I stared at the scene playing out in front of me. I had done this. It had started with the crack, and then Rose, and now this. And perhaps it hadn’t started quite as consciously as it now was. But it had started, and now it couldn’t be stopped. This was the most significant thing I’d ever done in my seventeen years on the planet. And prior to today, I’d had no idea that I was even capable of doing something like this.

Candles had been lit and placed on the ground around Natasha’s painting. People bowed their heads in silent prayer, and some were walking up to the wall and laying flowers below it. To my left, a City of Cape Town truck was parked, and three men with paintbrushes stood with unopened cans of white paint at their feet. A ring of people holding hands had formed around them, stopping them from approaching the wall. The feeling in the air was palpable. It tingled and pulsed with a sense of greatness and importance . . . and uncertainty. This moment was balancing on a precipice, and anything could tip it over, one way or the other.

And then someone broke through the crowd and walked up to a box that had been placed in front of the wall. She was young, Black, cool-looking, and was wearing a Dora the Explorer T-shirt with Natasha’s face on it. The face I had painted. She climbed onto the box and everyone applauded. She introduced herself and talked about the epidemic of gender-based violence ripping the country apart. I pushed my way through the tightly packed crowd, bustling past shoulders and arms and signs held in the air.

Finally, I got to the front. I wanted to see the woman who was talking more clearly. I stopped listening to her words at some stage, though—I didn’t need to. I could see what she was saying, her hands raised in the air, fists clenching, the vein bulging in her forehead as she spat her words out at volume. She was angry. And so was everyone else. I felt caught up in this massive thing—I could feel it expanding around me, like the universe must have done at the moment of the big bang. Starting at a singularity, an infinite tiny point, and then suddenly space and time were rushing out of that point, building atoms and grains of dust and soon moons and planets and solar systems and entire galaxies, a universe. That’s how big this felt.