Somewhere Quiet Enough To Hear Myself

The morning I could not tell anyone about

I remember the exact colour of the sky that morning, the flat grey you get over Johannesburg in early April before the winter properly arrives. I was twenty seven. I had a job I liked, a small flat in a block near Melville with a geyser that never quite behaved, and a life that, from the outside, looked settled. Inside I was anything but. I had spent three weeks carrying a piece of news that I had not said out loud to a single person, and the weight of it had started to change the way I moved through my own days.

I want to be careful about how I tell this, because it is not a story with villains in it, and it is not a story about a cause. It is a story about a decision that belonged to me, and about the handful of people who treated that decision, and me, with a kind of ordinary respect that I did not know I was so hungry for.

What I was actually afraid of

If you had asked me at the time what frightened me, I would probably have said something practical. Money. Timing. Whether my body would be alright. But underneath all of that, the real fear was smaller and sharper. I was afraid of being seen and judged. I grew up in a home where certain subjects were spoken about in lowered voices, if at all, and I had absorbed the idea that there were things a woman simply did not discuss. So the thought of walking into a room and saying, plainly, this is my situation, this is what I am considering, felt almost unbearable.

I did what a lot of people do now. I sat on my couch late at night with my phone, the screen too bright, and I searched. I read the way you read when you are scared, half swallowing the words. I found the number of a women's clinic that offered confidential consultations, and I saved it, and then I did not call for four days. The number just sat there in my phone like a small stone in my pocket. Every time I picked up the phone to do something ordinary, to check the time or reply to a friend, I saw it and my stomach turned over.

The phone call I finally made

When I did call, my voice came out thinner than I expected. I had rehearsed a sentence, but it fell apart the moment a real person answered. What I remember is that the woman on the other end did not rush me. She did not make me explain everything at once. She asked a few gentle questions, told me I could come in and simply talk, that nothing had to be decided in that first visit, and that whatever I said would stay between us. I got off the phone and cried, not because anything had been resolved, but because for the first time in weeks someone had spoken to me as though I were a whole person and not a problem to be managed.

That is the part I did not anticipate. I had braced myself for coldness, for forms and frowns, and instead I got a booking and a kind voice and the strange relief of being expected somewhere.

Sitting in the waiting room

The day of the appointment I took a taxi rather than drive, because I did not trust my own concentration. The waiting area was quieter than I imagined. There was a woman about my mother's age reading a magazine, and a younger woman with earphones in, and none of us looked at each other, and I was grateful for that unspoken agreement between strangers. Privacy, I realised, is not only about locked doors and confidential files. It is also about the small dignity of not being made to feel watched.

When I was called through, the nurse who sat with me had a way of listening that I have thought about many times since. She let there be silences. She did not fill every pause with information or advice. When I finally managed to say what I was thinking, haltingly, she nodded and said that it was my choice to make and that her job was to give me accurate information and to look after me, whichever way I went. She talked me through what my options actually were, in plain language, without leaning on me in any direction. It is a difficult thing to describe how much that steadiness meant. I had come in expecting to have to defend myself, and instead I was simply cared for.

Choosing what was right for my own life

I took a few more days before I decided. I walked a lot that week, around the streets near my flat, past the jacarandas that had already dropped their last leaves. I thought about the life I actually had, not the one I was supposed to want, and I let myself be honest about it. The choice I made was mine, and I am not going to lay it out here as if it should be a template for anyone else, because that is exactly the kind of thing I was so relieved not to have imposed on me. What mattered was that I got to weigh it carefully, with real information and without shame breathing down my neck.

When I went back, everything was handled with the same calm privacy as before. I later read a little about how these services are meant to work in South Africa, how a proper abortion clinic is bound by confidentiality and by a duty of care, and it helped me understand that the kindness I had experienced was not luck. It was how it was supposed to be, even if I had not believed that going in.

What I carry now

That was a few years ago. I am in a different flat now, one with a geyser that works, which feels like its own small miracle. I do not think about that autumn every day. But when I do, what surfaces is not fear. It is the memory of being listened to, of a stranger treating my most private uncertainty as something worthy of patience.

I have a younger cousin who once, without knowing my history, mentioned that a friend of hers was frightened and did not know where to turn. I told her, quietly, that there are proper abortion clinics and confidential services that exist precisely so that no one has to face these things alone or in secret. I did not tell her my own story. I may one day. For now it is enough that I could pass on the one thing I most needed to hear, which is that being uncertain and being cared for are not opposites.

If I could say anything to the woman I was that grey morning, it would be this. You are allowed to want to be treated gently. You are allowed to make your own decision and to make it in a quiet enough place that you can finally hear yourself think. That was all I really needed, in the end. Somewhere quiet enough, and someone willing not to judge.