The Water Was the First Thing That Made Sense

Boxes and a Bakkie

I grew up in a house in Pinelands with a jacaranda tree that dropped purple mush on the driveway every October and a garden my mother refused to let anyone else touch. That is the kind of childhood that ruins you for apartment living, or so I believed for thirty one years. When the offer came through from a software company with offices near Highveld, testing lead, better pay than I could get in Cape Town, I told my sister I would take it for eighteen months and then move home. I remember saying that out loud in her kitchen like it was a fact and not a wish.

The move itself was forgettable in the way most logistics are forgettable. A bakkie, two guys who wrapped my kettle in more bubble wrap than it deserved, and a drive up the N1 that took a day and a half because I stopped too often to look at the Karoo and pretend I was not doing the thing I was doing. I had spent two weeks before that scrolling through listings on my phone in bed, half heartedly looking at apartments in Pretoria East because a colleague from the new job said that was where people who worked our hours actually lived, close enough to the office that traffic did not eat your evenings.

The First Grey Weeks

January in Pretoria is not grey, it is blinding, but that was how it felt inside my head. I had a one bedroom unit on the third floor of one of those newer Pretoria East apartments blocks that had gone up on ground that used to be open veld, white walls, a balcony that looked out over a parking area and, past that, some open ground I hadn't paid attention to. I unpacked in four days and then had nothing to do with my hands. No garden to argue with. No dog, because I had left my sister with the dog. My days were spent staring at test cases and regression logs on a laptop at a small table I had bought from a shop in Menlyn, and my evenings were spent staring at the ceiling wondering why I had agreed to any of this.

I want to be honest about that part because it is the part people skip. I was lonely in a specific, humming way. Not dramatic, just constant, the way a fridge hums until you stop hearing it and then you notice it again at two in the morning. I called my mother more than I want to admit. I ate a lot of toast standing at the kitchen counter because sitting down to eat alone felt like an admission of something.

Six A.M., More or Less by Accident

The walking started because I couldn't sleep past five thirty most mornings, some leftover Cape Town habit of early light through curtains that never quite closed properly in the new place either. One Tuesday I put on the trainers I hadn't touched since a half marathon two years before and went out just to move, not for any reason beyond needing my legs to do something.

That was when I found the lake. It sits at the low end of the estate, past the units with the better views, ringed by a paved path with benches nobody sat on that early. There were three ducks that morning, and a man doing tai chi with such total seriousness that I felt embarrassed jogging past him, and mist coming up off the water the way it does in the highveld before the sun properly commits to the day. I did two laps and went home and made coffee and felt, for the first time in about six weeks, like a person rather than a task list.

I kept going back. Not every day at first, but often enough that by March it had become the thing I built my mornings around rather than the thing I did when I couldn't sleep. I learned which bench got sun first. I learned that the herons showed up around six fifteen and left before seven, fishing at the reeds on the far side. I learned the names of two of the security guards on the gate because they started saying more than good morning to me, started asking about the Cape Town accent they could still hear underneath whatever Pretoria was doing to my vowels.

What the Lake Actually Did

I don't want to oversell it, because it was just water and grass and a path, nothing more dramatic than that. But there is something about repetition that rewires you without asking permission. Somewhere around month four I noticed I wasn't dreading the walk down to the water anymore, I was looking forward to it the way you look forward to a conversation with someone who never disappoints you. The low patch didn't end with one epiphany. It ended with about eighty mornings of putting one foot in front of the other next to something still and patient while the sky changed colour, until one day I realised the humming fridge feeling had gone quiet.

I started running instead of walking somewhere around June, when the cold mornings made moving faster feel necessary rather than optional. I met a woman from the block two buildings over, Nomvula, who ran the opposite direction around the lake most mornings, and for about three weeks we did an awkward nod before one of us finally said something and we ended up doing laps together some days, talking about nothing, work mostly, her frustration with her manager, my frustration with a testing framework nobody had bothered to document properly. It sounds small written down. It did not feel small at the time. It felt like the first thread of an actual life forming in a city I had arrived in resenting.

Deciding to Stay

My eighteen month plan quietly became a two year plan and then stopped being a plan at all. When my contract came up for renewal I signed without the internal argument I expected to have with myself. I started, almost as a joke at first, looking at property for sale Pretoria East on my phone during lunch breaks, the same way I had looked at rentals that first restless January, except this time I wasn't looking for an exit, I was looking for a version of staying.

I still don't have a garden. I have a balcony with two pots of basil that die with predictable regularity and a view I have grown fond of in a way I never expected to be fond of a parking area and a strip of grass. But I have the lake, and the herons, and Nomvula, who still beats me on the days she actually tries, and a route so worn into my legs now that I could probably run it with my eyes shut. My mother asked me last month, half joking, half not, whether Pretoria had won. I told her I wasn't sure it had won so much as it had simply refused to let me stay a stranger, one ordinary morning lap at a time, until the water at the edge of the estate stopped being scenery and started being the closest thing I had to home.