The Weight of Purple

The Weight of Purple

I didn't come to Pretoria with a plan. I came because I was tired of the plans I'd already made and broken, tired of pretending I knew what I was looking for when really I was just hoping a new city might teach me how to stop running from questions I didn't have answers to. The jacarandas were blooming when I arrived, their purple so insistent it felt like the city was trying to tell me something I wasn't ready to hear yet.

I've learned that some places hold you gently and others don't let you look away. Pretoria did both. The petals fell like small acts of forgiveness onto the pavement, onto my shoulders, into my hair, and I thought about how strange it is that beauty can make you feel more alone instead of less—because you're standing in the middle of something breathtaking and you don't know who to tell, or whether telling would even matter.

There's a hill in the center of the city called Meintjieskop, and on top of it sit the Union Buildings—two wings of sandstone curved like arms that might be welcoming you or holding you at a distance, depending on how you're feeling that day. I walked toward it on my second morning, not because I'd read about it in a guidebook, but because I'd seen it from my hostel window and thought, maybe if I stand up there, I'll understand why I'm here. I know that sounds dramatic, but I was alone in a foreign country and my phone was at eighteen percent and I hadn't spoken to anyone in two days except to order coffee, so everything felt a little dramatic.

The walk up the hill was steeper than it looked. My backpack kept sliding off one shoulder and I had to stop three times to catch my breath, which felt like a metaphor I didn't want to examine too closely. At the base of the steps, a woman was sitting on the low wall with a child in her lap, braiding the girl's hair with the kind of focused tenderness that made me want to cry for reasons I couldn't name. She looked up and smiled at me—not because she knew me, but because I was sweating and probably looked lost, and sometimes strangers smile at you just to say I see you, keep going.

I climbed the steps slowly, my hand on the warm sandstone balustrade, counting each one under my breath the way I used to count down anxiety in crowded rooms. Thirty-two steps. At the top, the city spread out below me—rooftops and treetops and the hum of traffic that sounded farther away than it was. I stood there longer than I needed to, not because the view was particularly stunning, but because I didn't know what else to do. I'd come all this way to stand on a hill and I still didn't feel any different.

The Union Buildings curve around you like a sentence you're still trying to finish. I walked along the colonnade, my footsteps echoing in the empty arches, and tried to imagine what it would feel like to work here every day—to walk into a building this grand and have it just be your office, the place where you eat lunch and check your email and complain about meetings. Does it stop feeling important after a while? Or does the weight of it press on you every time you walk through the door?

On the lawn below, people were sitting in clusters—couples sharing takeaway containers, office workers on their lunch breaks scrolling through their phones, a group of teenagers laughing about something I couldn't hear. I wanted to sit with them, to be part of that easy afternoon rhythm where you belong somewhere without having to explain why. Instead, I sat alone on a bench and ate the sandwich I'd bought that morning, which had gone soft in my bag and tasted like regret.

I thought about calling someone—my sister, maybe, or the friend who'd told me I was "running away" when I bought the plane ticket—but I didn't know what I'd say. I'm sitting on a hill in Pretoria and I still don't know what I'm doing with my life? That felt too honest, and also too ordinary. Everyone feels lost sometimes. The trick is pretending you don't until you figure out how to not be.

On my third day, I took a bus south to the Voortrekker Monument because the hostel owner said I should, and I didn't have a better plan. The monument is a square block of granite that rises from a hill like a question no one wants to answer out loud. It's a place that holds history the way a clenched fist holds stones—tightly, deliberately, and with consequences. I didn't know much about it before I arrived, just that it meant different things to different people, and that some of those meanings were painful.

I climbed the steps slowly, feeling the weight of the place before I even reached the entrance. Families were taking photographs on the stairs, positioning themselves with their backs to the view, smiling in that practiced way people smile when they're performing memory instead of living it. A grandfather adjusted a child's collar, then said something that made everyone laugh, and I felt a pang of envy so sharp it startled me. I wanted to be part of something that simple—a family, a joke, a reason to smile without thinking about it first.

Inside, the hall was cool and dim, the kind of quiet that makes you aware of your own breathing. A frieze ran along the walls, telling a story in stone—wagons crossing rivers, hands gripping tools, faces set against miles that didn't promise anything except more miles. I stood in front of it for a long time, trying to understand what I was supposed to feel. Reverence? Anger? Curiosity? I felt all of them at once, and also none of them, because I was a stranger standing in someone else's history and I didn't know if I had the right to have an opinion.

A woman standing near me was crying quietly, her hand pressed against the wall as if she were holding herself upright. I wanted to ask if she was okay, but I didn't know how to do that without intruding, so I just stood there uselessly, holding my own discomfort like a coat I couldn't figure out how to take off. Eventually she walked away, and I was left alone with the stone figures and the silence and the uncomfortable awareness that some places ask more of you than you're prepared to give.

I don't know what I expected to find in Pretoria. Maybe I thought a new city would give me clarity, or purpose, or at least a better story to tell when people asked why I left. But standing in that granite hall, I realized that places don't give you answers—they just hold up mirrors and ask if you're ready to look. And most of the time, I wasn't.

On my last afternoon, I walked back through the streets under the jacaranda canopy, letting the petals fall into my hair and onto my shoulders like small blessings I didn't deserve but accepted anyway. I sat on a bench in a park and watched a vendor fold paper boats and send them down a trickle of water from a broken tap. A boy chased them, laughing, then let them go when they disappeared around a corner. He didn't seem sad about it. He just turned around and asked the man to make another one.

I thought about the hill, the sandstone curve, the granite square, the long streets between them. I thought about the woman braiding her daughter's hair, the office workers eating lunch on the lawn, the woman crying in the monument hall, the boy chasing paper boats. I thought about how all of these people were living full lives in a city I was just passing through, and how I'd probably forget most of what I saw here within a month, but some small part of it would stay with me in ways I wouldn't recognize until much later.

I didn't leave Pretoria with answers. I left with purple petals still caught in the seams of my backpack, a phone full of photos I'd probably never look at again, and the quiet understanding that sometimes the point of going somewhere new isn't to find yourself—it's to get lost enough that you stop pretending you were ever found in the first place. And maybe that's enough. Maybe that's more than enough.