The Morning My Mother Folded My Whole Life Into One Suitcase

The suitcase on the bed

My mother started packing three days before I was due to leave, and she packed slowly, the way she does everything that matters to her. The suitcase was the hard blue one my uncle had brought back from Gauteng years ago, and it had sat on top of the wardrobe gathering dust for so long that it smelled of the wardrobe itself when she brought it down. She laid it open on my bed and stood looking at it for a while, and I understood then that she was not really looking at a suitcase. She was looking at the fact that I was going.

I am eighteen. I grew up in a village outside Polokwane, where the roads turn to red dust in September and the taxis to town leave when they are full and not a minute before. Nobody in my family had ever gone to university. My grandmother did not finish primary school. My mother cleans at the clinic and reads better than anyone I know, because she taught herself from the newspapers people leave behind. When the letter came saying I had a place to study in Cape Town, she held it with both hands as if it might blow away, and then she went outside and did not come back for a long time, and when she did her eyes were red and she said only, we must find you somewhere to stay.

That was the part nobody had warned me about. I had thought the hard thing would be the marks, or the money, or the distance. I had not thought about the simple terrifying question of where my body would sleep, more than a thousand kilometres from the only bed I had ever known.

Looking for a room from a village

We did not have anyone in Cape Town. Not a cousin, not a church friend, not a friend of a friend. So we did what people do now, which is sit on the edge of the bed with my phone and the one bar of signal we could catch by the kitchen window, and look. My mother held the torch of her own phone over a notebook and wrote down every option in her careful handwriting, the rands per month, whether food was included, how far from campus, whether it was safe. That last word she underlined twice.

The listings frightened me more than they reassured me. Some of the photos looked like palaces and cost more than my mother earns in two months. Some had no photos at all, only a number and a promise. I had read enough stories to know that a girl arriving alone with a suitcase is exactly who some people wait for. My mother knew it too, without ever having left Limpopo, because a mother knows these things in her bones. We kept coming back to the question of safety like a tongue to a sore tooth.

In the end the university sent a list of places they had checked themselves, proper purpose-built Student Accommodation near the campus, with gates and cards for the doors and other students in every room. It cost more than a back room in somebody's yard would have, and my mother and I sat up late deciding, but she said a thing I have not forgotten. She said, I would rather you eat less and sleep safe than eat well and lie awake. So we chose the safe thing, and I filled in the forms by the kitchen window, and when the confirmation came I felt the first real flicker of something that was not fear. It was closer to belonging, as though a city I had never seen had agreed to hold a small square of itself for me.

The long way south

The bus left Polokwane in the dark. My mother came to see me off even though it meant she would be late for work, and she stood on the pavement in her good coat holding my face in her two hands, telling me things she had already told me a hundred times. Phone when you arrive. Do not open the door to strangers. Eat something, even if it is only bread. Then the driver called and I climbed up and the doors folded shut, and through the dusty window I watched her get smaller until the bus turned and she was gone.

It is a long way from Limpopo to the Western Cape. The land changes slowly and then all at once. I watched the flat bushveld give way to the Karoo, those enormous empty plains the colour of a lion, and I thought I had never understood before how big my own country is. Somewhere in the night I slept with my cheek against the cold glass and my bag strap wound three times around my wrist. When I woke the mountains had arrived, standing up grey and sudden against a sky going pink, and I knew without being told that I was nearly there.

Cape Town came at me too fast. The traffic, the sea appearing between buildings, the sheer number of people who all seemed to know exactly where they were going. I stood at the station clutching my blue suitcase with both hands, the way my mother had held the letter, and for a moment I could not move for the size of it all. A woman helping students find the right shuttle saw me and asked where I was headed, and I read her the address of my Student Apartments from the paper in my fist, my voice smaller than I wanted it to be. She smiled and pointed me to the right queue, and that small kindness was a rope thrown to someone in deep water.

The first night in a strange room

My room was on the fourth floor. It had a bed, a desk, a narrow cupboard, and a window that looked out over rooftops toward a slice of the mountain. It was clean and it was quiet and it was mine, and I stood in the middle of it and did not know what to do with myself. At home there is always noise, my little brothers, the radio, the neighbours, the dogs. Here there was only the hum of the city and my own heartbeat.

I unpacked slowly, the way my mother had packed. At the bottom of the suitcase, under my folded clothes, she had hidden things without telling me. A small tin of the rusks she bakes. A photograph of the three of us. A twenty rand note folded into a square with a note that said, for when you feel far. I sat on the floor and cried then, properly, the way you can only cry when nobody is watching, because I was far, and I was free, and both of those were true at once and neither cancelled the other.

I phoned her. She answered on the first ring, which meant she had been sitting with the phone in her lap. I told her the room was safe, that the doors locked, that there were other girls on my floor already, two of them from Mthatha and one from a farm near Ceres who was as lost as I was. I told her I could see the mountain. She was quiet for a moment and then she said, good, in a voice that was trying hard to be steady.

That first night I lay in the strange bed listening to the strange sounds and I thought about how much had to go right for a girl from a village to end up here. I had worried about Student Accommodation in South Africa as though it were the final obstacle, the last gate between me and this life, and in a way it had been. But lying there I understood it differently. The room was not the end of the journey. It was the beginning of being allowed to have one. A place to come back to after the lectures I was terrified of, a door I could close against a city I did not yet know, a square of floor that was mine while I learned how to be the person my mother had packed that suitcase for.

I did not stop missing home. I still do, every single day. But somewhere in that first week, walking back up four flights with bread and milk in a plastic bag, fitting my key card to my own door, I felt it settle in me quietly, the thing I had been too frightened to name. I was the first. And I had somewhere safe to begin.