It scattered with the others onto the parquet floor of my London flat—
just another handful of post. Flyers, bills, charity requests.
The letterbox snapped shut with its usual clatter.
I padded over barefoot, tea forgotten on the side table. The light slanted low, catching the thin blue edge of an airmail envelope. It lay half-buried among the pile,
but something in me knew.
I knelt. My fingers hovered, hesitant. My heart pounding with that strange, wordless knowing.
It was addressed to me.
But the name in the corner—Makange.
I sat cross-legged on the floor, the letter in my lap, staring at the script.
Familiar. Careful. Impossible.
He had been gone six months.
When I opened it, orange dust spilled through my fingers, settling into the creases of my jeans.
The scent of Tanzanian soil—warm, meaty, alive—rose to meet me. I paused.
I remembered once catching him sweeping my footprints from the threshold of our project house in Kambai. He’d joked—spoken like a joke, but carried like a ritual—that if he sent them to the medicine man, it would help ensure I returned. If I wanted.
Now here was this letter. And this dust. And this quiet, impossible moment.
I pressed the paper to my face, breathing in memory.
Tears fell—hot, sudden, unstoppable—mingling with ink and earth. A soft alchemy.
His son had found the letter tucked in a folder after Makange died. Unsent.
He had finished it, but perhaps it had simply been lost in the fold of everyday living—left resting in a drawer or beneath a stack of papers, waiting for the right moment to move.
And somehow, it did.
It made its way to me.
I could see us again—
in the backyard of the project house.
Me, writing letters home to my parents and friends.
Him beside me, pretending to write too, watching, always watching.
“You write so much,” he’d say, with mock exasperation and genuine admiration.
“I start… but then I get stuck. I don’t know what to say!”
But this time, he had found the words.
He had finished.
Inside, he asked after my family. Said he’d heard we’d welcomed a baby.
He told me about the rains, the harvest, the quiet loneliness of the project.
He told me he’d been unwell.
And then, near the end, the question that echoed across the veil:
“Is it really true that we will meet again?”
I held my baby close.
I laughed through the tears.
And I danced—right there in the living room,
dust falling from my jeans,
the letter against my chest.
Tu-ta-o-na-na te-na.
We will see each other again, I whisper,
as I brushed my fingers across the ink on the page.
This letter that I received almost twenty five years ago, was the most memorable letter I have ever opened.
Not because it came late—
but because it arrived at the perfect time.
A letter of love, carried across the threshold of life and death.
A message that took the time it needed to find me.
He may never have got around to posting it,
lost in the fold of everyday living.
Not lost.
Just lingering at the threshold
until I opened the door.
A Call To Reflect
- What have you left in the folds of everyday living?
- What letter have you not yet sent? What truth or tenderness waits in its folds?
- What is lingering at the threshold, waiting for you to open the door?