I hope I didn’t lead you on there, with the new neighbour.

I expect I did though.

I’m just telling you now that it didn’t amount to anything really. Well, in the two weeks (or so) that had elapsed since he had moved in next door. Please accept my sincerest apologies; but then again, you shouldn’t have gotten your hopes up.

Usually when you pick up a book and it starts like that – with the protagonist spotting some guy and taking some interest, that’s just the writer setting you up for the grand tale of their torrid love affair.

Well, you came to the wrong place for all that. Sure, I’d like to have one great love someday, (though not like those stupid idiots Romeo and Juliet who went and killed each other) and get married and the whole lot of it (more about that later) but this is Malawi. Things like that don’t happen here.

Or at least, they don’t happen to me.

My interest in Sven (I hope you remember that that’s not his real name) was actually a hangover from my growing up attending international schools. They were a mixing pot of ethnicities and races and religions. There was never a dull moment. Now that I was attending a University in the Country, all that variety was gone.

Don’t go labelling me a racist just yet, but seeing only black people all the time got a bit… drab. I missed white people, and Indians and Coloureds and Asians. I missed the quirks of each race. I’ll give you a couple of examples so you know where I’m coming from.

See, Indians were all so beautiful. Even if they weren’t, they were exotic. There was the material aspect- all the best clothes and latest gadgets and vast quantities of candy (which to be quite frank with you, enough to get a younger me to make a deal with a demon).

The boys all gelled their hair. The girls had the most beautiful handwriting and were horribly clever and had thick dark hair and (as if it weren’t hard enough for the likes of little butterballs like me) were all painfully skinny, delicate little things. I was a fat greasy-faced black girl with coarse stiff hair.

They giggled. I cackled.

And have you experienced Indian culture? Mendhi, saris, the food and spices… -Bollywood! Sure, I may have been culturally appropriating, but it seemed much lovelier than my chitenjes and nsima.

There did seem to be an element of inapproachability lingering around some of them though. They tended to stick to their groups and their parents all knew each other or were related somehow… they even had their own sort of accent… anyway, it was some clique I could never be a part of, but could only observe with apparent envy from a distance.

Even in terms of religion, the Hindus had beautiful thousands of Gods; and the Muslims seemed so much more… devoted to Islam and its teachings than Christians did to theirs. They’d fast over Ramadan and then celebrate when Eid came with Indian sweets – I mean, just picture the food.

Picture it.

White people- I mean, come on. When I was little, I used to put a towel over my head and tuck it behind my ears and pretend to have long flowing blonde hair and blue eyes. If that doesn’t say tell you something about me then I don’t know what does.

I have seen black people with beautiful eyes. Caramels with flecks of gold and grey and hazel… mine are just a dull black-brown.

There was a time I liked this boy in high school. He was white and I thought that even though my eyes were a boring old shade of brown, they held a hidden beauty. After shining a torch into my eyes, I came to believe that when the sun shone in my face, they’d suddenly go clear and he’d see this beautiful rich, glassy sort of brown instead of the usual.

I caught my reflection one day, when the sun shone with its full force into my face. I was squinting so much; you could barely tell I had eyes. I just looked like a glossy potato because my skin was so oily.

That was the end of that.

So, although I did grow up in a cultural mixing pot, I had come to think that even if I did like Sven, the odds were not stacked in my favour.

I tended to stick to people with brown eyes.

Out of the brown eyed people, I stuck to guys who were at my level physically. They couldn’t be solid tens. I mean I didn’t date ones, because I have a nice face and killer personality (if I do say so myself); but you know, I learned to have standards.

Out of these guys, I learned to stick to those who’d take me.

So, when someone said something like “plenty more fish in the sea”, I pictured the reality of my dating pool and realised that it was just that. A pool. -And not just any pool. Mine was a wading pool.

I really do hate that I go off on tangents like that. The point I was trying to make was, Sven was a fish in the sea, but I was prohibited from ever going into the sea, you see?

(Did you catch that rhyme?)

I’m smart, I’ll admit to that. I know better than to go off liking someone I’d never have a chance with. It’d end like Romeo and Juliet too – only I’d be the only one who was dead. From humiliation, and from the car that’d hit me when I lay in the middle of the road because of the humiliation.

Anyway, I’d barely gotten a look at Sven. Maybe up close he was so ugly it’d look like he’d seen the Arc of the Tabernacle in person. I was only interested in him because he was white. Like I told you, I missed white people.

I wanted to show him (in my head) that in a way, I was one of the international people.

Of course, he was older than I was too. A house, beard and a teaching job at the high school? He seemed horribly grown up.

I’d yet to catch myself successfully adulting. I mean, technically I was an adult, but whenever I said it to myself in my head, I’d laugh a little. I felt a lot like a dog taking itself for a walk; leash held rather unconvincingly in its mouth.

Although I did feel the adult-ness creeping in sometimes -like when I was around teenagers. They all seemed to be vapid little shits and know-it-alls. I refuse to believe I was ever one of them.

Also, I found that I had no idea who some of the newer models and celebrities were, nor did I care, although there seemed to be a lot of them. And the latest music all sounded too loud and electronically dance-y. I really hated it.

So, you get the point; so far, my holiday efforts were focused on me trying to successfully adult. Meanwhile, I’d taken an innocent (but silly) interest in the new neighbour.

I’m such an introvert that I couldn’t actually be bothered to go out and spy on him or anything, so I forgot about Sven over the next couple of weeks.

Instead I went out for lunch with a couple of friends from High school, hoping they wouldn’t notice how much weight I’d gained; but instead the blazer I’d worn in an attempt at looking grown up at least. So that’s what I did, and I even pulled out a pair of wedges for the occasion.

This lunch was in itself no extraordinary affair; the four of us always made it a point to meet up at the same restaurant every time our holidays coincided.

First, there was Mariah (not mah-rye-ah like Mariah Carey, but Mar-Yah). She was Indian but Malawian at heart and had dyed her hair a beautiful golden colour (from the inky-black tresses she had grown up with) and now sported a short choppy bob-cut. She’d always been tiny, but now had filled in in that way skinny people do when they transition from teen to adult. Now you’d say she was slim and not skinny; and could say this even though she was dressed rather conservatively, as per usual. She’d also grown quite attractively into her large eyes and thin lips.

Mariah was always my go-to friend in English, and drama and French. To a certain extent, we were both old souls and kindred spirits in that respect and tended to laugh at the same things and read the same books.

On the other hand, Janna (who also had a bob-cut now; apparently, I hadn’t gotten the memo) and I had bonded over our love for boys. Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t sluts, but were those sorts of girls who talked a lot about boys and wanting boyfriends but never actually dated any in high school. We only ever liked them; you see.

We didn’t have much in common, she was a tall sporty girl of an athletic build with grey-green eyes and sandy-blonde hair. I (as you know by now) wasn’t. She also had a sort of wide-eyed, Christian innocence about her. Despite this, she still grew up with an inclination towards that pop-punk scene, boasting the likes of Avril Lavigne. This had now matured to a love for classic rock; Bon Jovi and AC/DC now featured heavily on her playlist.

But I think deep down we were both sort of… forever types of girls. We both wanted that great love in a generation of people who slept around and never labelled anything. We’d lie awake at our sleepover talking about what it’d be like when we got married and had kids and all that, or what our first kiss would be like.

The romantic in me found a friend in the romantic in her; and as different as we were growing up, we were best friends.

Lastly, there was Noor, Mariah’s best friend. She and I had never been particularly close if I’m honest. She was always good for a laugh, but we’d never sort of clicked in the way that I had with Janna and Mariah.

She was probably the smartest out of the four of us, and always seemed to be laughing at something or the other. I suppose she could have been laughing at the rest of us, because we must have seemed to have the intelligence of single celled organisms to her.

Her eyes were the same colour as mine, and all she ever did in the way of makeup was draw around them with a thin black eyeliner pencil, but somehow, she managed to make them seem both mysterious and magical. With her long hair (always flat-ironed within an inch of its life) and darker skin, the combined effect gave the sense that she’d been an Egyptian queen in another life. Anyway, that’s where she was from, but she too was undoubtedly Malawian at heart.

So, all four of us had been in school together since pre-nursery, and stuck together all through high-school. Sure, we’d made other friends along the way, and had other friends now, but we’d never lost contact, not once. This seemed the trend too; to slowly lose contact with people you’d been joined at the hip with a few years ago, but I never felt it with these three. I’d often get the urge to tell them things or check on how they were doing, and they were always there. I imagined they’d be there if/when I ever married too.

Not to say we were all still best friends or as close as we had been in high-school. In fact, fearing the occasion when an awkward silence would one day rear its ugly head in our conversations, I never met any of them alone, but always tried to have at least one of the others there. If I ever ran out of things to say, I could play my favourite role, which was to be a spectator to their conversation.

So, while we share thin-crust pizzas, I tell them about my sort-of boyfriend, but leave out the part about him being boring. They tell me about the various universities they’re attending. Noor had returned to Egypt; Mariah was studying in England and Janna in Germany.

(This is actually a bit of a sore spot for me, because I feel stuck in Malawi and they seemed to be living it up abroad; but I do my best to listen.)

Because you might still be hoping to hear about the new neighbour, I find it pertinent to add that nothing is said of him; although Janna’s dad does work at the high-school too.

Lunch passes finishes without incident, and as we’re leaving, we all promise to do this again soon; knowing that we’ll only get around to it in another year or so. I think about this on the short drive home and conclude that yes, I am successfully adulting.