Naledi was lost.
She had chased the dry leaf across sandy pathways. The leaf captivated her mind with its tumbling form. A representation of her jumbled childhood thoughts. Her laughter chinkled through the empty air, its joyous sound serving as the lead to the sounds of dry grass and quarrelling crickets.
Naledi was simply dressed in her old, comfortable flowing dress, a torn ruin of faded white serving as the springboard for the printouts of barely visible flowers that she had never seen (for the curious of mind it was an agglomeration of hibiscus and plumeria), but she loved the bright colours. The colours serviced to be a star amongst the shades of brown that painted her natural world. Naledi was growing up in a small village in an arid part of South Africa. Day after day her existence was coloured by the browns of the earth and the blues of the sky, only interspersed by the flaming reds and purples of dawn and dusk.
Today, she had started her day with the long trek to the stream to gather water for the day. As the firstborn of two children, she had the bulk of the household chores starting with gathering water at dawn. Each day she headed off in the direction of the rising sun. Today like many before she repeated the chore with the clay water pot defying gravity on her head. She rushed along kicking off plumes of dust with her cracked and parched heels, she took pride in making sure there was water for the family to bath in by the time her dad groggily opened his eyes. Like yesterday, she was in her grove like the pathway was a groove between the wildness of the surrounding bush. The sun shone as it had shone yesterday but the breeze was a lot stronger, it buffeted the clay pot but never slowed Naledi down. That was until the tumbling leaf caught her eye.
She had seen countless tumbling leaves before. But this one was different. Like the flowers on her dress, it had colours that were foreign to her. It halted her on the path, the plumes at her heels settled with the sudden stop. Her eyes glued. On their own, her hands rose to clasp the clay water pot lifting it off its perch and settling on the edge of the footpath. Dad will have to wait. This leaf was all her seven-year-old mind cared about. Over and under it turned helpless in the wind, exposing to Naledi its multitude of never in nature seen before colours. To her the world had stopped spinning, the wind had stopped blowing and the colourful leaf was alive and dancing along the path.
Joy in hand she rushed along to the music of her giggling and the sweet encouragement of the wild breeze. Today she would dance, today she would hold her world, and today the world would remain behind. But the leaf was quick, carried by the breeze that was funnelled between the tall stalks of dried grass that framed the dusty path. Naledi ran, her heels kicking up against her thighs as she tried to hold her world in her hand. But the truth was simple, everything she wanted at that moment was ahead of her. The leaf would stay in front of her no matter how fast she ran.