Esme Calder & Kito Mavela

The bench had belonged to my grandmother, and one leg was shorter than the others. This was not a charming irregularity. Put a cup on it and the cup began a slow journey towards the ground. I had been promising to fix it for two years.

Kito heard about the bench before he saw my home. We had met through WaBanja, spent a few weeks chatting, then met several times in public. One of our conversations turned to unfinished tasks. He admitted to owning a curtain rail that had travelled through three moves without ever meeting a wall. I told him about the bench.

We arranged a Saturday to work on it together once we knew each other better. I pictured an easy afternoon: sanding, painting, something nice to eat afterwards. Kito arrived with a notebook. This was my first warning.

For the first hour, we were funny about our differences. He drew a little diagram. I labelled one corner “where the conversation goes to die.” He laughed. I liked him more for laughing. Then we tried to remove a screw that had clearly decided to become part of the wood forever.

I was the one holding the screwdriver when its head slipped. The noise I made was not an attractive noise. Kito reached to help, and I told him I could manage. He stepped back. Five minutes later, I was angry that he had stepped back so completely.

Kito looked at the bench for a while, then said, “When you tell me to leave it, I will probably leave it. I don't know how to recognise the other instruction.”

There wasn't much drama in his voice. That made it harder to turn the sentence into an argument. I told him I was used to help arriving with a price attached: a lecture, an explanation of what I should have done earlier, the expectation that I would be grateful in a particular way. He said he understood why that would become tiring. He also said he couldn't prove he was different by ignoring a request to stop.

I asked whether he would help me loosen the screw. He asked whether I wanted instructions or an extra pair of hands. I said hands first, instructions if I asked. We returned to the bench and discovered that we had been using the wrong size of screwdriver.

The bench eventually stood level. We painted it a quiet colour after I abandoned my more dramatic suggestions. The first time we sat on it, Kito made a small, anxious movement as if he expected to catch the entire thing. I told him that if it collapsed, he was responsible for the tea. It didn't collapse. We drank the tea slowly, enjoying an achievement that would have looked unimpressive to anyone passing by.

The photograph on the path was taken on an afternoon when we had decided to stop doing tasks. I wore my floral dress. Kito wore the green shirt I always said looked better outside than under the light in his kitchen. We walked without a list, and I pointed this out so many times that he accused me of making a list about not having one.

His arm was around my shoulders. I remember leaning into him because we were laughing, and because by then leaning did not feel like failing to stand on my own.