Prologue: She Still Picks Up
Two years later
She still picks up when I call.
She once told me, with the certainty of someone stating a mathematical fact, that you cannot develop real feelings for a person in twenty-one days. Twenty-one days is not enough time, she said. We both deal in numbers; I let it stand as an equation.
Months later she sent me a poem she had written. It was about love at first sight — about a man sitting two rows below her, head down, lost in his computer screen, whom she had decided not to let herself fall for. It was about me. And it ended with a line that undid her whole equation: I wanted us to have had more time.
So which was true — the equation or the poem? That is the question this book keeps asking, and I am not sure I have answered it yet.
Here is what I can tell you. We met on a leadership fellowship in South Africa — twenty-one days, seventy-seven strangers, one borrowed laptop charger. We are in different countries now; I went home to Zimbabwe, she to Mozambique, and the programme has long since moved on to other cohorts. Nothing happened between us, not in the way these things are supposed to happen. There was no relationship, no first date, no clean beginning to point to. And yet, all this time later, she still picks up when I call. She still comes to my inbox when the day has been heavy. We talk the way two people talk when they are genuinely fond of each other and have never quite worked out what to do about it.
This is not a love story — she would correct me if I called it that, and I have learned to respect her corrections. It is a record of twenty-one days, told as honestly as I can manage, with the strategy and the hope and the small embarrassments left in. It is also a question I have not finished asking: what do you call what we were, and what do you call what we still are?
She picks up. That has to count for something.
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