The Passage Light I Could Finally Leave On As Long As I Wanted

For three years I shared. First with two girls I met through a friend of a friend, then with a rotating cast of strangers as people moved out and new ones moved in. I am twenty six, I work at a call centre in the middle of Johannesburg as a team leader, and for those three years I lived my whole life in one bedroom of somebody else's arrangement, tiptoeing around a house that was never quite mine.

I do not want to make it sound like a tragedy. It was not. It was simply a slow grind of small indignities that added up to a person who was quietly disappearing.

The teabag drawer

The last house was the worst, and it was the worst because of a woman I will call Retha, who ran the place like a border post. There was a drawer for teabags and everyone's brand was labelled, and heaven help you if you took one that was not yours. There was a spreadsheet for the electricity. There were notes left on the fridge in capital letters. There were house rules about guests, about noise, about which shelf in the bathroom cabinet was whose, and the rules changed depending on Retha's mood.

I learned to come home late so I would not have to talk to anyone. I learned to cook fast and eat in my room. I learned to hold my breath, in a sense, from the moment I put my key in the door until the moment I closed my bedroom behind me. I did not realise how much of myself I was holding in until I finally stopped.

The night that broke it was small. I left the passage light on because I was expecting a parcel and wanted to see the step. Retha switched it off and left a note. One line. It was not my week for the passage. I stood in the dark holding my parcel and I thought, very clearly, I cannot do this anymore. Not the light. The being a guest in my own life.

What I thought I could not afford

I had always told myself that living alone was for people who earned more than me. That a place of my own in the city was a fantasy, that the choice was either sharing with strangers or moving back to my mother in Katlehong and adding two hours of taxis to every day. Those were the only two futures I could see.

A colleague changed that. She is a little older, sensible, the kind of person who reads the whole contract. Over lunch I was complaining about the teabag drawer and she said, why are you still sharing, have you actually looked at what your own place would cost. I said I could not afford it. She said, but have you looked, and I had to admit I had not. I had decided I could not afford it without ever once checking.

That evening I looked properly for the first time. I searched for apartments to rent in Johannesburg that were close to work, that were safe, that were built for people who earn what I earn rather than double it. And the thing I had been so sure did not exist turned out to exist. Not luxury. Not a rooftop pool. Just a clean, decent, secure flat in the inner city that one salary like mine could actually carry.

The viewing

I went to see one on a Saturday. I remember being nervous, as if someone would take one look at me and know I did not belong there. Nobody did. It was a small one bedroom on a middle floor, with a window that looked out over the city, and a kitchen that was mine, and a bathroom cabinet with no labels on any of the shelves.

I stood in the empty lounge and I did a thing I am slightly embarrassed about. I walked to the light switch by the door and I turned the passage light on. Then off. Then on again. Just because I could. The agent probably thought I was checking the electrics. I was checking whether it was really true that nobody would leave me a note.

The building had proper security, a working intercom, and a caretaker who actually answered when things broke. When you have spent three years somewhere that the landlord ignored, that matters more than any fancy finish. I did not need marble. I needed a place that worked and a door that only my key opened.

Signing my own name

The paperwork was the first grown up thing I had ever signed entirely on my own behalf. No flatmates, no shared deposit, no arguments about whose name went first. Just mine. I had spent so long looking at flats to rent as things that other, richer people signed for that the moment I put my own signature down I had to sit for a second and breathe.

I moved in with almost nothing. A mattress on the floor for the first two weeks. A kettle, one pan, a single plate. My mother came to see it and cried a little, and then immediately started telling me where the couch should go, which is how she says she is proud of me.

That first night I slept badly, not from worry but from a strange excitement. At about eleven I got up and made tea, in my own kitchen, from my own box of teabags that nobody had labelled, and I drank it standing at the window looking at the lights of the city, with every light in my flat blazing because there was nobody to tell me not to.

The person who came back

It has been a year now. The flat is small and it is still mostly empty, because I am furnishing it slowly and only with things I actually love. But something has come back in me that I did not know I had lost. I sing while I cook. I have friends over without asking anyone's permission. I leave the passage light on for as long as I please, sometimes for no reason at all, purely out of spite toward a woman who will never know.

I tell the younger people at work the same thing my colleague told me, because it changed my life. Do not decide you cannot afford something before you have actually looked. I had spent three years assuming that decent apartments to rent in this city were beyond me, and the assumption cost me far more than the rent ever would have. It cost me three years of holding my breath.

I am breathing now. And the light is on.