The Air Here Holds On To You

The first thing I noticed was the wet

I grew up believing air was something you did not feel. In Bloemfontein the air is a dry, thin thing that lifts the dust and cracks your knuckles by June. You put cream on your hands and it disappears in an hour. Your washing goes stiff on the line in twenty minutes. I lived inside that dryness for forty-three years without ever once thinking of it as a fact about my body.

Then I drove down Van Reenen's Pass with a boot full of the things I had chosen to keep, and by the time I reached the coast the air had changed its mind about me. It settled on my skin like a hand. I remember stopping at a petrol station outside Pietermaritzburg and stepping out of the car and feeling my shirt go soft against my back within seconds. The attendant smiled and said the humidity takes some getting used to, and I laughed because I did not yet know how right he was.

I am a paediatric nurse. I have spent more than twenty years learning how to read small bodies, how a fever sits in a two-year-old, how a child who has gone too quiet is often the one to worry about. I took a post at a children's hospital in Durban because I needed a reason to go somewhere new, and because after the divorce I could not keep waking up in the same town where everyone knew the shape of my old life. Bloemfontein is a kind place. It is also a place where the woman at the pharmacy asks after a husband who is no longer there, and you have to decide, every single time, how much of the truth to hand across the counter.

So I left. Quietly. There was no drama in the divorce, which is its own kind of grief. Nobody threw anything. We simply ran out of things to say to each other and were honest enough, eventually, to admit it. I signed papers in a lawyer's office that smelled of instant coffee, and then I started looking for somewhere to live in a city I had visited twice.

Buying the first thing that was only mine

I had never owned a home on my own. Everything before had been ours, or his family's, or a rental with someone else's taste in tiles. When I began scrolling through listings late at night in the old house, I felt like a teenager doing something she had not asked permission for. I looked at a great many places. Some were too far from the hospital. Some were beautiful and made my chest tight with a price I could not carry alone. I remember lying in bed reading through pages of apartments in Umhlanga with the light off and the phone too bright, feeling both foolish and thrilled, like the whole thing might be a trick I was playing on myself.

In the end I bought a small apartment near the Umhlanga promenade. Two rooms, really, plus a kitchen you could not swing a cat in, and a balcony just wide enough for one chair and a washing rack. It was the first home that had ever been solely mine. My name, alone, on the papers. When the estate agent handed me the keys she said congratulations in the automatic way people do, and I had to turn my face to the window because I did not want her to see what it was doing to me.

The night I got the keys I sat on the bare floor of the empty lounge with a bottle of water and no furniture and I listened. That was the thing that undid me. The sound. Back home, at night, there had been the particular silence of a house with one person too few in it, the silence of the empty half of a bed. Here there was the sea. Not loud, not crashing, just a long steady breathing somewhere beyond the buildings, in and out, in and out, the way you teach a frightened child to breathe when they come into the ward. I fell asleep on that floor with my jacket rolled under my head and I did not wake until the light came grey and salty through the window.

One box a night

I did not unpack the way sensible people do, in a weekend, with a plan. I unpacked one box a night. It became a small ritual I did not decide on so much as fall into. After a shift I would come home, make something simple, and then choose a single box and open it and put its contents where they now belonged. Just one. Then I would stop.

I think I did it that way because I was afraid of finishing. As long as there were boxes there was still a version of me that had not fully arrived, a woman mid-journey, allowed to be unsettled. And there was something in the slowness that let me look at each thing properly. The mug my mother gave me. The good scissors. A photograph I decided, on the third night, that I did not need to display and did not need to throw away, so I put it in a drawer where it lives to this day, neither honoured nor thrown out, just present, like most of the past.

Some boxes took ten minutes. One took an hour because I sat on the floor reading old cards I had forgotten I kept. The cardboard smelled of the Free State, of the dry garage where they had been stacked, and slowly, night by night, that smell was replaced by the smell of here, which is green and briny and slightly of rain even when it is not raining.

The walk to the lighthouse

The hospital shifts start early, and I have never been good at rushing in the morning, so I began to leave the flat before I strictly had to, just to walk. The promenade at that hour belongs to a particular kind of person. The old men doing their slow circuits. The runners with their earphones. A woman who feeds the mongooses even though there are signs asking her not to. And me, in my scrubs, walking down toward the red and white lighthouse before a shift, watching the light change over the water.

The first mornings I walked stiffly, arms folded, a Free State woman braced against a cold that was not there. It took weeks for my shoulders to come down. The sea in the early light is not blue the way it is in adverts. It is grey and pewter and then, all at once, when the sun clears the horizon, it goes the colour of a coin held up to a lamp. I would reach the lighthouse and turn around and walk back, and by the time I got to my door I felt ready to hold whatever the day put in my hands, which in my work can be a great deal.

There was a morning, I remember, when a pod of dolphins moved past just beyond the backline, their fins turning over and over in the swell, and a stranger and I stood next to each other and watched without speaking and then went on our separate ways. I thought about that for the whole shift. How you can share something complete with a person whose name you will never know.

The city fills in around me

Slowly the anonymous city became a set of known places. The particular Woolworths where I do my shopping. The pharmacist who does not know anything about a husband and never will. A man at the market who saves me the good avocados. Even the search for the flat, which had felt so enormous and solitary at the time, has softened into a story I can tell lightly now, the months I spent comparing this and that, the evening I very nearly put an offer on a place in an entirely different part of town after reading through listings of Umhlanga property until my eyes burned. I did not, in the end. Some quiet instinct kept pulling me back to the sound of the sea, and I have learned, at my age, to trust that instinct more than the spreadsheet.

I will not pretend the loneliness is gone. It is not. There are evenings when the flat is very quiet and I would give a great deal to hear another person moving about in the next room, the ordinary domestic sounds of a life shared. Divorce at forty-three is not a fresh start the way people mean it when they say it brightly. It is more like emigrating from your own past. You carry your accent with you. You dream in the old language.

But I have also found something I did not expect, which is that I like my own company more than I feared. I like coming home to rooms arranged entirely to my own liking. I like that the kettle is where I put it and the books are in the order I chose and no one sighs when I read too late. When friends from home ask what it is like to live alone in a coastal flat, I sometimes send them the same pages of Umhlanga apartments I once pored over myself, half as a joke, half because I want them to understand the size of the thing I did.

The humidity, by the way, I have made peace with. My hands do not crack anymore. My washing takes an age to dry and I no longer mind. The air here holds on to you, and after a lifetime of thin dry air that let go of everything, I have decided that being held, even by something as ordinary as the weather, is not the worst way to begin again.