THE FIRST TIME I see you, I am walking gently down the trail that leads onto the sand of the lake, and it is nightfall, the water beginning to look ethereal and threatening with its sway, advancing and retreating, and you are sitting on the shore where you had been hidden from view by the escarpment rising behind you, and near your hand is a scarlet glow that I recognise as a cigarette, and the smoke is a lazy waft rising and melting into the stars. You turn and look at me.
“Looking for a swim?” you ask.
“I think it’s too cold,” I say.
You turn your head back to the water. You are wearing a white blouse, your arms bare, and I wonder if you are not cold. I am wearing a jersey, and I shivered all the way down here, wondering why I keep doing this.
You have thrown me off, and I stand there silent for a long minute, watching the water, wondering if tonight, of all nights, I will catch the fleet of shadow I have been waiting for, and if I’ll be forced to watch it with a stranger. But the lake is still its silent self.
“I’m Ruvimbo,” you say your name, and you exhale the last syllables with softness and surrender. It sounds, forcefully, like an ending instead of a beginning.
I tell you mine. “Panashe,” and I stand there for another minute before turning silently and trudging up the trail, the lake a solid blanket behind me.
The second time, I am prepared for you. I catch the scent of the cigarette before I see the curve of your neck and back. You are seated, as before, and out on the lake, there is a fishing canoe rippling the water as it becomes an indistinct blur. You are wearing a hoodie today, and in the moonlight, the burgundy colour looks close to red.
“Did you really want to swim yesterday?” you ask me.
“No,” I say. “I was here for something else.”
“And I disturbed it?”
“I wasn’t expecting to see anyone.”
I sit down on the sand, enough distance between us to not feel your heat.
“Everyone here seems bored with this lake,” you say. “I would have given everything to grow up here.”
How to tell you that beauty is only transitory, that the lake blows unimaginable cold into the city, the winters become nearly unbearable.
“Where are you from?” I ask.
“Harare. I have an aunt here who invited me for a few weeks.”
“Do you love it?”
“Harare? I love and hate it in equal measure.”
You take a long drag on the cigarette and, as you hold the smoke, you tap the top of the roll with your forefinger, and ash sifts down onto the sand, its colour erased, then you exhale.
“Hey,” you say. “I’m going to a clean-up campaign of some sort tomorrow. We’re meeting at City Hall, if I’m not mistaken. I’ve never been there.”
The invite is unfinished, a half-suspended cloud, but I reach for it and say, “I’ll be there.”
In daylight, I notice the details that were hidden from me: the tiny freckles across your nose, the trimmed-down hair and how your eyes carry a heaviness.
“You,” you say to me as I walk up to you in the slight crowd you are standing in, and I don’t know why you say it, but you have thrown me into focus. Someone is handing out black rubber gloves and plastic bin bags.
“Something to pass the time,” you say to me, and even as you are putting on the gloves, carefully stretching them so that each finger is filled, I notice that you are bored. We are divided into groups, and we set out.
“I once stayed here as a child,” you tell me. “It was for three months, I think. I don’t recall much about it, but I do remember this ice-cream trolley I used to love visiting so much. It had this aggressive pink colour and a painting of children.”
“I never saw that,” I tell you. “Or maybe I don’t remember it.”
“Isn’t it strange,” you say, “how people can hold different memories of the same place?”
I think it is strange, too, that we are walking here through this sunlight when a few days ago, you did not exist to me, and a few days ago, I wanted the sunlight to break me.
“Are you enjoying this?” you ask me.
“No,” I say.
You smile. “Me neither.”
I don’t know why, but we laugh, and we continue bending over littered plastics and soda cans.
I wake up, and the world is hard like a shell. I don’t see you for the next three days. I don’t go to the lake, even though I know you’re there, even though I can feel your presence on the other side of possibility. I spend those days suspended in nothingness. The shower water on my back feels like needles, and the eggs and bread taste sour. I let the television drone on as background noise. I sleep, and my dreams are a blank canvas, and I want to drown in them, to not be awake. Outside, the light seems to taunt me, the way it sweeps across the front yard, blowing everything — grass, sand, pebbles — into stark clarity. I wish for that dream again, where I catch her shadow over the lake, like a messiah, but it never returns.
I get to the lake and your clothes are a bundle on the sand: pink T-shirt, black jeans, sneakers and a cardigan. I look out into the water, and I don’t see you. For a moment, I panic, my body freezing up, imagining your body sunk, weighed down by the weight of the sky. But there, in the distance, I see a tiny bob, then an arm rising and striking the skin of the water. I shout your name, and I cannot tell if you hear me, but you start swimming towards the shore. When you wade out, you are shivering, your teeth gritting, but you are smiling.
“That’s one way to catch a cold.”
“I thought I had driven you away,” you tell me.
I shake my head and do not explain my previous absence.
You stand there for a while, waiting for your skin to dry before putting on your clothes, and you look miserable, your body all bunched into itself.
Afterwards, a trickle of water from your short hair running down the side of your face, you ask, “Would you like to see my aunt’s house?”
Again, there is no refusal in me.
We walk through the advancing night, the clouds on the horizon tinted orange, and even though you were swimming, I catch your perfume.
We arrive suddenly, like emerging from a forest, and we are walking through a door painted red, and the house is dark, and I keep my eyes on your neck, following closely behind. Your hand fumbles on a wall somewhere, and then light. You walk along a corridor and then turn into a room. There is a single bed, a heavy-looking wardrobe, a desk and a chair. It’s impersonal, devoid of preference. I sit on the bed and you on the chair, and you say, “Hand me that fleece.”
You wrap yourself in it and begin rocking back and forth. We sit in silence for a long while. Outside, a cricket is making a racket, and it is fine like this, too.
“I don’t know why,” you say, your eyes still closed, “but I feel sad a lot.”
You open your eyes, and you are looking at me.
“My sister died a few months ago,” I tell you. I did not want to, but the words are out, and they calcify into something real between us. Silence.
“I’m sorry,” you finally say.
“I know.”
You stand and then sit beside me, and we are not touching, but we are close. Somewhere inside the house, a song starts playing.
You want to read all the facts about the cave on the plaque, and I am amused by your excitement. I have been here countless times, and I know how the mouth of the cave leads softly down through a series of steps until it all becomes different: the light, the warmth and the voices reverberating against the walls. But this is your first time, and you want to soak in everything, even the outside with its lush trees and exposed brick buildings. I can imagine you as a small child, pointing at everything, exhausting your parents with questions.
When we finally enter, we do so slowly. You gaze around at the walls and roof, and we see the patterns of water reflected on the rock before we see the lake shimmering ahead, its water blue and clear like glass. We stop at the railings bordering it because no one is allowed to swim here. I imagine what it must be like to burst headfirst into the water, eyes open. Around us are endless flickers of phone camera flashlights, and you sit down on a rock and watch the water. I look for a flat pebble and swing my arm. The small stone bounces on the water four times before sinking to the bottom.
After a while I say, “Come. There is more to see.”
We backtrack and branch off into another tunnel.
“Careful,” I tell you. The steps here are slippery, and water runs down the walls as if it has just rained, and the voices of laughter ahead echo throughout as if from a distant future. There is no underground lake here, but the beauty of this particular cave is that it seems to go on forever, burrowing deep into the earth, becoming so dark even with the bulbs overhead. When we come to its abrupt end, the sky is suddenly open above, and the light falls down like arrows, and all around are people milling about and talking, unwilling to turn back.
“I used to be scared of getting lost here,” I tell you. “There are so many branching tunnels, they seem like a maze.”
“I didn’t see any of them,” you say.
“That’s because you weren’t looking.”
You look around, as if expecting to see tunnels right there.
Suddenly, I remember my sister. I remember the last time we came here, how she was angry at my parents about something and how she walked behind us the entire time, and each one of my attempts to talk and walk with her ended in her pretending I was not there, as if I, too, was encompassed in her anger.
“What are you thinking?” you ask me. You have noticed my distraction, and I wonder if the grief behind it showed, too.
“My sister,” I say. “Being here reminds me of her.”
You nod, and I appreciate your silence, the way you do not try to extend comfort so I might be forced to meet it.
“Let’s see the other caves,” I say, and turn away from you even though I want to keep standing there, talking, in the humid heat of space carved into rock.
That dream, again, where she is a shadow over the lake, walking towards the shore. I do not think of her as a ghost, but as real. What else could a repeated dream mean? I am in the dream but absent from it, too, because I do not see myself, only her, and she walks and walks but never arrives.
I wake up, and outside, the darkness is unforgiving. I look at the time; a few minutes past two. I slide out of the blankets. I put on clothes absently and fumble out of the house. It is so cold it makes me feel like dying, but I keep walking, the world around me like a dying breath. I hear the lake before I arrive, that deathly knell. The water looks sinister, and I am scared because there is no moon, because the escarpment is like a closing fist, because my sister is dead. I look out over the water and there is no shadow, and suddenly I am crying there on the sand, and it feels like pulling an arrow from my chest, the way it hurts, the way it wants to split apart and rest.
You are smoking on the small balcony of the art gallery, and through the transparent glass, one of the guards is staring at you with disdain, though he says nothing. A few moments ago, you kissed me, and there was something sweet on your breath, bubblegum or mint. Now, we are looking down at the cars. We have exhausted the paintings and sculptures because they are so few, so quiet in what they have to say.
“I’m leaving in three days,” you tell me.
I knew this, that the space before your presence would claim itself again. I nod, not knowing what to say.
“What do you want to do?” you ask me.
I want to tell you about my sister, to make a vessel for what I hold of her, but who am I to burden you like that? It is a cold morning on a day we are both alive, and you are smoking, and I am watching you, and it is alright like this, too.
“Nothing in particular,” I say before sneezing loudly.
“You have a cold,” you say to me.
I nod again. You look at me as if searching for something. You put out the cigarette and flick the stub over the balcony. We stand there in silence, and what should feel like closeness instead feels like a divide.
I want to open my mouth and tell you about her, but my language for grief is tied up. You are right there, waiting, blowing out space to accommodate me, but I am silent.
“Let’s head back inside,” you say, and as always, I follow, watching your neck.
It is your last day, and I am waiting for you at the bus station, sitting on a cold iron bench, my body already forgetting the warmth of summer. I watch the pregnant sky with its thick and heavy clouds, seemingly stagnant yet moving.
You are suddenly in front of me, cutting into my vision, just like the way we met, your figure stabbing into my days.
Your aunt is standing beside you, smiling.
“I’m sorry for making you wait,” you say.
I shake my head. “You didn’t.”
You have a small suitcase and a satchel, and you find a bus, and there is nothing climactic about your departure.
You say, “Goodbye,” and I say, “I’ll write you a letter,” and though I’m not sure where the post office is or how to even send a letter, you give me your address, and then you are gone.
I go back home, and everything is suddenly silent as if silence is all the house ever knew, and your steady disruption has ended. I am left with myself and everything else, except this.
I imagine your life, but there is not much to imagine. You are still as much a stranger to me as I was to you. I don’t answer your calls. For the first few weeks, you call endlessly, incessantly, as if trying to prove your own patience with me. But even you, too, are human. You stop eventually. Our lives move in their directions. I eat fish and catch my tongue with the bones. I go to the lake and find comfort in waiting for something to happen, even though the cold slowly peels my back. I sleep and wake and fill my hours with sun. I miss my sister and don’t know what to do with my missing.
I wake, and for the first time in months, there is full sunlight crashing into the room, and I think of both you and her, one dead and another far, and it is like a wound that keeps cutting into itself.
I know there is no catharsis in this, but I rise and open one of my sister’s wardrobe drawers, the one where I gathered all the stuff we couldn’t give out: school counter books and dead phones and earrings. At the very top is a spiral notebook, the one she last used at the university. There is her handwriting, neat and straight. Inside the hardcover of the book are written the words “I met you by surprise you were hanging out all the time” and, of course, I know the lyrics, the album even, how my sister played it all the time, and there is that ache again, because the lyrics remind me of you, too. I flip through the book, and the notes inside are impersonal and mean nothing to me, but I keep flipping even when the words empty out and there is blank page after blank page. I know I’ll write you the letter after this, that it won’t blow us into clarity, but it will taper both of us back into life regardless.
