Everyone in Chankwenda village knew about the boy who talked to the sky.
His name was Luyando—Lui to the kids who ran barefoot in the dust, and “that dreamer” to the adults who didn’t understand why he scribbled poems on the backs of used maize-meal bags. He was seventeen, tall for his age, with a mop of unkempt hair and a heart so soft, even puppies trusted him.
But Luyando was searching—for happiness, for purpose, maybe for love, though he wouldn’t admit that out loud.
Each day after chores, he’d retreat to the giant mango tree near the old broken borehole. The elders said it was haunted. Luyando said it just listened better than most people.
Then, in the dry season of 2023, something changed.
Her name was Thandiwe, and she arrived in a beat-up Land Cruiser that kicked up so much dust it nearly buried the village. She was part of a youth outreach program—big city girl with braided hair, oversized headphones around her neck, and a journal full of her own thoughts she never let anyone read.
Luyando hated her on sight.
Well… not hate, exactly. More like… feared her. She had this confidence that made him feel like a blank page. But the universe, being the mischievous matchmaker it is, assigned them to paint the same classroom wall for the next two weeks.
She painted like she didn’t care. He painted like each stroke might change the world. It annoyed both of them.
“So, what’s with the tree?” she asked one day, pausing to sip her lukewarm Maheu.
“It listens,” he said.
“To what? Your broken dreams?” she smirked.
He rolled his eyes. “To whatever the heart can’t say out loud.”
She blinked. Something in her shifted. That night, she showed up at the tree. And the next. And the next. And slowly, through mangoes and music, through awkward silences and shared stories about things they’d never told anyone, something bloomed.
But this isn’t the kind of story where love comes easy.
One night, under a sky so clear it hurt to look at, she whispered, “I’m leaving next week.”
Luyando looked down. “Of course you are.”
“I don’t belong here,” she said.
“I never belonged anywhere,” he replied.
Then silence.
The kind that says everything.
She left. No grand goodbye. Just a folded note tucked inside the tree’s bark: “Keep talking to the sky. Maybe one day, I’ll hear you from wherever I am.”
Luyando broke for a while. He stopped writing. Stopped visiting the tree. He even started avoiding the stars.
But grief, when mixed with love and memory, has a strange way of becoming fuel.
A year later, he self-published a book of poems: Whispers from the Tree. It didn’t go viral. It didn’t make money. But it reached her.
She read it in a noisy café in Lusaka, heart pounding.
Then, one rainy afternoon, as thunder cracked over Chankwenda, Luyando returned to the mango tree—and found her sitting there, soaked, holding a mango and grinning like a child.
“You said it listened,” she said.
“And it brought you back?” he whispered.
“No,” she smiled. “You did.”
That night, they sat beneath the tree, said everything the sky had once carried, and realized that happiness isn’t something you find in a city or a village. It’s something you grow, water, and wait for—beneath the tree that never stopped listening.
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