.”

I have thought about that exchange more than once since, turning it over the way I turn over most things Phila says without quite meaning to be wise. Boring, in the way Sibongile and Themba's love is boring, has started to sound, to me, less like an insult and more like a particular kind of luxury — one I am not sure my own year is going to extend to me, whatever else it ends up offering instead.

Chapter Nineteen

Sandile was quieter than usual today, and when I asked why, he told me his mother has developed a cough that won't clear, the kind that makes the whole family go silent at the dinner table when it starts, waiting it out, none of them saying the word they're all thinking.

We were sitting in our usual corner of the library, but he hadn't opened a single book in the hour we'd been there, his pen turning over and over between his fingers in the restless way I'd come to recognise as a sign something was sitting heavily on him. I asked twice before he actually answered, the first time deflecting with a vague “I'm fine, just tired,” the second time finally letting the truth out, as though he'd been deciding, in the gap between my two questions, whether he had the right to burden me with it.

“The doctor in town wants her to go to Durban for a proper scan,” he said, picking at the corner of his notebook rather than looking at me. “My father keeps saying it's nothing, just the dust from the harvest, but he says that about everything. He said it was nothing when she lost weight in winter too.”

I asked if he was frightened.

“I don't let myself be, yet,” he said. “If I start being frightened before there's a reason to be, I don't think I'll be able to stop.” He said this very evenly, very steadily, in the voice of someone who has rehearsed the sentence privately before saying it out loud, and I understood, hearing it, that this was not the first time he'd had this exact thought — only the first time he'd said it to me.

I didn't have anything wise to offer him, so I simply sat with him until the library closed, neither of us pretending to study anymore, his shoulder against mine the only comfort I knew how to give that wouldn't sound hollow. The library lights flickered their warning twice before the staff finally chased the last stragglers out, and we walked back to the residence gate in a silence that felt, for once, entirely comfortable — not the strained, careful silence of two people avoiding a subject, but the quiet of two people who had said the true thing and didn't need to dress it up with more words.

I am writing this down because I want to remember, later, exactly how he looked tonight — not dramatic, not falling apart, just quietly carrying something heavy and trying not to let the weight show in his face. I think that is how most real worry actually looks. Nothing like the films.

Chapter Twenty

16 June 2026

Today was the kind of day I want to be able to return to for the rest of my life, so I am going to write down every part of it I can hold onto, in more detail than I usually allow myself, because some days deserve to be kept whole rather than summarised.

It was the start of the midyear break, and Sandile borrowed his cousin's car and drove us out past Howick, to a spot above the falls where the spray rises in a fine mist even on a clear day, and we sat on a flat rock with a thermos of tea his mother had insisted on packing — “you cannot court a girl properly on an empty stomach,” she'd apparently told him, which made me like her even more, MaDuma's single syllable notwithstanding.

We talked about everything and nothing, the way you do on the good days, the ones that don't announce themselves as important until much later. He told me about the first calf he'd ever helped deliver, at eleven years old, terrified and proud in equal measure. I told him about teaching my younger cousins to read using the labels off cans of food, because we'd had no proper books in the house that year. We laughed more than either of us had laughed in weeks, the kind of laughing that comes easily because nothing is being defended or proven.

At some point, half joking and half not, he started naming our future children, the way young couples do when they are testing how a thing sounds out loud without committing to meaning it. “If we have a daughter,” he said, “we should name her after my grandmother. Nokuthula, actually — oh. We can't. You've taken that one already.”

“We'll think of something,” I said, laughing, and he said, more seriously than the joke had been, “We will. We've got time.”

I believed him completely when he said it. I want that recorded here plainly: I believed him completely, with no reservation at all, sitting on that rock above the falls with the spray cooling our faces and a whole imagined family being built out of nothing but a borrowed car, a thermos of tea, and an afternoon neither of us wanted to end.

We stayed until the light started going gold and then grey, and drove back in a comfortable, talked-out silence, his hand resting on my knee the whole way, and I remember thinking, somewhere on that road in the dark: this is what it must feel like, the thing people mean when they say forever. I did not yet know to be careful with that word. I am not sure, even now, that I would have done anything differently if I had.

* * *

We stopped on the way back at a small roadside stall outside Howick, more out of hunger than planning, and bought roasted mealies wrapped in newspaper from a woman who recognised Sandile immediately and teased him, in isiZulu too quick for me to follow entirely, about bringing a different girl than the one she remembered from the year before — a joke that made him laugh and duck his head in equal measure, and which I chose, that evening, not to ask too many questions about, preferring to let the day stay golden a little longer rather than introduce a single shadow into it.

We ate the mealies sitting on the car's open boot, watching the last of the light go, saying very little, both of us full in the particular way you're full after a day that has given you more than you knew to ask for. When we finally pulled back onto the road toward Pietermaritzburg, properly dark by then, the radio playing something soft and half-familiar, I found myself memorising the shape of the evening with deliberate care — the smell of roasted maize still on my fingers, the particular blue-black of the sky over the hills, his hand finding mine again once both of ours were free of mealie husks — the way you memorise something you already suspect, somewhere underneath the happiness, you might one day need to call back into being from memory alone.

Chapter Twenty-One

Phila sat across from me in the cafeteria today with the particular look he gets when he's decided something is worth mentioning but hasn't decided how seriously to mention it.

He'd arrived with his tray and sat down across from me without his usual opening commentary on the food, which was, in itself, a small sign that something was on his mind. He picked at his rice for a minute before finally saying what he'd actually come to say.

“Have you noticed Sandile's been weird lately,” he said, not quite a question. “Quiet. Distracted. He missed our study group twice this week and didn't say why either time. That's not like him — he usually at least sends a message, even a one-word one.”

“His mother's not well,” I said. “She's going for tests in Durban.”

“Ah.” Phila nodded slowly, the explanation apparently satisfying whatever he'd been turning over, his shoulders visibly loosening with relief at having a simple cause to attach to the strangeness he'd noticed. “That'll be it, then. Poor guy. Family stuff is family stuff — there's no studying your way out of that.”

“He'll be alright,” I said, mostly to convince myself.

“He's got you,” Phila said, with a shrug that suggested this settled the matter entirely, and went back to his lunch, the conversation closed as quickly as it had opened, the way Phila's conversations often are — a thought surfacing, getting addressed, and then submerging again beneath whatever ordinary thing came next. I let myself believe, for the rest of that afternoon, that having me was going to be enough — that whatever weather Sandile was carrying privately these days, I would simply be allowed to stand under the same roof as it, the way he'd let me stand under it once already, by the jacaranda tree, with a leaf in his pocket.

Chapter Twenty-Two

A letter from my mother arrived today, three pages in her careful, slanted handwriting, full of homestead news — the price of mealie meal, Sibongile's wedding plans now consuming every conversation in the house, a complaint about a neighbour's goats getting into her vegetable patch for the third time this month.

I read it twice through before I noticed the margin note, the first time too absorbed in the ordinary rhythm of her news — imagining her at the kitchen table, lamp lit, working through each piece of family business the way she always does, methodically, nothing too small to mention. It was only on the second reading that I caught it, squeezed in along the edge of the third page where she'd clearly run out of room and decided to add it anyway rather than leave it for another letter.

Near the end, almost as an afterthought, squeezed into the margin where she'd clearly run out of careful planning and simply added what occurred to her last: “I hear the Khumalos have a lot on their plate this year, with MaKhumalo's health and now talk of the boy needing to settle down properly. These things have a way of working themselves out, one way or another. Don't worry yourself sick over things that haven't happened yet, Thuli. You were always too quick to carry tomorrow's troubles on today's shoulders.”

I read that line four times, trying to decide whether it was meant as comfort, or warning, or simply my mother's habit of speaking in proverbs when she isn't certain what else to say. Eshowe is a small enough place that everyone's business eventually becomes everyone's business, filtered through three or four mouths before it reaches you, and I have learned not to take every piece of homestead gossip as gospel.

Still. “Talk of the boy needing to settle down properly” is a strange thing to read about the person you love, secondhand, in your own mother's handwriting, folded into a letter about goats. I sat with the letter open on my desk for a long while afterward, Ayanda asleep across the room, the particular quiet of a residence at midnight pressing in around the single circle of lamplight I was reading by, trying to decide what, if anything, the sentence actually meant, and arriving, eventually, at nothing more solid than the unease itself.

I have decided not to mention it to Sandile. There is nothing in it I could ask him about without sounding like I am accusing him of something, and he has enough weighing on him already without me adding rumour to the pile. I am filing this letter, like so much else this year, in the part of my mind reserved for things I will want to understand later, once I have more pieces of whatever this puzzle turns out to be.

* * *

I wrote back to her two days later, mostly ordinary news of my own — a good mark on an assignment, a funny story about Ayanda's attempt to cook a proper Sunday meal on a single hotplate — and at the very end, almost as carefully buried as her own afterthought had been, I added a single line I am not certain she will know how to read correctly: “Things with Sandile are good, Mama. Whatever you've heard, I think it will be alright. I have decided to believe that, for now, and I would rather believe it than not.”

I do not know if that sentence was meant to reassure her, or myself, or both of us at once, the way a letter sometimes ends up doing more work than the person writing it originally intended. I posted it anyway, the way you post most things this year — hopefully, and without any real certainty about what will arrive on the other end, or when, or whether it will say what you meant it to say by the time it gets there.

Chapter Twenty-Three

I said it first, in the end, which surprised both of us, I think — I had always imagined, if I imagined it at all, that a man would say it first, the way they seem to in every film and every song, but it was a Tuesday evening, ordinary in every way, and we were walking back from the library with our arms full of borrowed books, and it simply arrived in my mouth before I had decided to let it.

We had spent the evening at our usual table, him grumbling about an assignment on soil composition, me marking up a stack of practice lesson plans Mrs. Buthelezi had assigned, and somewhere in the ordinary, unremarkable business of packing up to leave — him holding the door, me juggling too many books, the librarian calling out the closing time in the bored voice of someone who has said it every night for years — I simply looked at him under the corridor light and the words were out before I'd given myself permission to say them.

“I love you,” I said, and then, because the silence that followed lasted one second too long for my nerves, I added, “You don't have to say it back right now if you're not ready. I just wanted you to know it's true.”

He stopped walking. He set the books down on the low wall beside the path, carefully, the way he does everything when he's giving himself a moment to think, and then he looked at me with an expression I had not seen on him before — not surprise exactly, more like relief, the look of a man who has been carrying a sentence around for weeks, waiting for permission to say it.

“I love you too,” he said. “I've loved you since the tuck shop, I think, though I didn't have the nerve to say so until you went first. You're braver than me.”

“I'm not brave,” I said. “I just didn't have it in me to carry it quietly anymore.”

“That's brave,” he said, and picked the books back up, and we walked the rest of the way in a happiness too large and too simple to need any more words attached to it, the night warm around us, the campus mostly empty at that hour, every ordinary streetlamp we passed under feeling, for that one walk, like it had been placed there specifically to light our way home.

* * *

Ayanda was still awake when I got back, and took one look at my face before declaring, with great satisfaction, that something significant had clearly happened, and refusing to let me change for bed until I'd told her everything. She made me repeat the exact wording twice, and then made a small, theatrical noise of approval at the part where he'd called me braver than him.

“That's a good sign,” she said, with the authority of someone who has read every magazine on the subject available to her. “A man who can admit a woman beat him to something. Means he's not so fragile he needs to win every moment between you.”

“I didn't realise we were competing,” I said.

“Everything's a competition,” she said cheerfully, “until you find someone who doesn't mind losing to you occasionally. That's when you know.”

I have thought about that strange little theory of hers more than once since, and have decided, on balance, that there might be something to it after all — that the ease with which Sandile had handed me that small victory, calling himself less brave than I was, said more about the shape of his love than any grand declaration could have managed on its own.