Chapter 2

I have always been different. I felt it early, even if I didn’t have the words for it. I never really felt like I fit in—not in the way I thought other children did, not in the way the world seemed to expect. There was a distance between me and the lives around me, a thin glass I could see through but could not break. The other children laughed and played in ways that seemed effortless, while I watched, I observed, I felt everything too much or too little. I experienced life emotion to emotion, image by image. Like sorting out the frame from the puzzle pieces, trying to find where each piece belonged.

I remember sitting in the garden, the grass cool beneath me, the banana trees swaying in a breeze I could feel but not hold. I would pick a wild strawberry, hold it in my palm, and study it as if it held a secret. The red was so deep, so perfect, that it seemed to pulse with its own life. I would bite into it slowly, letting the sweetness spread across my tongue, and in that moment, I was not different. I was just a child, tasting a strawberry in a garden that loved her. But the feeling never lasted. The moment would pass, and the glass would slide back into place.

I learned to navigate the world through emotion. Joy came in bursts—the warmth of my mother’s hand, the smell of rain on dry earth, the sight of a butterfly landing on a banana leaf. But other emotions came too, ones I didn’t understand. A heaviness that settled in my chest for no reason I could name. A sadness that arrived without a story. A fear that had no shape but was real enough to touch. I didn’t know then that these were the puzzle pieces of a life I was still learning to see. I only knew they were there, and they were mine.

The facebrick house stood solid through all of it. Its reddish-brown walls held the heat of the day and released it slowly at night, like a living thing breathing out its warmth. I would press my cheek against the bricks sometimes, feeling the rough texture against my skin, grounding myself in something that did not change. The foundation, especially, drew me. It was the place where the house met the earth, where the weight of everything above rested on something unseen. I would squat down and run my fingers along the line where brick met soil, wondering what lay beneath. Was it stone? Concrete? Something deeper, older, that held the house in place? I didn’t know then that I was asking the same question about myself.

Day by day, year by year, I gathered the pieces. Not deliberately, not with any plan. They came to me in moments—a flash of sunlight through leaves, the sound of my own laughter echoing off a wall, the taste of a strawberry still warm from the vine. Each piece was a frame from a film I was only beginning to understand. I stored them not in a box, but in the marrow of my bones, in the quiet corners of my heart where memory lives without words.

But the pieces did not always fit. Some were jagged, their edges sharp, and when I tried to press them together, they cut. Those were the painful memories—the ones I did not want to hold but could not let go. They came as images too: a door closing, a voice raised, a silence that stretched too long. I did not understand them either. They were just pieces, scattered on the floor of my mind, waiting for a picture I could not yet see.

And then there were the absent pieces—the holes in the puzzle where a memory should have been but was not. I would reach for them and find only empty space, a gap that ached like a missing tooth. I wondered what had been there, what I had forgotten, what had been taken from me or what I had hidden from myself. The foundation of the house seemed to know, but it would not tell. It just sat there, patient and silent, holding its secrets in the earth below.

I think that is why I keep returning to that garden, to that facebrick house, to that foundation. It is not just a memory—it is a map. A map of a life I am still learning to read. The wild strawberries mark the places where sweetness grew despite the odds. The banana trees mark the places where resilience took root. The foundation marks the place where everything began, and where everything might one day be understood.

There is a door I am trying to unlock. Not a physical door, but a door in the mind, in the heart, in the soul. It is the door between wonder and knowing, between not fitting in and understanding why. I have stood at that door for as long as I can remember, my hand on the knob, waiting for the right key. And the key, I am beginning to see, is the puzzle itself. The pieces I have gathered, the frames I have saved, the emotions I have felt—they are not random. They are the pattern. They are the picture. They are the answer I have been looking for.

I remember a moment, one of the good ones. I was lying on my back in the garden, the banana leaves forming a canopy above me. The sun filtered through, dappling my arms and legs with light. A wild strawberry, picked moments before, rested on my stomach, rising and falling with my breath. I closed my eyes and let the world wash over me—the sound of birds, the rustle of leaves, the distant hum of a lawnmower from a house down the street. In that moment, I was not different. I was not separate. I was part of something, woven into the fabric of the day, no more or less important than the strawberry or the tree or the soil beneath me.

That moment is one of the frames I carry with me. It is a piece that fits, smooth and perfect, into the puzzle I am still assembling. And when I hold it, I remember that the door does not need to be forced. It will open when the last piece is in place, when the picture is complete, when I have gathered enough of the frames to see the whole story.

The foundation is still there, in my mind, solid and waiting. The wild strawberries still grow, tucked under their leaves. The banana trees still bow in the wind. And I am still here, standing at the edge of the scene, sorting through the pieces, feeling the emotions that call each image forth. I do not know how long it will take to fit them all together. But I know that I will keep gathering, keep sorting, keep trying. Because the door is there, and I want to walk through it.

From wonder to knowing. From not fitting in to understanding why. That is the journey I am on, and it began in a garden in Alberton, Gauteng, in a facebrick house with a foundation that holds more than walls. It holds the promise of answers—answers I am only beginning to find, one memory, one emotion, one image at a time.