I checked on you last night, as friends often do. You said you were okay, in fact, that you were doing very well. I should have been happy to hear that, but your answer did not give me peace.

There are moments when words arrive perfectly formed and still fail to persuade us. Nothing in what you said invited concern, yet something in me remained unsettled. Perhaps friendship is partly this strange burden of hearing what has been said while also wondering about what has been left unsaid.

I have often heard people speak about the profundity of African greetings. There is the isiZulu sawubona, often rendered simply as “hello”, but carrying the more literal sense of “we see you”. I have always liked the fuller idea people attach to it, that seeing another person means recognising more than the body standing in front of you. You acknowledge their humanity perhaps even the soul behind the face. There is a similar explanation I once heard about the Shona mangwanani. Mangwa are words, or messages, so the question is essentially is “Who has the words?”

There is something beautiful about that.

Our people believed that dreams could carry messages from the great beyond. Morning therefore brought with it more than the acknowledgement that another day had begun. People gathered and asked whether anyone had been given a message during the night.

Mashoko anani pakati pedu?

Manzwi anani pakati pedu?

Who among us has the words?

Who has brought a message back from the night?

I am no linguist or custodian of oral tradition, so I offer this with the humility appropriate to things inherited imperfectly. However, for the purposes of this letter, I choose to hold on to that meaning.

Because what a remarkable way to greet one another.

The first question of the morning was not merely whether you had slept well. It created space for the possibility that you had something to say.

Perhaps we lost something when greetings became automatic.

“How are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“And you?”

“Good.”

… And with that, two people who may each be carrying entire private worlds pass one another having exchanged almost nothing.

Maybe the older idea of greeting was more demanding. To say that I see you is, in some small way, to accept responsibility for having seen. Once I have really seen you, indifference becomes harder, and to ask who has the word is to create space for the possibility that someone does.

We live in an age of curated resilience. We are told to “look on the bright side” and to “choose happiness.” We are bombarded with messages that our well-being is a matter of personal branding, a project to be managed and displayed. In this environment, a confession of struggle is seen as a failure of that project. So, we master the art of the script. We learn to say “I’m fine” with such conviction that we begin to believe our own performance, burying the messy, chaotic reality of our inner lives beneath a veneer of success.

Perhaps what unsettles me most, is that we have reached that age when we have begun to bury our friends, the people we grew up with. Not that there was never such a time, death has always been the inescapable context in which claims the young and the old alike. However, by virtue of age, we are no longer the ones being guided through grief by our elders. We are now the ones being waited on. We are the people who must sit and plan how to conduct the funeral. There is something deeply unsettling about realising that the chairs we once watched our parents and elders occupy are slowly becoming ours.

Perhaps that changes the way you hear a friend say, “I am fine.” At this age, checking on one another begins to carry a weight it did not have before.

There was a time when “How are you?” was simply a greeting. I am asking about today, certainly, but somewhere behind the question is the knowledge that none of us has been promised an unlimited number of tomorrows.

Still, perhaps seeing someone means holding two truths at once.

I hear what you have told me.

And I remain available for what you have not.

Maybe this is why I have been thinking about those greetings.

Sawubona asks me to see you.

And mangwanani, in the meaning I choose, asks whether you have anything to say.

Perhaps those two ideas belong together.

I see you.

You have the word.

In this season where I am profoundly aware of my own mortality and those words matter differently to me.

We are burying people who still had things to say. People whose conversations ended without anyone knowing that the last conversation was the last one.

There were questions we assumed we could ask another day. Visits we postponed. Messages we read and meant to answer later. “How are you?” was asked casually because there seemed to be an endless supply of mornings in which to ask it properly.

Age is slowly teaching us otherwise.

So when I checked on you last night and you told me you were doing very well, perhaps the unease I felt had very little to do with whether I believed you.

Perhaps I was simply becoming aware of the weight of the privilege itself.

You were here.

I was here.

We could still speak.

And while we still can, perhaps friendship asks something more of us than the polite exchange of reassurance.

Perhaps every now and then we should greet each other as though the question actually matters.

I see you, do you have the words?