It has been twenty-two years.

Yet the name I remember you by has travelled with me ever since I left.

We were in Grade 2 at New Horizon Primary School in Groblersdal. We used to play diketo. I don’t remember every day we spent together. In fact, I only remember one.

One afternoon.

One circle drawn around a handful of little stones.

One game.

The same memory that has lived quietly in the recesses of my mind ever since.

I was seven years old when I left.

I woke up one weekend to my mom packing everything. She only packed like that when we were going to visit my grandparents during the school holidays.

But it wasn’t the school holidays.

I remember knowing something wasn’t right.

I asked her why she was packing.

She told me we were moving to Pretoria.

Just like that.

I never went back to school.

I never got to say goodbye.

I never got to hug you one last time.

All I have left is the possibility that your name was Charmaine and the memory of us playing diketo the last time I ever saw you.

The rest has blurred with time.

I can’t remember your face anymore.

I wish I could.

I still remember the circle around the little stones, but I can’t remember the face of the little girl sitting across from me.

Almost twenty-two years later, I still think about you.

I wonder where life took you.

How the rest of that school year unfolded.

Whether you’re still alive.

Whether you ever wondered what happened to the little girl who disappeared one weekend and never came back.

Sometimes I even wonder whether your name was ever Charmaine at all.

Or whether I’ve held onto that name for so many years that it has become a placeholder for someone whose memory I refused to lose.

Today, I looked for you.

I searched.

I tried different spellings.

I hoped that somewhere, somehow, your face would appear and I’d simply know.

Nothing.

And for the first time, I wondered whether I had imagined your name all along.

Will I ever find you?

Will I ever know what became of you?

Will we ever play diketo together again?

Or will this remain another unfinished room I carry with me?

I wish I had been able to say goodbye.

To tell you that I’d see you again someday.

To hug you one last time.

To thank you for being part of a childhood I barely got to finish.

Because perhaps that is where it began.

Not in the unfinished house I would later call home.

But here.

With a little girl whose face I can no longer remember.

A goodbye I never got to say.

The first room that was left unfinished.