Mpho’s Love

The first time I crossed the Abi I was four, nestled into my father’s arms, my best dress was wet and my stomach painfully empty. The muted agony of every companion with us was enough to make even young children sombre. We were leaving our home with war close behind, our dead and the dying already haunting us.

It was another six years before we crossed the Abi again for lack of a better home after my father’s death. In the small village of Willows where we decided to settle with my Grandmother who had already wandered back here. Always we remained a family of wanderers.

Grandma, my Maani, ventured the Abi’s banks with practiced ease then and immediately taught me how to do the same, treading for food and lost things to treasure. She taught me that without warning the river was impossible to cross, the fish overran its banks and we would lack for nothing. And with the snap of its fingers we had to kneel over its muddy banks while it dried up to almost nothing. It was an odd river, the Abi, it followed no season or rhyme but its own.

At night Grandma would join us in the small hut where we always kept the fire burning to tell us stories about things that came out when no one was looking. Mama did not always agree with her stories but there was very little she could say. The Abi was Grandma’s favourite story, “You see that moody river?” She would say, “be careful it doesn’t swallow you up.” All the while my mother tsked away irritated by her eccentrics. I loved the stories and their magic. They were like dreams that had nothing to do with our immediate hunger and needs.

I first discovered Mpho on the very banks of the Abi, a dark skinned tender slip of a girl with vivid angles like something right out of a storybook. I did not know what to think of her...each morning I would arrive and begin my tasks with barely any acknowledgment. No one minded her.

One morning , during a dry spell we had no explanation for, I wondered down to the Abi to scrimmage for what little food I could find. Exhaustion and hunger had began to haunt our features while the river yielded nothing.  It was the first day Mpho spoke to me. I had been startled to find her voice familiar in the way long lost relatives might sound. Alone so late in the day, she had almost blended into the muddy bank whilst I had searched for anything resembling food. Only a moment of shock passed before I heeded her instructions as though we spoke everyday and headed upstream, too exhausted to do anything else. That night I returned with one large fish found trapped in a shallow brook nearly dried up. I had panicked for a moment before tossing it out by its tail to avoid wrestling it, the dry surroundings took care of the rest. Scooping up a small yellow tinted shell the likes of which I rarely saw, I waited and prayed for more good fortune. It would be another week before I would begin my unexpected friendship with Mpho.

My days took on a dreamlike quality as she showed me new nooks and crannies of the Abi. Little pockets that appeared hidden in plain sight. I savoured the adventure, the just enough fish and strange fruit with dazed acceptance. I did not want the magic to run out.

“Where do they come from?” I once asked her.

“The Abi.” She said as a matter of fact. She had a tendency to not explain and I had a habit of not asking. Our days were full of tasks up and down what I now considered the very rich banks of the rediscovered Abi before Mpho pointed towards a rocky basin to explore. Unlike everywhere else, this place was not new to me.

“It’s forbidden.” Looking to the small incline I felt the stirrings of anxiousness take hold. In our time together I had learned that there was nothing Mpho feared, less so the river she so loved. I turned away in stubborn resistance, long enough for the silence to be awkward.

“Fine then let’s go.” She sung in that melodic voice of hers effectively ending the moment as she jogged in the opposite direction. She was not deterred however and brought it up again, each time a little more convincing than the last. I refused until the morning of my birthday as she handed me a bracelet of ivory coloured shells and odd trinkets.

“Will you come?” she spoke and the meaning hung heavy in our midst as the only thorn in our otherwise perfect friendship. The bracelet was too beautiful for our muddy existence, it reminded me of the yellow tinted shell I now kept buried at the base of our withered mango tree.

“No” I murmured resolutely. This time she insisted. I looked up and blinked against the rising sun glinting directly behind her. Her birthday, I had discovered, fell a few weeks from mine.

“For me?” She begged, “Just one minute on my birthday and never again. You won’t even have to bring a gift.”

I felt shame in that moment. I had never had any gifts to offer in all the time we’ve known each other. Maybe the polished oddity tied around my wrist looking as foreign as it felt added to my shame but I agreed eventually. And then went home for a lunch of fish and veggies after a long day of fruit sweeter than any I had ever had.

She died a week later amidst our plans to celebrate her birthday, her small body floating down stream found by a group of women doing laundry. We buried her in an unmarked grave without much of a show.

If I said the river had always been a place of strange foreboding I would have been lying. I had feared the Abi and then loved it before fearing it again and then settling somewhere between the strange foreboding and awe. It had been a source of so much substance since the age of four and now it had claimed the life of the only person who had made it magical. There was no magic after Mpho, no strange fruit again as though to mock the memories I now struggled to claim each time I forced myself to gaze at it from afar. I never approached, not anymore. I helped in the garden and home seemingly fighting a growing sense of fear regarding its waters. From every direction I could see it, feel it. Until the day of Mpho’s birthday.

I sat up early in the morning, rising with the sun while my heart steadily climbed up my throat . Playing with the ivory bracelet angrily snatched from my brother the night before, grief and confusion filled me as though to weigh me down into the ground with both my father and Mpho. A niggling memory sat just out of sight with an uncertain urgency and all I could hear was the Abi. Should I go say goodbye?

Time was blurred, grief was blurred and every now and then the eyes of my family would pierce me with a grief so deep it sharpened my awareness of them. I was now more child than ever now and could not understand any part of this life we have been living. Mpho was now a dead mystery. One I needed to say goodbye to.

These were my thoughts as I carefully dressed and gathered my mismatched tokens. Bidding my mother a short explanation once I noticed her troubled eyes on me. She looked and said nothing. I nodded and left.

I had already known my destination even before I’d fully formed the thought, trekking across a densely covered path, I headed away from the safety of the well known banks into the unknown. A line of deliberately placed rocks formed a barrier placed there by our elders before the bank sloped down into a basin no one could ever really explain for as long as I could remember. Part of it seemed natural. Curving into the river itself in a strange damn like formation while the rest of the river behind the barrier flowed in and around it undisturbed at its own current. On the other side of the depression it was hard to see the full extent of the basin. Some water would get caught in this grove as though storing away for a drought while the river beyond it rushed and slowed in intervals seemingly removed from the current here. Surrounded by jagged rocks, the calm waters here never overflowed or dried up. But even on the driest months, no on came here.

I never liked to come close to here either, seeing it for the first time in years made it hard to forget the suppressed memories but I was here now and there was nothing to it. I stared for a while not knowing how to proceed, “Just one minute Mpho.” I said to no one, pretending she was with me as we like she used to be.

“Come see.” She answered besides me and my body was temporarily frozen.

I do not know the face I made while I stood there staring at a dead girl seemingly alive but it must have been funny because she laughed in the soft way she always had and then shoved my shoulder in a gesture that seemed to say “stop overreacting”. A very real, very tangible hand motioned towards the centre of the basin while she exaggerated her expressions as though speaking to a child “Come.” My shoulder burned with the memory of that hand, her eyes alight with something.

“Mpho?” I whispered, afraid to end the dream, she smiled and headed straight for the water.

“Mpho?” I called again, louder this time as I struggled to not turn back in fear. I followed her. Asking myself if dead girls could die again in the same waters they had the first time. My head spun with thoughts of the impossible.

“The elders-“ I pushed, “My Maani says never to come here. It’s cursed.” Blood rushed through my ears with the same uncontrolled urgency as my voice tried to reach her, stop her, make her hear me somehow.  Instead I reached the end of the slope and had a new moment of foreboding. She had already walked in and I could not think up ways to bring her back to me.

Was this it? Was this somehow the curse? Why was this place forbidden?

She smiled just then as though privy to my thoughts, “Because they don’t want you to see it.”

“See what?” My voice broke and she continued to swim.

“See what Mpho?”

“Get inside and see.”

I didn’t get a chance to ask what again before she slipped under the water.

“Mpho? Mpho?!” No matter how many times I said her name even as she broke through the surface again and again, she did not look back until she’d reached the middle, settling in to float near the surface. She waited like nothing was wrong.

“You drowned?”

“Come inside.”

“You died.”

“Come inside Mantwa. Come, you’ll see.”

I knew she would not answer. Starring across at her she stared back and waited as stubbornly as I had when I had refused her requests before. I wanted to run back and never return but I couldn’t. Mpho was alive in front of me and my blood seemed to be screaming every manner of grief I could hold. Nothing made sense. She would disappear, and something precious would die. No one would ever believe me.

For a moment my vision went white and then I breathed my first real breath since her death. I would not leave.

I took my dress off and entered. It was thoughtless from then on, a desperate attempt to not panic, I glided into the glassy waters with my heart stuttering in anticipation. I would tell no one that I entered these waters, no one but Mpho would know, if she was still alive tomorrow and this whole tragedy was a dream then it would be worth it. In the split second as I entered I wondered if I should share my other memory with her....and then decided not to.

It was warm for one, warmer than any river had any right to be, the water was light and easy to swim in. Nervously kicking my feet against a bottomless pit, I focused all my attention on getting to Mpho. Singing a wordless tune, she languidly played in the water while waiting for me to reach her. No birds sang with her.

Finally reaching the middle I looked to find her waiting still, barely kicking if at all. She showed no signs of strain and I could not hold it in anymore. The water seemed eerily undisturbed.

“How are you here?” I forced one last time.

“The same way you’re here.” She said and just like that a storehouse of suppressed memory tumbled open. Deliberately turning her head to her left, she indicated with the most delicate of nods. Carefully and cautiously, I turned my head towards the same direction.

The thing about grief I find, is that it sets you wandering as aimlessly in what used to be familiar. There’s no way to say how it happened really, one moment all was normal and the next the world had shifted and I was staring back at my four year old self crossing the river in my father’s arms, eyes locked on mine as she trembled, afraid to show her father the girl on the other side of the rocks. My voice stuttered, I could not fathom what I was seeing. Both a memory and now a vision juxtaposed next to my reality which had split into two. My breath caught and I spiralled. I began to lose shape.

“Mph-“

Rising as suddenly as the wind churning with unnatural motion, the young girl that was me disappeared from sight. I jerked to find purchase as the first wave of water smashed into me but there was no point, driving me into the unknown depths I did not have a body with which to swim in. I had already died, kicking and screaming for existence itself in some non-corporeal form. And in the Abi’s depths I saw the image of Mpho’s fading body. Sightless and old, she was the river itself, her water buried into my essence as it had once my body. A body which had died some weeks ago.

At the tender age of four I had seen the same soul gaze across at me from this very basin and said nothing. While a single mother of two had wailed for the rescue of her lost son among the desensitized group I had known he would not come back. No one helped her, we were too used to death even then. When I had looked into the eyes of the Abi six years ago, I saw my death and promptly erased it from my mind and again some weeks ago upstream when Mpho, Mpho who was the Abi, had dragged me under. I had tossed myself outside of my body as though the fish I had tossed out of the water so many months before. My only remaining wish to take my spirit home where I belonged.

Like cataracts removed from the eyes I had recognised her on that fateful day weeks ago and she had rushed over me with a force unparalleled. Somehow her camouflage had shifted and I could not unsee it, only forget as death permits.

It seemed strange to say now after I had ran so fast from the Abi I’d left my memory and body behind. Suddenly my family home did not seem so strange anymore, how no one could bare to see me even as they bared me for weeks in silence. It was me they had buried in bewildered grief and me who had haunted them. Haunted? Just as Mpho did to me.

Eternity stretched on into nothing and I continued to lose sense. It seemed funny now how Grandma warned of the night and creatures made out of ghost stories to trap the brave and foolish, but here I was already dead in the stomach of a river no one trusted to begin with in broad daylight. I could no longer see the surface, only darkness. And as the water steadied with belying calmness I saw the last few months of my life pass by again.

She was and is a smart creature, Mpho, clever enough to conceal her nature well. She was only ever a glimpse, on a glimpse you caught so many times, it solidified into the existence of a girl everyone knew without any thought or knowledge to her origins. More than anything, she had been my friend, a terrible mark of death since the day we met. I had loved her and  she had loved me as any predator would their next meal. One day, you simply meet the Abi as it is and then there is no turning back.

Now as I succumbed to the waters in exhaustion I could see nothing but the river, its hunger satiated with the source of my life and its banks once again swelling. This is why Grandma called it cursed even if she did not understand why. She had said it in the way all trees could turn into crocodiles in the right angle, only a vague sense of knowing. While we eat to survive and it survives to eat, fully aware of the mouths that need it and the hands that feed it. The Abi was indeed a moody moody river.