You sit in the train, thrusting yourself deeper and deeper into your book and have reached the part where this woman you adore is describing the exact same route you are on. You look up, and smile greedily, at sharing a part of life together with her. Already, you have walked through the grief of arriving at Yale after her fellowship ended. It was a short moment of crude disappointment which you consoled by telling yourself, you could not have jumped in time into university to meet her. This adds to the current stockpile of remorse you have slowly accumulated as you’ve read the book, mourning the possibility of never knowing her and have compromised on the grace to gulp in her words, and feel your heart swell and flip pages to re-read her brilliance over and over. Then she speaks to you. Yes, Sisonke speaks to me. She taught at Yale, she took this very train to New York. And you look up, satisfied with seeing a part of yourself in her because you want to write just like her. You want to make words run and float and stagger like she does.

Then words are thrown at you, I just wanted to say I am a fan and your style is beautiful and you now have an accent so where are you from? I string together his words, trying to make sentences. He is bent over, leaning inside my seat, his small face with milk skin and small bumps. He looks gentle, but my heart has quickened because he is saying sweet things that I cannot understand. I want to hear the sentences but in his rush to be brief and respectful, he doesn’t understand I am frantically trying to clutch his words like chasing a fly with a kitchen towel. I lean in, breaching my right to personal space which he interprets as consent so stands and says more things and looks at my bag on the seat next to me then on the seat across from me and finally decided on the armrest of that seat across. You’re not sure if it is the force of the train or the panic you’re trying to fold away that makes him keep the distance but you are relieved. A bit surprised but it calmly reinforces your feelings about his gentleness. You ask, “How are you a fan and you don’t even know me?” He doesn’t understand you, so you slow down which does little to get the message across because the slower you speak, the more space you give your accent to fill into. By now, you have seen the white man at the corner of his seat a row behind you looking up from his phone, once and twice and thrice fishing for a sign of danger and perhaps preparing to be a comrade to a woman. You know it is more out of nosiness rather than concern but you clutch onto his interest as if it was a safety net you could fall into later. His lithe body snakes its away around me and pokes his head into the window space between us. His voice is magnified into my ear, resonant bass trickling into my head and brushing across my heart until I am smiling. I can see his face clearer now and notice some soft coils sitting pretty on his head. In fact, he is pretty which I might have told him if I wasn’t too occupied smiling and stifling my laughter at his sweetness. He is convinced that my style has marked me as foreign and wants to know where I’m from. I focus on his face, and consider lying because his question feels annoyingly simple. He has found me many months into my assimilation. I’m convinced where I’m from will not encapsulate the half hour I spent trying top on top of tops, throwing off skirts, tying my purple scarf around my waist, my scarf with green yellow and purple mosaic, slipping into my cheetah pointed heels, clasping my brass bangles and combing my afro out. It will not explain how I jump from piece to piece until I feel the colours are just right, the right amount of brightness and jaggedness as prints clash and collide.

I’ve been worn down with too many grazes and scrapes from people trying to dig around my past. I’m also grappling with my own fall from exceptionalism which isn’t his fault, but it is where he finds me. I was so so special I made it to America, my young African self, but now I feel as if my novelty has worn off and I’m just a woman. It was almost as if I had more to learn about being a woman that it didn’t matter whether I had come from home or not. Where I was from didn’t matter when I had to figure out more important things like my major and making money and networking with people. I was a woman unraveling from the girl I used to be and losing strands of home in the destruction.

What if I said I’m black or from New Jersey? The longer I stared at him, the more I felt like he would think I didn’t understand him and would keep saying sweet things so I gave him what he wanted. But I did juggle the thought before I did. My lie would puncture his investigation right down to the bottom I knew it. But it might have been funny to see his tongue retract and his lips sewn shut. Maybe he would lose the air inside him that buoyed him all around me and behind my ears and into my cheeks causing me to smile and wilt into appreciation because he was gentle to the very end as he pleaded to leave and not intrude any more of my day. I wish I had told him how he had just pumped something sweet and thrilling into me. I would have, but he had hoisted me far away from courtesy into another space, one where I was special, and pretty and different and I liked to remember that feeling.