My Twin Went to Stellenbosch and I Went to Pretoria

The Last Night in the Same Room

For eighteen years I fell asleep to the sound of my brother breathing. Kamogelo is older than me by eleven minutes, and he has never let me forget it. We shared a womb, a cot, a bunk bed in our grandmother's house in Seshego, and then a narrow room in our parents' place in Polokwane with two single beds pushed so close together that you could pass a phone across the gap without sitting up.

The night before we left home, neither of us slept. We lay there in the dark with the window open because January in Limpopo does not care that you are nervous, and we listened to the dogs down the road and the taxis on the main road and our father snoring through the wall. At some point, around two, Kamo said, "You know you are going to have to start answering to your own name now." I did not understand what he meant. I understand now.

People in Polokwane never called us by our names. We were "the twins," or "Mokoena boys," or, at church, simply "those two." Teachers mixed us up until Grade Nine, when Kamo broke his front tooth playing soccer and finally gave everyone a way to tell us apart. Even our mother, on a tired day, would shout one name and look at the wrong face. We never minded. It was easier, in a way, to be half of something.

Then the acceptance letters came. Kamo got into engineering at Stellenbosch. I got into BCom at the University of Pretoria. We had applied to both, assuming we would end up in the same place, and then the universe made the choice for us, and neither of us was brave enough to give up a place to follow the other.

Fifteen Hundred Kilometres

Our parents drove Kamo down first, because the Cape is far and his residence opened earlier. I stayed behind with my grandmother for those five days, and that was the first time in my life I slept in a room alone. I lay awake with the light on. I felt ridiculous, an eighteen-year-old man who could not sleep without hearing another person breathe, but there it was.

When it was my turn, my father drove me down the N1 in his old Toyota with my bags tied under a tarp in the back. I had been to Pretoria before, for school trips, for a cousin's wedding, but I had never looked at it as a place where I would have to make a life. My father did not say much. Near Bela Bela he told me to phone my mother every Sunday whether I had news or not, and near Pienaarsrivier he told me that he had also been lonely at university, at Turfloop, and that it passes. That was the most he had ever said to me about his own life.

Finding somewhere to live had been a whole saga. We had started late, because for months we assumed the two of us would be sharing a place in the same city. When the letters came apart, my mother spent evenings at the kitchen table comparing residences and private options, reading reviews out loud, and phoning cousins to ask what they knew. She typed things like Student Accommodation in South Africa into her phone with one finger, frowning, then scrolled for an hour, then asked me what I thought of a building I had never seen. In the end we chose a room close enough to campus that I could walk, with a shared kitchen and a roommate I had never met.

The Roommate Who Was Not My Brother

His name was Ruan. He was from Upington, he was a second-year doing quantity surveying, and the first thing he said to me when I opened the door was, "Please tell me you do not play music while you study."

I did not play music while I studied. I played nothing at all, because I did not know how to fill a room by myself. At home, the noise was always Kamo. He hummed, he argued with the television, he practised his debating speeches in the shower. I had always been the quiet one, and I had never realised that my quietness only worked because he was loud.

Ruan was not loud either. For the first two weeks we were two quiet men sharing a fridge, labelling our milk, saying "morning" and "night" and very little in between. I would sit at my desk and stare at my economics textbook and feel the silence press on my ears. I phoned Kamo almost every night. He always answered, but by the third week he sounded distracted. There were people laughing in the background. He had joined a choir, and he had friends from Paarl and Durban and Windhoek, and he wanted to tell me about a hike up a mountain I could not picture.

I felt something I had no name for. Jealousy is too simple. It was more like watching your own reflection walk off without you.

The Night the Power Went

In the fourth week, load shedding hit at seven in the evening, right when I was trying to cook pap and mince on the stove. The whole building went dark. I stood in the kitchen with a pot of half-cooked pap and no idea what to do, and then Ruan came in with a camping lamp and a gas cooker he had brought from Upington because, he said, "Nobody from the Northern Cape trusts Eskom."

We finished cooking on the gas ring. We ate on the floor because it was cooler there. And somewhere between the second plate and the third, he asked me why I always looked like I was waiting for somebody.

I told him about Kamo. I told him about the bunk beds and the broken tooth and the eleven minutes. I told him that nobody here knew there were two of me, and that I did not know who I was without the other one standing next to me. I had never said any of that out loud. It felt strange, saying it to a man I had only known for a month, by the light of a camping lamp, with mince on my fingers.

Ruan listened. Then he told me he had a younger sister with cerebral palsy, and that he had spent his whole childhood being "Lize's brother," the one who pushed the wheelchair, and that coming to Pretoria was the first time he had been just Ruan. He said it was the best and worst thing that had ever happened to him. We sat there until the power came back and the fridge shuddered on, and neither of us got up to switch on the light for a while.

Learning to Be One Person

After that night, things changed slowly, the way things do when they are real. Ruan dragged me to a five-a-side game with guys from his course. I was terrible, and nobody cared. A girl in my statistics tutorial asked if I wanted to study together, and when I said yes I realised she had no idea I was a twin, and it did not matter to her at all. She knew me as Karabo, the guy who always had extra pens. That was enough.

I started to notice things about myself that I had always handed over to Kamo. I like cooking. He never did, so I never did. I like waking up early. He liked the late nights, so I stayed up with him. I like walking alone. I had never once walked anywhere alone in Polokwane, because there was always someone at my elbow.

Some of my classmates were living in proper Student Apartments with their own little kitchens and study rooms, and I spent a few evenings in theirs, cooking for groups of four or five. I became, without planning to, the guy who made the food. It is a small thing. But it was mine, not ours, and I had never had something that was just mine.

The Visit

In the June holidays, Kamo and I were both home in Polokwane at the same time for the first time in six months. Our mother cried when she saw us standing next to each other in the driveway. Our grandmother told us we did not look alike anymore. She was right. Kamo had grown a beard and wore a Stellenbosch hoodie everywhere. I had cut my hair short and put on a little weight from all that cooking.

That first night, we lay in our old beds again, pushed close together. I listened to him breathe and waited to feel the old comfort. It came, but it was different, softer, like visiting a house you used to live in. He told me he had cried every night for the first two weeks in Stellenbosch and had not wanted to tell me. I told him about Ruan and the gas cooker and the pap. We laughed until our father banged on the wall.

Then Kamo said something I will not forget. He said, "I thought I was the strong one because I talked more. I think you are actually the strong one. You just never had to show it."

What I Tell the Younger Ones Now

I am in my second year now. Ruan has graduated and moved to Cape Town, and we message each other about rugby and his sister and, sometimes, about loneliness, which neither of us pretends to have fully beaten. I share a place with a new roommate from Mthatha who plays music while he studies, and I have learned to put in earphones and not mind.

Last month my cousin's daughter, who is about to start her first year, phoned me to ask about finding Student Accommodation, and I gave her the practical stuff: start early, check the walking distance, ask about backup power. But what I really wanted to tell her was something else. I wanted to say that the room you end up in matters less than what happens to you inside it. That the silence is frightening at first and then it becomes a place to hear yourself. That the person sharing your fridge might end up knowing you better than people who have known you your whole life.

Kamo and I still talk most nights. We are not two halves anymore. We are two whole people who happen to share a face, a birthday and eleven minutes that he will never stop mentioning. And when I lie down at night in Pretoria, in a room that is quiet apart from my own breathing, I do not leave the light on anymore.