Pink watermelon flush in each cheek. Why didn’t you love me mum? Are you aware of the storm you created, rain pouring down, my heart feels as if red lace is wrapped around a stone, a canvas, the painter’s sketchbook. There’s an odd fairy lightness in her body, my sister’s body. There is no connection between us. No longer any sibling rivalry. And so the image of the autumn chill is always on my mind. Leaves all set for death and their diverse origins, destination for a cool wilderness landscape that feels like a frozen North American lake. I remember the despair and hope in the eyes of young girls thinking they are wearing fashionable clothes. I remember the range of peace, the delicate flutter of the eyes of old women, the limbs now infirm, who long for the warm sea when they used to go swimming as young girls. I remember the love song in silence when I felt I could no longer escape him. How does he move in the lovesick world now? I am the ice woman, frozen to her core, wrecked. See the descriptions of the clowns at the circus. I am one of them now and forever.
There was a sane life, an insane life, a reality, a past regret, a mistake that was made, a telephone call, an apology, laughter, past energies in a story and I was left to wonder how some people find love in this world. A love that is as ancient as rain, the apron in the kitchen amongst pots and pans, a feast-meal on the table on Sunday, daddy sitting on his throne. Childhood is lost on me, dead to adult me, past is past yet it still has such sweetness, its dissolve. And some nights it comes back, awful, familiar, all the gruesome stories with such clarity that I know it is not my imagination’s spell playing tricks on me. I want it to wash away all my sins destination anywhere instead it says, ‘Remember me. It doesn’t matter who you love, who you fall for, who and what you desire or drink (alcoholic), watch the men dissolve. They won’t come back.’ And when the awful becomes too close for comfort I take to my bed after drawing the curtains, leaving the windows open for cool air, closing the bedroom door and I will lay on the bed until I can feel notes on grief begin to vibrate within me, as if they have a quiet, harmonic society and how beautiful and sad their symphony sounds to me. It is a breathing lesson, a lesson on suffering, on living, on life. What is brutality here? It is nothing but a memory, an interruption, and becoming a mute daughter. The flick of a belt buckle, a stinging wet cloth held under a tap of cold water, mummy, mummy’s red hands, mummy’s gardening hands inside the chilled earth, hard laughter, harsh words, running to daddy, feet bare. He is shouting at mummy. I look at her for the first time now and I see that she is tired. Her hands hang limply at her sides now. She says nothing. My skin feels as if it is burning all over. Daddy I am burning. Daddy I am crying. I am pink all over, then red. My skin feels raw, itchy. It feels as if I am Joyce Carol Oates’s harvesting flesh. She says nothing. She simply turns around and walks away. What did I do? What did I do? Where is the key to that country? How strange is the marriage of the mind to harvesting? The mind means education, psychology, something must be taught and something must be understood. To harvest means to bring closure to a season. This is what family means. To eat in front of the television, to scream and scream and scream until you cannot scream anymore. Nobody will come to you, comfort you.
And so I grew up, moved up, moved away from the world of a child and the games of the child and the adolescent and stopped believing that she lived a secret life. Perhaps mummy had a secret lover. She was beautiful in that way, easily bored in that way, did not find the same things that daddy found relevant and beautiful. They were from two different worlds. They were from two different cultures. She came from money and he didn’t. She came from Johannesburg and knew a specific way of life from there. My mother came with a Pandora’s Box, suitcases packed full of clothes from there when she arrived as a newlywed. My father came from Everywhere in Port Elizabeth. South End, Walmer, Fairview, North End, Korsten, a fisherman’s village called Port Elizabeth, Gubb’s Location, New Brighton, Zwide, Kwazakhele, Nelson Mandela Bay. Through the years those names became lodged in my memory as I studied his research wanting very much to hold onto it rather than send it to the archives at the University of the Western Cape (my father the political activist learning how to send messages using invisible ink), read his diaries from his London and European experience (I rediscovered him, his suicidal illness, and by this time I was enchanted by his depression, watched slides of the palaces he visited but I could never imagine myself there. It was enough for me to see Versailles as a tiny photograph held up against the light. He witnessed many great things, magnificent things of wonder. Daddy was wonderful in those days, a thinker, an intellectual, a teacher, a role model to me who brought me back to poetry.
Because a fire was in my head like the studies of the Robert Muirhead poems I had begun to write, because a flash of winter was in my head like the chains of bitterness in a veteran photographer’s memory but there was also something unfinished inside of me, something had dissolved. Look for opportunities the guardian band of gold around the sun said and that became my mission’s. I began to imagine other people’s shackles of pain, their chains, their prison walls put up all around them, the spirit of fear, hurt and rejection within them, abandonment, and spiritual neglect, poverty and for some reason it felt like I was multiplying gravity.
I got tired of people asking me to smile please, you’d be lovelier if you did.
Did I have courage, that mute child in the photograph? I’ve suffered but what is suffering anyway when compared to others. I have a mental switch but what do others have? What are their coping mechanisms? The universe gives freely to me. I have refuge if I want it. I have a sanctuary if I want it. Hope is there. In the arrival of it there is always freedom. There is always revolution in the mind of the poet and quintessence in the poetry that comes from the mouth, the voice, the straightforward thinking of that kind of revolution.
I’ve met someone else. He tells me everything. He isn’t afraid to tell me anything. And slowly the veil lifts my smile and becomes like a scar. My wounds are like stigmata. And I begin to see and hear everything again. Hope floats. There are angels everywhere yet I still feel incomplete like some kind of show off finding it tiresome to live normally like the people next door who weren’t embarrassed to get drunk in front of their children. I’m embarrassed by loneliness, despair and my bleak outlook on life. I know where you’ve been once upon a secret life. A secret life. Do insects have secret lives too and what is their best intention for all those years they live with secrets? Therein lies their survival. When my sister comes home she and my mother sit down together as if it was the most normal thing in the world and they drink. They drink cocktails. Pink syrupy liquids that seem to sparkle, sparkling wines, Peach schnapps’, vodka and orange juice cool as ice going down their throats. I prefer my secret life.
As an adult my mother, mummy is no longer my morning star and my sister is still my dream stealer. They have become my life, guarding the car keys and the bottle of milk stout. I have to find my own projects. According to God’s plan he wants us, me to act accordingly, justly, with integrity, humility. He wants us to go forth into the new world knowing that He is always on our side now and forever more.
We’re all born with a philosophy, not necessarily a Plan B so to speak, and we want to bring meaning to our own lives. I found a book once called Norah’s Secret Life and as I was reading it I discovered many things about this woman whose life I wouldn’t exactly call exciting or romantic. She had ‘romantic’ love affairs but they were doomed from the start. She was or wasn’t significant but her life seemed to become something symbolic as if I had to have an opportunistic use for it later on in life.
She was unfortunately not the marrying kind but she had a wealth of spiritual knowledge unlike any other woman of her generation and sometimes in the love affairs she had she would think like a man when it came to the ‘transaction’. In the material world men dominated she knew she could never win. And so she became like the smiling faces of children amidst poverty. When she wanted to escape she did what all men did, she educated herself, she painted, and she received visitors, she wrote unfathomable poetry that was never self-pitying but stories that were in a way. And in one way, perhaps some ways she became the caretaker of so many women who lived in isolation of a society who would not accept them because they chose to live an unconventional life.
At the end of one her love affairs Norah seems to be coping with her new life as best she can like the stars in the evening sky when the earth smells clean and as fresh and new as vanilla. She is bright. Her spirit feels bright. It feels too bright. Her conversation can be illuminating and clever. She wants to be entertained. She wants to be filled with joie de vivre. She also wants to be pursued. Doesn’t any woman want to be pursued? Men are extraordinary when they are in pursuit. They have a grand perspective. They’re regale you with stories. The world becomes magnificent when they’re in it with you on their arm and you’re going places. It doesn’t really matter that you’re part of his secret life. They’re still pretty impressive. They make you feel desired, beautiful, and the grief that you once felt or had so strongly in your life above anything else is no longer triumphant. You’re no longer flying-walking-singing-chanting solo.
It is the year 2013, nearly two in the morning, December and another Christmas has come and gone and my brother is about to become a father. I can’t mock him anymore. And in the exquisite compass of the infinite internal struggle between suicide, wanting to fly, wanting to have that family, that plan coming together, the memory, the thought of Plath, Hughes, Bessie Head, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell I am still here. I am alive with an awakened spirit, with everything that I’ve put the sum parts of me through I have realised that I cannot turn back. I have to move on, move forward because I ‘m the sun’s mistress and life after all is a mission. I don’t really see how my life could change after this, after all I’ve put it through. Two birds. Plath and Sexton. Once upon a time they were two birds on a mission too. Joy fills my lungs so does a surge for the realisation of humanity. Our survival. Our instinct. The little one’s name is Ethan. Ethan Ambrose. We’re all actors acting in a bit part there and a bit part here. My brother held this bright shining thing in his arms. Something that would be educated, instilled with his values, his parenting skills and I felt as if I was being torn apart by some primal, primitive animalistic force. And I knew that I would put the past Jean Rhys’s Mr Mackenzie’s (plural) behind me. I never had an ounce of ambition within me anyway. They had all come with the world’s territory. There it was. The undocumented love affair was really most of all inside my head however brilliant the man was and however bold his moves and brave I was to take him on.
I knew something different now. I was more defiant like Norah was in her secret life because eventually she had found her way out. Nobody wants the ending of a book or film to be spoiled for them. Norah had found her way out and she was happy. As happy as could be. Women deserve to be happy. Men are altogether different. Lost boys everyone. They are always searching. I don’t think they ever grow up.
They ate fried chicken on Monday but on Friday he liked a steak with his hot tea and chips. This was before I came along screaming blue in the face. On their walk on a Saturday afternoon through the park they would stop for a light picnic lunch (usually a variety of sandwiches and ice tea or cold lemonade, let me stop here. This is only in my dreams. Most of what is written here is true but some is made up. Pure make-believe. Mostly Enid Blyton make-believe. Mr Pink Whistle loved that lemonade for his parties for the elves and his talking cat. I can’t believe I can remember that far back). On Sundays she would curl up on the sofa and read her cookbooks after the greasy feast of roast chicken and he would sit in his study and read the newspapers. Tall men have such a sweetness about them even boys. Tall men have such a sweetness about them. My father was not a tall man. My mother’s love, mummy (that’s what I called her) was like a cold photocopy. Why do women long for children anyhow? Is it biology or survival or do they mean the same thing? I’m just a woman who longs for a child of her own now but the pretty are way more advanced than I am. They’ve married happily or unhappily and they’ve had those kids.
The red seed of an abortion flowing out of the woman’s body. Nobody talks about backstreet abortions anymore in Johannesburg. You can go to any clinic. The red seed growing and growing of cancer cells. How can I be delivered from those things? How can I escape, forget? I ran away before to another city but I don’t think I can do that again. I’m too grown up. I am too set in my ways.
I’m safe here. Amongst these houses. In this house. In this suburb. The elite. Those are two words that mean absolutely nothing to me. What does being wealthy mean for humanity at large? It is a meagre one percent. I do not count myself amongst them. It is not my money. It doesn’t belong to me. I didn’t work for it. I’ve wasted years, energy on a variety of things. I tried to educate myself but the real world is a machine and it spits you out if you do not fit. If you’re unconventional. If you’re ugly and emotional. Sylvia Plath is so beautiful, all her doll parts. I’m obsessed with her. I eat to live. I eat to live, to survive another day in modern society although it stinks to high heaven with shadows and insecurity.
The house belongs to my parents. My brother is fixing it up. His son’s name is Ethan. His girlfriend’s name is Rose. He does some painting. He has a patch of garden where he is growing vegetables. He says we are going all out organic in a big way. We have to eat healthy. He is so handsome but now he is taken. All the girls wanted him. They danced around him. All he had to do was to click his fingers. He could have anyone. I had all these dreams of living in a world-drama like that.
I am rich in other ways. I see now that spiritually I am richer. I mean to say that perhaps in the beginning stages of my life, in the formative years my mental faculty was not as rich as it is now.
Johannesburg smells. It smells of poo, dirt, urine, pavement meeting rain, thunderstorms, white snow spreading out like a blanket, smoke, people, blood, cars, trains, pollution, mines, funerals, murders, and films. I love films. Faster, faster, faster is how everything goes there.
I know you. I’ve always known you. You knew that then and you know that now. I am not coming for you anymore. You’re history remember. Funny how we never said that word goodbye as if we were both reaching for something. Are you lost heathen?
I want to write to her, my sister who wants to travel the world but I do not want to write to her not of suffering, loss, sadness, the mourning period, a stolen kiss in the cemetery and not the peck on the cheek kind. I want to be overwhelmed by the brethren’s kindness. I know she won’t reply though. She’s the pretty one. She’s the one I make most nervous. How I work on her acute dopamine and serotonin levels. Shame on me. Shame on her.
During the cocktail hour in my house the world becomes a new place. Mummy and Sissy. And then there’s a calm breeze that floats through the house. Sissy is short for sister. The awfully good middle child. The achiever. Invincible Superwoman. I have a rush of love for her. For mummy too even when she’s at her terrifying worst. The vodka loosens the tongue. I can hear laughter, cackling even. They’ve finished the orange juice and that makes me mad. They know I can’t drink the strong stuff, the heavy stuff. What do to with madness except admit defeat and sink?
I don’t think I’ve ever felt brave enough to feel that vulnerable in front of someone else. Man, woman, child did it matter.
You who do not know me, of me, what I have carried for years, the internal struggle I have been in, had to spirit away while nations have been at war I think of your kindness. You came like a thief in the night.
Focus on what I am trying to tell you. The January heat of the sun is pinned to my cheek, there are tears building up inside of me like sap when I remember you. Golden-gorgeous-genius you as much of a lover of words as I am. And when I think of magnificent you, that incredible phase in my life (past is past but still you are not dead to me and still further along you are not a ghost) I think of you as a cure, an anchor, a door that is left ajar for a visitor, and when I think of you I drown but not in despair or shame (blush of red on my cheeks). I drown in hope. I forget that you killed me once, perhaps on more than one occasion.
Write. Write words. Anything that takes your fancy, pleases you, makes you glad and see the loveliness in the world. Now that’s a mantra.
Smile. Pick up the fragments, the small bits and littler pieces.
Sylvia Plath wrote about kindness and words, their purity, clarity, poetry, dryness. It came like a flood out of her, pouring out like machinations, sunshine, liquid, the blue jewel of the sky. I think it became necessary for her in a way like writing has become necessary for me.
I need you Sissy but you’re not there. You’re not connected to me in the substantial way we were once as children. Sometimes I call her Jean in my stories or Eve.
I’m scared. I do not want to go back there again, held hostage by deep pain and regret. Where are these words coming from? I do not know. To question it means the death of me.
You don’t know anything about me. I prefer it that way because if you knew anything about me if would mean the death of you. I’m awfully mean. I’m a miserable person. I’m miserable company to be around with. I am not an idol or a celebrity. I am not a god or a leader of a secret cult. So do not worship me. Food for thought. I will let you down. I cannot nurture anything. I will let you down badly. Keep your expectations to yourself. You in all your loveliness, splendour and wonder I surmise will need it more than I do.
I’ve never been good enough for this world. It has pushed me aside to get to the pretty ones. The lovely ones. Popular, not so moral ones but they have not stood the tests of time. They do not pray. They aren’t churchgoers. They aren’t Christian or even Catholic or even Muslim girls. They who delve into having their dope smoking ‘man-of-the-year’. They are the visible ones. How can they be lonely when they have nothing in their heads but moth smoke, and heat and it has lived there so long that cobwebs have sprung up, a kind of witch’s brew to drown their spirits when they are feeling pointless. When their perspective is lost. Oh lots of people say they aren’t good enough for this world but they’re simply lying to themselves. Sometimes even the beautiful get lost. So lost in fact that they land in the wards of hell. I don’t pity them for a minute. They found their own way there and must make their own way back to the universe that created them. I am talking about those people who are lost-lost. Just plain lost. They came into the world this way. Deserted by family. Perhaps there was an absent mother, an absent father, or perhaps they witnessed violence (I’ve witnessed violence and made stories up about it.) They are Immortals every single one of them. They suck ‘blood’ (conversation, acting in a world-drama) from mortals, suck water from rivers (the sea is filled salt and salt robs them of feeling physical, their angelic otherworldliness) because they’re thirsty (as if it is the first time they have felt it on their skin), and feed on chicken feet. They cherish red meat. They’re a butcher’s wife every one of them. How I hated them? Their soft mouths, the apple in their cheeks, the paradise I believed that men and boys would receive when they spoiled these ‘children’ to get to love, to say those words and mean it and to say those words and not mean it anymore.
The lost girls do not know how to remember loss, suffering, suicidal illness, confessional poetry, what comes after silence, the passing of history, death, poverty. They do not know what the meaning of the words genocide or Holocaust is.
They know that autumn comes before winter. They have devoted themselves to making themselves look like the cover of a magazine. It’s a tragedy. Comedy speeded up. You can still get a sadistic pleasure out of it, watching them. Studying them up close and personal. Observing their habits ‘in the wild’ (their most natural environment which is the bathroom).
If only they had the brains. If only I had the patience to teach them. If only they could understand. If only they could surprise me these half-wits, these idiots with their shiny pink lips that they continually go to the bathroom and dot more lipstick on because they are expecting a man to show up. It is so hot here. I am sinking. I am becoming more and more lost. And I can’t help it.
Parents have their favourites. I am my father’s favourite. It didn’t matter to the world, to the charismatic older men I met in that dumb world fuelled by money and ambition, the feel of their skin, to the boys (schoolboys tripping on acne, and hormones), to the other girls, the girls who were the same as me, to women, to women who were as cold, as frozen as my mother. She never had a warm embrace for me. She never had a kind word to say to me. And if she did it was for her own pleasure. As if all she did was make me and that was enough, handing me over to my father to raise. I wasn’t really a woman or a girl at the end of youth. This, this was normal and when I found out it wasn’t. When I was fifteen or fourteen it killed something inside of me. It shattered me. It destroyed me. And I became as I wrote in Bittersweet Squalor a destroyer. I became the queen of bitter and mean. I became nasty and nothing that I did could flip that switch. Up and down. Up, up, up and then down, down as if I was a drug addict on uppers and downers.
I have learned the hard way that it’s important to most of all to have a passion to write and then that burst of black clouds, that approaching storm, that half-buried voice inside of me that demands to be crazy and heard at the same time (lunatic make peace with the world I say) doesn’t exist anymore. It doesn’t have a soul. It doesn’t have a spirit. It doesn’t have a physical, mental or emotional body. You can’t act your way out of an acute spell of depression. So the love affair ended. The older man moved on to the birthday of his son and his life, his eloquent wife. How articulate he was in saying and not saying all of these things to me. A killer is a killer is still a killer. Was I was too much masculine, not feminine enough?
All of these questions will drive me insane or to an early grave.
Are you trying to make a statement by doing that, going out like that?
Would you prefer me to be lonely, stay in on Friday and Saturday nights with oh-so-serious-you?
Wipe that smirk off your face. You’re sly. You’re very, very sly? You’re a fox. You’re a red fox. And you’re going on a hunt. Are you going on a hunt femme fatale?
I’m what?
You’re something else. Come here. I want to remind you that you’re a married woman. You do not have options. I am your husband and you have to obey me.
Oh. Now I see the choices that I have.
And? Dance. I want you to dance. Spin around. Put some fresh lipstick on and then kiss me.
No. You’re talking crazy. Why don’t you get up from that sofa lazybones and make me. Why not dance with me?
Why don’t you join me on the sofa?
I’m not in the mood. I’m starting to hate you. I’m a lover not a hater. Oh, he gets a smile for that one. I wonder what my reward will be.
I’m starving. I’m going to make a sandwich. Put on some music for us and I’ll get a bottle of red.
Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
No, no and no.
I just want cake.
You have to start watching what you’re eating some time so why not now?
A tiny piece of gorgeous cake made by my gorgeous wife then I’ll keep the peace.
You promise?
Don’t I always keep my promises?
Depends.
Depends on what?
I guess the planets mostly. The price of a loaf of bread. America. Conspiracy theorists.
Come here.
No.
Look at me.
No.
Come here. Just turn your head. You can still see me.
Why can’t you just say what you want to say to me? I can hear you from where I’m standing.
Real people do not talk like that. Do newlyweds talk like that? Do people who have stayed married for thirteen years talk like that? I know that in Terms of Endearment they did not talk like that. Nor in August: Osage County. Someone died in each of those movies. Someone loved. Someone special and funny. Someone who had a unique spirit. I know that real people don’t talk like that but sometimes I imagine that they do when I feel as if I have a peculiar spirit or nature. Lie. Lie. Lie. Liar. What I meant to say was when I feel sad, gripped by it, carried to its threshold, when it speaks to me, when my head is wrapped tightly around it, can’t get loosened from it. In my head I would make up the conversations we would have over a period of nearly thirteen years of married life. Are vows terms, conditions? Will we go to church or lie in on Sunday mornings with our cold toast complete with gloop of shining marmalade with its pretty sun face, lukewarm milky tea and the newspapers reading our favourites. You will tuck a stray brown curl of hair behind the lobe of my ear, kiss it. Say, ‘You’re really sweet. You smell lovely. All perfumery.’ Later on you will go and make us coffee (my pretend husband will go and make me coffee and yes only in my dreams) before we go out for a walk on the beach. We will hold hands. You will put your arm around my waist. We will look into each other’s eyes, talk about our week at work, about our friends at work. Someone will say something funny. We will both guffaw like crazy. We don’t have children. We have accepted that we can’t have any. It isn’t anybody’s fault really (this really means it’s my fault. It’s impossible for me, for my genes). We have a dog called Misty Upham after this beautiful Native American girl who played the role of a beautiful Native American nurse and cook in the film August: Osage County. You (my husband) have a dog. I have a cat. Kitty. Cat for short. In real life my cat is dead. Tender is the day, the salt on the breeze catching my hair, the nape of my neck, and the backs of our legs. You’re laughing and complaining at the same time, that I decided we come out today of all days. We’ve both rolled up our pants. We’re eating vanilla ice cream with a chocolate flake inside of it. You’ve picked me up. I’m screaming. Screaming with joy and terror. It’s cold. The sea has always freaked me out. I can swim. I just prefer to swim in a heated pool, preferably indoor. I hate the smell of chlorine, the sight of skinny people, so wrapped up in the joy of their thinness and revealing it to the world at large. There’s something beloved about my local swimming pool. I’ve been swimming there since I’ve been a child with my mother and father, my two younger siblings.
Beetroot. Coleslaw. Fried chicken. All of this in front of you a feast. A huge serving. Not like those portions you’re used to getting at the clinic. The portion that could fit into your hand. Now eat. Eat as much as you like or eat as little but you have to eat some. Put it on the end of your fork and now eat this stuff. Some of it is healthy and some of it is unhealthy. Just for you I added extra Tabasco and mayonnaise. Beetroot, coleslaw, chicken is the colour of the day. It will brighten you up. You look so pale because you haven’t been eating right. The doctors spoke about this. Your therapist. You can’t push people who care about you, who are concerned about you and your episodes of mild clinical depression away from you. Just think that not so long ago this was your favourite meal at the hospital. You couldn’t eat anything at that posh clinic. Just think what will happen if you don’t eat. You’ll simply fade away, waste away to absolutely nothing but skin and bone like those kids in Ethiopia, Somalia, wherever-in-Africa. Ethiopia’s in Africa right? See I made you smile. History was never my strongest subject in school or is that Geography. See how I made you laugh. Look at me. A regular stand-up comedian. You’re a moron if you don’t eat this. I’m going to have to throw this good stuff away. I can’t eat all of it. It’ll go off in the fridge. Are you listening to me or am I losing you? Hey, don’t tell me I can’t click my fingers in your face. I need you to pay attention to me. Listen you. You have to start eating and putting on some weight. This kind of lifestyle is not doing anything for you. This negativity. It’s just being selfish. You’re being selfish. Can’t you see that? I hate this. I hate wearing this hat. It is making me tired. You playing these games. These mind games. You can play them with your doctors, the other patients, your psychologist, the occupational therapist then that is fine by me but you can’t come home like this. You can’t come home to me like this. I am your husband. You’re not behaving. If you don’t know how to behave like a wife, a proper wife, then what will happen to both of us? You’re sabotaging us. Something close to perfection. Marriage is not perfect but it can be happy. It can make both people realise that they aren’t perfect people. You’re making us, the once upon a time perfect us unhappy. Don’t do this. Just do the small things. It’s not such a big deal to have a meal. It’s not as if I’m asking you to eat three times a day. This is just the beginning of a very long road to sanity. Forget about being sophisticated. Forget about vanity. Maybe I’ll give up on you today but I won’t give up on you tomorrow and that’s just the way it is. I was saving the vanilla ice cream for you. You’ll find it in the freezer.
And then he ends the conversation like that. He switches off the lights in the kitchen brooding and brooding and brooding. And then the brooding turns to bitterness and then rots and festers in his heart or wherever bitterness, rotting and festering takes place. My dreamy pretend husband leaves me in the darkness of our perfect kitchen that I picked out of the pages of a magazine. Imagination is a wonderful thing. The thing is I am not even looking for a husband. And that is the wicked truth of it all.
In the thirtieth year a nephew has come along, a girlfriend has moved all her flat’s furniture into our house, my parents’ house and I begin to hate, rot and fester more and more. This is me speaking and not my imagination. Life begins to become more brutal, less forgiving. God, how it wounds. This aggression. Life aggravates me and my nerves. It feels like lightning and electricity combined. Can you even imagine that kind of catalyst communicating to the world of the dead? All the suffering. All the details. All I want is God to speak to me. On the other hand words speak to me also. I grasp at them like my nephew’s hands grasp at nothing and everything. And when that voice comes it comes in moth-speak, fog evaporating, leaves tearing up districts, Whitman’s blades of grass, rain meeting pavement, making it wet, slick, making hair wet, slick, licking umbrellas, shoes, coats. It comes with the wind that shakes up everything in its path. I remember how the Johannesburg people wanted to take my father away from me, from Port Elizabeth, my brother, my mother and me. Mostly me I think. They thought we wanted his money. How cruel. People are cruel (here I mean family). Love ones to loved ones. The closest to you. I don’t believe in worshipping family anymore. Scratch that one law, rule, resolution out. It doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. Relationships and everything else were blackened that September and October. 2013. 2013 taught me that pretend was just play-play, another child’s jubilant playing field. And now we come to nearly thirteen years of leaping and awe-inspiring loneliness etched into every landscape that I’ve travelled through, every wonder I’ve quietly observed, every childhood that has burned to the ground, every passion that felt like a fever, that has taken on the guise of a pretty flower in a garden that has made your spirit felt charged and ready for success, every three-leafed clover sorely missing its fourth. Now we come to thirteen years of depressive suicidal illness and disability. Thirteen years of emotional instability. Ups and downs. Follow the writer. The twit. The twitter. The twittering. Follow the babble, the kerfuffle. Follow the leader. Play reader. Play. Push the red button. Drift. That is what it comes down to. Just drift because that is what humanity is meant to do when facing off the physical. When the physical becomes nasty, mean-spirited. And all it gives your brain is negative information, wishes that will never come true no matter how hard you wish for it, no matter how long you hold your breath. It feeds your brain ugly myths and unfortunately there is nothing of the fairy-tale kind where good always triumphs over evil, where I am good, good enough.
I loved you. I always will. For thirteen years now I’ve loved you, met up with you again, again and again in my dreams for real and not pretend and sometimes it kills me to say it. You’re somebody else’s husband. Somebody else’s fella. Some days are good. Some days are bad. God has married the romantic gentleman you to my memories like the world around me has grown to become more digital. It just goes faster. I have no control over it. There’s no function key that I can press. My contemporaries are far more advanced than me. I’ve come to terms with that. I still don’t know anything about you. I don’t know who you are. What you think about when you lie awake at night in your bedroom next to your lovely wife who is nothing, nothing like me. Is she ordinary-extraordinary? Lie. Lie. Lie. Liar. You were my best friend. My only friend as it turned out to be. You taught me truth was the only policy to live by. Some kind of special gentleman you were. You offered me some kind of hope, self-esteem, and culture in a zoo of players. For some time now you have made me very happy. I’ve starved myself for so long. Can you understand what I am trying to tell you? I am never coming back, going back.
You made me quite ill. Frighteningly so. I scared myself to death. I was high on you. Addicted to your kind of human nature, funny hint of environment, scarcity of empathy (did you even know what the word sympathy meant or did it just mean having a sexual transaction to you).
The Ovi 