I arrived in Hungary a year ago today. I took a three-hour taxi from the airport and settled into my hotel room. The following afternoon, I walked to my small city's downtown, heard a new language and experienced a dry heat I did not think Europe was capable of. I asked a tourist store employee where to get a bus ticket, and she directed me to one of the national tobacco stores.

A year later, I'm familiar with the two-and-three-quarter-hour train ride to and from Budapest; I have the just-functional Hungarian transit apps. And I'm sitting cross-legged, alone, on the balcony of my shared apartment. I curse the heat every time I stand up, and smile when I hear people talking as they walk by outside.

Here, I want to speak the distance traversed between these two points: what it means for me to be far from the things that I knew, adjusting my various identities to where I am, the relationships that bind me to each place, and finally, how I pass my time in each of those places.

To facilitate this discussion, I will also speak about a duology that I read towards the end of the summer, The Pandominion by M.R. Carey. Briefly, it is a science fiction story about multiverses and what can happen when variations on a theme meet each other. When I was reading it, I felt it gave me a language for articulating the past year.

Defining Space

Before I get into the essay, there are two terms from The Pandominion that I want to elucidate. First is 'multiverse,' which I will refer to regularly. The second, 'stepping,' is not directly spoken about in the essay, but the concept was on my mind while I was writing, thus its implications lie behind my discussions concerning distance and travelling.

Firstly, the premise of The Pandominion's world is the existence of the 'multiverse', an infinite realm of being of which our universe is regarded as an instance. It opens with scientist Hadiz Tambuwal, living on our earth after it has been further ravaged by climate change and nuclear war, discovering other universes. In the books' world, the multiverse is an infinite variation of events that could happen on our earth since the Big Bang: a different species wins the evolutionary race instead; varying speeds of technological advances; different languages, fauna and flora; and of course, an infinite number of other differences. Additionally, when we are introduced to the multiverse, it is coordinated by an empire called the Pandominion, from whence the duology gets its name. As "a thing of monstrous size" (31, Infinity Gate), it grapples with the political and economic interests of hundreds of thousands of worlds, exacerbating all the problems that we have seen arise from international co-ordination.

But The Pandominion does not just posit infinite variations: it considers infinity with a fractal character. While Tambuwal is searching for a suitable twin of our earth, she is first stymied by the fact that she has an infinite set of variables and ranges to work with, because it is impossible to make a meaningful decision with an infinite set of choices. However, following the logic of infinity, "[e]very universe would have an infinite number of near-identical twins" and "that figure would be dwarfed by the number of worlds that are utterly unlike world one except for a single detail." After thousands of trials, she has to take "one step back," and notice the recursions occurring. "Two steps back and you could capture them, lock, stock and barrel, in a mathematical formula." Now, infinity is something navigable. (50, Infinity Gate)

In this essay, I have lifted that premise and applied it to life. There are behavioural patterns that occur on almost every level and facet of my life: what I once looked at as unique joys and sorrows showed themselves as consistent responses to feelings and events. I am not sure if this sounds like explaining away feelings with logic. It feels like the opposite to me: there is almost no meaningful langauge to define how each unique experience reifies the pattern (me) which it reflects and extends.

Moreover, while I won't speak about it extensively in the following essay, I don't want it to be taken for granted the forms of life in these parallel universes. In our reality, we're descended from apes, whereas in the story's other universes, rabbits, hedgehogs, felines, or canines win the race. Again, all patterns play themselves out on a larger scale: the feline predator natures remains, lagomorphs flight response never disappears, and apes' "aggressive and competitive instincts" (332, Infinity Gate) often kill us before we reach the rest of the multiverse. This facet of the story reinforces that I cannot take survival for granted, or that success is the natural result: for all my hard work, sometimes it's one turn of luck and a lot of desperation that makes the final difference between success and failure.

My second point concerns travel. In our reality, earth is a combination of water and landmasses, with locations bringing about particular conditions of life. It matters to us that we can overcome these distances and bring your conditions of life to my life. In The Pandominion, travel between worlds is termed "stepping," which is well-defined in the novel, but for the purposes of this essay, it is a mode of travel where an object is moved from its location in universe A to the exact same location in universe B, which takes just under 3 seconds. This extends the complexity of what we know as borders and 'globalisation,' but, as things develop, you realise it's just the same story, on a larger scale.

With that preamble, I'm ready to talk about my life.

Distance

A planet-sized, omniscient being, Mother Mass, and a lagomorph, Paz, argue about saving lives in an ongoing war. The Mother Mass says, "Death — the kind of death you mean — is no more real than distance is," (414, Echo of Worlds) having previously said that distance was not real. Paz realises that there is, ironically, an insurmountable difference between perspectives. When you're planet-sized, everything is with you and you are forever. When you're small, your composite world sprawls, most of it out your immediate reach, with your mortality ticking downwards; every distinction matters.

I've been considering how these perspectives apply to self-discovery, the process of learning who you are. Some folks go on silent retreats and others go on multinational jaunts to discover themselves, and either side can be incomprehensible to the other. On the one hand, the woman who has spent her life being talked down to might only echo and reinforce those thoughts in solitude, whereas the noise of the busy world gives her the space to cause some trouble of her own. On the other hand, the woman who knows herself only relationally finds it easy to erase the borders of her-self, but in solitude, she has to think on what separates her from nothingness. But even with the knowledge of how a different path from yours would help another person, a part of you may still find an inherent danger in another set of coping mechanisms.

For that, I can understand why, but I've been asked a frustrating question several times by several people over the years: don't you think you're running away from something? Don't you think you're running away from figuring yourself out? In the lingo of this essay, are you trying to put distance between who you were and who you are?

Am I running away?

Did I leave South Africa because I felt so dangerously unhappy with myself towards the end of high school, and I felt I couldn't experiment with happiness while surrounded by everyone who had ever known me? Did I leave Toronto because I didn't want to do the tough work of labouring for permanent residence, bleeding money? Did I move away each time because it no longer made sense to be where I was?

Yes, yes, yes, I ran away, of course, I ran. With absolute certainty, I can say staying put would have killed me. Much like Tambuwal, I knew I had to go outwards, but the possible options and my capabilities made it feel like a shot in the dark — not even the dark, into the void of space — to make that leap. It was out of calculated desperation that I applied to the University of Toronto. More, it was sheer, unexpected luck that it was the only university that accepted me (thus 'forcing' me to go there), and that I was offered a partial bursary for first year, making moving even a possibility. I ran because I was suffering staying put, and I am still running because there's more of me to unpack.

This physical displacement from the places I've lived in has enabled me "to put then and now in the same perspective and get some parallax on both" (363, Infinity Gate). Being alone and far away means that I have to make decisions that satisfy me. From the frivolous to the serious, I needed the distance to see what I would want if I just considered myself. I took "one step back" moving to Toronto, the newfound sense of freedom revealing that I had been scared of being seen trying new things. I took "two steps back" moving to Hungary, and realised that I had been terrified of being seen making mistakes while trying new things. But until I ran, it did not feel like fear: it felt like failure. Failure to be as happy, daring, and comfortable as I had been. It didn't click that I had to redefine these things as I matured.

In particular, my distance from my home forces me to test with the malleability of my personality, before even delving as deep as my identity. I was worried that facing some of these fears and making mistakes would make me interact with the world differently. But I was telling Tanaka, a high school friend, about some chaotic night out that had felt so unlike me, and she said, "Of course you ended up there." Yes, I ran. I've come all this way, and to her, her friend's feet were still planted in the ground; there are just new branches.

Race and Othering

Essien Nkanika, one of the main characters in The Pandominion, is consistently trapped in circumstances assigned to him, and through much suffering and pain, he gets to exit the pre-generated tragedy before it kills him outright. Nkanika was born into an alternate Lagos in a world not inducted into the Pandominion. He comes into the world wanting, he's enslaved and released, finding himself hustling until his luck runs out, and then he is enlisted into the Cielo, the standing army of the Pandominion. But, despite being 'in' (finally), he still feels the burn of coming from a world that's not.

During his training, he is taught a lesson on killing without remorse. The instructor describes their victims as exactly like Nkanika, but exempts him: they are from an unlucky place, a powerless place, and the appropriate punishment for weakness is a nameless death. It was only on the second read that Nkanika's revulsion struck me, because that insidious logic is what I hear behind every use of the monolithic "Africa"— but what's worse, like him, I can feel a little relief from my luck.

There is fortuity in being on this side of the line, but small talk on politics reduces my entire continent (its people, its food, its language, its music, its wealth, its suffering) to a developmental issue, the easy butt of a worn-out joke. I've found myself in a confusing place. I'm very removed from my home country; there are deep socio-political issues we grapple with. But, what on earth do you say when, sure, home is not paradise, but it is yours? I don't think there are enough words to look into a stranger's eye and ask that they not only see you (because of course they like you, so you're in), but all that you are.

While it took him a while, Nkanika did not ask for that grace, because to ask is to imply that personhood can be granted. He comes across people like the victims in that original lesson, and he helps, because it's a pattern of violence, and if there are infinitely many patterns, then he can be in the one where it's disrupted. He tries and tries and tries. Despite being lucky, he had understands that to hurt them is to hurt himself, repeating the same tragedy. Before this realisation, he had exempted himself and treated the world as if it owed him compensation. Funnily enough, I think it was his time in the army that assisted in this shift of relating to the world: "He understood for the first time what 'unit' meant: it meant being one and being together" (154, Infinity Gate). If he wanted to be cared for and understood, he had to care and understand those who crossed his path.

Now, I'm not a character in a book, and I don't have the stomach or politics to be in the army, but I do have the same burden of walking among people who do not realise just how small they see those like me. Sometimes it feels like the only thing I can do it bear witness: talk about my family (my sibling, Imitha, is rehearsing for a musical); about my childhood (yeah, we were on drought watch for a few years when I was in high school); about my food (it's like a donut, but it's not a donut); about my history (it's because people were forcibly removed from their homes). And hoping that while I talk about our past, I figure out how my home and I make sense together now.

Friendship

When I first moved to Toronto, I had intrusive thoughts that my plane would fall out of the sky before I got there; that the anxiety would be forever stored as a very unfortunate what-could-have-been. I was invited to visit Toronto by friends this summer, and spent a few weeks there. On this return journey, I was worried that each stage of travelling would go wrong, from the visa application to border control. I think it's my brain's twisted way of protecting me from worrying about disappointment: I displace the anxiety into situations almost completely out of my control to overwhelm the fear that I can so easily disappoint everyone— or so it feels.

Here, I will speak about my friends, people I choose to be around for no other reason than they're lovely and make me feel more myself. Particularly, in line with the theme of this essay, I'll comment how it's largely through these dynamics that the patterns of who I am reveal themselves. I'll speak about how friendships reinforce belonging through shared history, learning who my friends are, and comment briefly on the different foundations for friendships.

Until I was back there, laughing and catching up with my friends and ex-colleagues, it had no longer felt like I had a life in Toronto. It was, yes, I lived in Toronto for a couple of years, and my friend in Toronto. But when I hugged Lucy again on Bloor Street next to the Varsity Centre, I knew certainly that there is a part of me tied to them; I'm not just holding onto memories. Not only had I lived here, I was remembered here and there are people who love me that live here.

But the real pleasure of coming back was seeing how much more there was to my friends: that they were who I remembered, and there was more to discover. I knew them through stories, through jokes, through gameplays, but there were still so many new situations to see them in— new suns with which to illuminate them.

I invited my friends to a writing open mic at Bampot House that I was performing at. Friends were introduced and re-introduced to each other, and we all fussed over what drinks to try. Dave, the game master for my regular Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) group, decided to read some stories that he had written long ago. I had always thought he had a very enjoyable, tongue-in-cheek way of storytelling, but to hear him read stories that were over fifteen years old warmed me, because I got to see that that is just who he is: a storyteller who looks from a corner of the room, revealing the world to listeners in unexpected ways. I suppose the pleasure is in realising that you know enough about a person for a pattern to even begin to emerge; that a single commitment spins out of control into nights learning the hills folks will die on during a DnD game.

My fortune in knowing people from different places, borne from different upbringings has had me think on how the nature of my friendships in South Africa, Europe, and Toronto are each different. In South Africa, it's we-grew-up-together with our interests developing and being influenced by one another. In Europe, it's more on an emotional and circumstantial level, enjoying each other's company, and discovering and dismantling our differences. In Toronto, it was almost entirely interest-based, expressed through sharing hobbies/careers.

I don't have a real preference for the foundation of a friendship: I love how my childhood friends and I know each other's stories, because we were there; I love that my university friends and I can take each other in without having to build past previous identities; and I love that my Toronto connections are a messy web of references and excitement. But now I can appreciate the differences: if I feel that I'm missing something from my surroundings, it's not dissatisfaction, but a separate desire, unfulfilled.

The thing I am most grateful for, though, is how each of them teaches me to love the rest of them. It is easier to learn lessons from certain people; it is easier to play out arguments with others; it's safer to act out with them; it's easier to let loose with her; it's comforting to ground myself with him. Each person is beautifully bizarre, so, it can be difficult to parse which lessons I've already learnt and which ones I'm yet to learn. But there is a pattern in how I respond to conflict, to complicated feelings, and to distance. I just have to take a deep breath to remind myself I don't have to rediscover the wheel in each friendship.

Activities

Unbeknownst to me, I arrived in Toronto hours after the floods that terrorised downtown had receded. The air was muggy and the streets were damp, but trains were running and I could walk from the subway station. My friend, Matt, met me halfway, and we walked to the apartment I'd be at for most of the trip, him wheeling my suitcase— it made the city feel instantly welcoming. After I had showered, I took in the pictures and drawings on the walls, relieved that the travelling was done, and I could sit still, alone, not subconsciously worried about where my things were.

There were two regularly scheduled plans I had during my trip. One was Wednesday outings with Brian, annoying colleague turned annoying friend (love you), and the other was DnD sessions twice a week (on Wednesday and Saturday evenings). The trip was a lot of coordinating schedules, with my friends and me trying to slot into each other's lives, and it could all get a little overwhelming, but those two activities in their predictability grounded me.

Wednesdays are Brian's only day off, so every Wednesday afternoon was promised to him, as much as he begrudged me for going to DnD later. He's a foodie, and loves finding the cool places in Toronto, which made every Wednesday a time to try something new: a cute brunch place, thrift stores, a Japanese restaurant, 'the best pizza in Toronto', and gossiping over ice-creams while sitting under a tree for a little relief from the heat. We were also able to retrace some old paths together, among them visiting the café we worked at (I worked, he works), marvelling at how much has changed and how much has stayed the same. We spoke about almost everything, making fun of each other whenever the moment arose. He has an earnestness that's so beautiful, that makes time spent with him filled with love, however long we're able to hang out.

My visit to Toronto was christened Vuyocon, a joke that erupted the previous year at the DnD table just before I moved, where it was floated that folks should come to Europe and we DnD up and down the continent. We managed to play games twice a week while I was there, in which I ended up dooming my longtime cleric character. Again, it was interesting to see how they had changed and remained the same. Before, when we were playing games during the winter of 2023, I joked that I saw the same faces twice a week for hours at a time— I had to either love 'em or hate 'em, and of course I loved them. But, being back at the table way sooner than I thought I'd be, I just wanted to take them in: see them enjoy the game and quibble over lantern physics. I don't have another group like them: most of them are older than me, and they're so, so kind. I can look at them, and have some peace that whatever messes occur now, there's something like them to aspire towards: to becoming capable of building and maintaining the inviting spaces they do.

At the same time, while these activities grounded me during my trip, it wasn't quite that the past year of my life and my regular rhythms fell away. However, I was struck again by the difficulties of timezones. Impromptu and even scheduled calls are challenging, so, in that way, it is more comfortable in Hungary, where I'm in-sync with most people I text/call regularly. For one thing, it was difficult calling my mother regularly— we're both early risers, so it's easier for us to chat in the morning before the rest of the world catches up, but the six-hour difference makes that pocket of time disappear. Once, during a holiday break in Hungary, I commented how I was calling her so much, and she responded, "Don't threaten me; I could barely get a hold of you in Canada." Regardless, while I was there, I called with family and friends in South Africa that I hadn't checked in with for a while. No matter if it was an early morning (on my end) call or catching them after their dinner, each conversation made me feel so alive with love that we had been able to reconstruct while I lived in Hungary and gave me energy when I was flagging.

Moreover, whenever I am travelling, my heart still wants to pull my faraway loved ones into those moments. I used to store all my photos and tales for a single catch-up session— but that manifested as me, very harshly, telling myself no whenever I had an experience I wanted to tell them. But it does take too much bandwidth from the experience to recount everything as it happens, so I had to find a happy middle: every few days I sent a summary of photos to my mother, Imitha, and Juan, accompanied by descriptive and/or pithy captions. It's the only way of honouring the very quiet, but insistent voice in me that's always saying, "I want you to see me here, but this is the best I can do."

On the other hand, spending time with Lucy is all about passionately experiencing what you want to, as you want to. We were sitting at Cong Caphe, a Vietnamese café, having breakfast and fantastic ice coffee. Number one: Lucy's love for a little treat is so infectious. Bearing witness to how Lucy enjoys things is one of the greatest pleasures in this world; moments of indulging with them are among the most gratifying experiences I've had. I had had a drink and finished it while we were sitting; we were going to get some shopping done, and I was sitting there for a few minutes thinking to myself that I just want a second one while walking. I got one, and while it's a very small thing, I'm someone who thinks two scoops of ice-cream is a bit much. Sitting next to Lucy, I remember that desires are mostly for acting on; it doesn't need to be an extraordinary situation to give myself a little happiness.

Lastly, even though I was again in a city where takeout was plentiful, one of the things I made sure to follow through on was cooking for my friends. I cooked a few meals: the default pasta my roommate and I would have for Francesca; chakalaka, baguettes, and broccoli salad for my DnD group (and Francesca and Lucy); and amagwinya for Kia and David, who I stayed with at the end of my trip.

Making amagwinya was a wonderful confluence of emotions. It was my first time making amagwinya; when I was a kid, to have them, you asked for some, and then either a few hours later or the next day, they're there. Now I was on the other end of the equation, doing the prep while my friends were at work: I made the dough (thank goodness for their Kitchen Aid), fretted while it was rising that it was too sticky (if baking is a science, I'm an undergrad trying their best during a lab), and keeping myself distracted with embroidery and stand-up comedy. It was such a fun scene when they came home, and we began prepping the kitchen for deep-frying. We were making my childhood food in a completely different place from where it came: heating the oil in a cast iron pot (David: "it must be so happy soaking in the oil"), flipping the gwinyas using chopsticks, and frying vegan minced meat. But, at the end of it all, there was the startlingly familiar feeling of breaking open igwinya with my thumbs to put the mince and grated cheese in.

With all these anecdotes, I hope you can see the echoes of the fractal nature of infinity described in The Pandominion. We're in a different instance— a different point in our friendship. Time has passed between visits and our lives have reconfigured themselves subtly, but each instance confirms the pattern we're in: love begets love. It is the act of spending days off together or cooking for friends that creates and extends friendships where such activities are possible.

Self

Towards the end of The Pandominion, the narrator speculates that the reason many earths tends to discover step travel is because, in our universe, once we've mapped out our own world, the obvious next target would be the stars. But "the tyranny of general relativity" (482, Echo of Worlds) keeps them out of an individual's reach. So, we figure out a different way to reach others and figure ourselves out — the two cannot be separated — however improbable a workable solution may be. And after the plot resolves itself, there is a being that figures out how to put the stars within reach; we just had to come at it from a different angle.

And that's what living in all these places is like. It's becoming conscious of myself; visualising the ideal path I'd like my life to follow; being stumped when the path falls into the void, and figuring out a different direction, ending up somewhere unexpected, yet having what I dreamed for myself: I'm writing in the early morning with a coffee by my side, working towards my bachelor's degree, hearing familiar footsteps in the apartment, and able to have early morning calls with my mother.

I often say about Carey that he is an author I trust with any concept. I will scarcely glance at the blurb of a book of his before I read it, because he takes concepts, interrogates them, flips them around, and does them proper justice. And I also enjoy myself immensely when I am in his stories. There was a particular review for Infinity Gate that I loved, which is really what spun out this essay:

That's how I'd like to look back on my life. I wanted something new, some new feelings? I started by pulling that desire out of myself, and with a lot of patience, I found myself building a world I could enjoy.

Recommendation: Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert.