“Ke ngoana.”

It was many many years ago. He was so young. She was so young. He did not deserve to die that early and she did not deserve to lose him so quickly – so suddenly. But she was a kid. She had to be fine. Surely, she could not have felt the blow.

She was the first to find him. She was also the last he spoke to, the last he was with, the last he saw. She was the one who had to run for help even though it was too late. She ran. She did not even like running. It did not say much though, she was a kid.

She would see the image of the one she adored wrapped in a pink sheet and the memory of his brown face fading in and out of the pink for the rest of her life but that’s okay because she was just a kid.

She watched, detached and unsure what the right shape of grief was supposed to look like as everyone around her wailed and wept and that was okay, she was just a kid, she probably understood nothing of it. It was definitely not because she was not sure she deserved to grieve or afraid of how it would be received. Kids have no right causing unnecessary drama when everything is already hectic, do they?

Everything happened so quickly that she would fail to even make sense of it even in her grown days but that was okay. She was a kid.

She was shuttled through the days that followed the way children are shuttled through things that adults deem too large for them – gently redirected, kept on the periphery, handed food and told to go play, or not, she does not really remember. She does remember though, that there was no basket holding her in and rocking her back to steadiness. Nobody asked whether her head was on fire, or her chest moved between feeling like a gaping hole and that it caved in when she was sleeping. Why would they? She was a kid. She was probably fine. She would soon forget, the way kids do, merciful and quick. Nobody knew that she was not forgetting. That she was storing. That somewhere behind her small eyes she was carefully folding everything – the pink sheet, the running, the too-lateness of it all – tucking it in a place she would constantly stumble upon as she searched for memories of him.

The memory of it is not quite clear but the burial was probably on a hot sunny Saturday. She bathed early, got dressed decently. It did not matter to anyone if she showed up for the service or not, she was a kid. So she did not, she kept herself busy, a busybody really, moving from one unoccupied person to the next, looking for company, looking for anything. He was her company. He was her anything and everything. She was just a kid. Kids do not necessarily need to say goodbye, do they? The whole weight of the tent with the green mat and all those people and a coffin that apparently held him did sink but not really because she was a kid. What could she have possibly known? What could she have understood? She stood at the edge of it all, small and unaccounted for, watching the adults move through their grief like they had been given a script she had not received.

During the service, her main goal was to find a companion to take her to the spaza for snacks because she was just a kid, clueless, not because she needed to get somewhere far from it, even only for a little while. Not because the coffin was too real and the green mat was too final and she had not yet been given the words for any of what was sitting in her chest. She was a kid. She was fine. The script had decided.

And then life continued, the way life does, indifferently. People packed up their grief and carried it home. The tent came down. The green mat disappeared. And her? She just kept going, because that is what you do when you are a kid and everyone has already decided you are okay. You become okay. Too okay, in fact. She went to school. She played. She laughed at the right moments and was quiet at the right moments and nobody looked at her too carefully, possibly because they were too afraid to. She was a kid; kids are elastic and kids are good at moving the only way they know how – onward and forward – and so she did too because she had not yet learned that she was allowed to stop. Here and there, she would slip in a story about the boy she loved, in conversations that were too trivial to dwell on.

She is just a kid. This is what everyone decides, always. Children are resilient. Children bounce back somehow. Children do not even understand much of what is happening. That is not anyone’s fault per se.

The adults around her were also beyond shattered and they did the best they could to move through the fog of that loss. They did the only thing they knew how and they did it well – keep the child fed, keep the child distracted, keep the child away from the heaviness of it all. Shield the child. They loved her, they probably thought of her, but they simply were never taught that love, in that moment, also needed to look like spoken consideration.

*adds epiphany by Taylor Swift

She is not a kid anymore.

She is not sure when it happened – the crossover. She knows only that at some point, the thing she had folded and walked away from began to take up more space than she had left for it. It had been patient, but its waiting was the kind unfelt grief can wait; no urgency, no noise, and no intention of leaving.

She thinks about him now in a way she did not allow herself to then. She thinks about the fact that he was her best friend even before she understood the concept of friendship. Her person. The love of her life, and now, the loss of her life. A real loss, a counted loss, a loss that deserves a name and a place and someone to sit with you in it.

She thinks about the running. running as fast as she could but never as fast as she wished. Running with the hope that would soon be crushed as though she had no right to it being otherwise. Running away from the possibility of the guilt that would eat her alive if he were not to make it. Running with the knowledge that everything could go wrong but hoping it does not. Everything did go wrong.

She thinks about the pink sheet they both used to sleep on. How he used to tease their sitter for mispronouncing it as he helped her make the bed. She tries to find if there was any sign in those moments, a communication she missed because there is no way he could have left without telling her, without her. He used to tell her everything and he most definitely wanted to go everywhere with her.

She thinks about how they made sure they stood her far away from him and how for the first time, the separation truly felt final, because it was. Of the words she swallowed as they placed him in the bakkie of a police van and drove off when all she wanted to do was scream and beg for them to not take him away from her.

She is not a kid anymore. And she is learning, at last, to give the one she was permission to feel.

It is true. She was just a child. E ne e le ngoana. She did not know. She did not fully comprehend, but she does wish someone, anyone, would have walked with her until it all made sense to her.