Elijah, you are a beautiful book. Just an imprint burned on my brain like a ghost. I miss you more than most on some days, just thinking of the very thought of you. I think of the anatomy of my health.
I think of Elijah who had literally moved abroad. Well, he had always wanted to travel. He had prospects. I was a non-event in his life. He had always wanted to go to Prague. Milan Kundera was his hero. When he asked me who my heroine was, and I told him, Virginia Woolf, he had looked at me sadly, then looked away again. But she killed herself, Imogen, she literally drowned herself. Just think about that. Her work triumphedin the end, I told him, but he didn’t want to hear it from that perspective. He had looked at me one last time tired-happy before he walked out my front door for the last time. He said he couldn’t love someone who was so insecure, so unlovable, who didn’t like herself. He was a beautiful stranger, soon to be estranged from me, and I, well, was just strange. Caught up in a set of circumstances beyond my control. The mornings flooded my brain.
There was so much to do. It was the weekend. Even my Saturday mornings were spent in the library, away from Elijah after another physical altercation, that had ended with me in tears, him drinking. I’d love to look at children in those days, their focus, and concentration, their giftedness, confidence, wisdom, and maturity beyond their years. The mothers would be selfless, and giving. The fathers were tall men in blue jeans, dictating to their wives, on the whole distracted, sometimes sneaking a smoke. Saturday afternoon, it poured spitting rain. I thought of birdsong, the most beautiful sound that a bird could make. And my clothes were like another planet, and 8felt like the sea. I was soaked through. The rain didn’t last long. By the time I reached the flat the downpour was over, and felt myself falling into Elijah’s arms. He didn’t see the tears in my eyes. I was a woman on a mission. All I wanted to do was sit.
The previous night he had disappeared, returning in the early hours of the morning with a girl called Susan on his arm. I slept on the couch. The morning faded away. Winter wasn’t far off, the center of winter, and it snowed, and I dressed n layers, drinking tea to warm me up from the soles of my feet, to the top of my head. Elijah kissed my forehead, and then my nose playfully. It was rare that he was like this in the mornings. Usually he slept off his binge-drinking from the night before. We walked arm-in-arm to a café for doughnuts. He called it, ‘the nest doughnuts on campus’. It was a pizza place too, but usually in the evenings. They served it with red wine in champagne flutes. Elijah would drink anything. I would sip mineral water. Once upon a time on the way home, he put his tongue in my ear.
I felt like a specimen, an experimental science project. He waited for my reaction.
I pushed him away from me, walked ahead of him, stuffed my hands in my pockets. That night his kisses felt like pebbles on my tongue, but his lips was warm, and he whispered sweet nothings in my ear. I forgot about feeling like a specimen, like a genome, and his breath was sour, his body was like a dry riverbed, and what was lost in translation was like driftwood, was like a clown handing you a birthday balloon, and the moonlight was pearled on his skin, but I let him take me anyway into his arms. And I remembered how detached I felt as he lit a joint, but I didn’t want a hit of marijuana, I didn’t feel like it, and he caressed the softness of my inner thigh, and he sighed when I said that I wasn’t in the mood anymore. It was dark out. So dark, but the clouds were like cream, and the wind was like a gunshot going off. I brushed my bed hair in the bathroom in the moonlight, drank some water.
“I’ll come and see you,” he said, “wherever you live, I’ll come.” Elijah had promised in the beginning of our relationship. But for the first time in my life I ran away that day, but every day I look back I was afraid. I told myself I didn’t have anybody to love me, to want me. I told myself I didn’t need anyone. I didn’t have anyone who cared, to hold me, didn’t have anyone to declare that they loved me. Running away came easy. I moved to a different city, or a different part of town. Inside I would feel so empty, remember Charlie’s breath against my cheek, or his finger would stroke my bottom lip, emptying out my heart with negativity. I thought of the city as my country. I thought of me as always being sad, never smiling. I thought of my own despair, and hardship, my own suffering, and pain. The waves, the waves, the waves, eating sushi with forks with Elijah.
Stuffing ourselves gloriously to the hilt with trifle with sherry for pudding, with lamb curry, fish cutlets, and the glow of yellow rice with sultanas on a Sunday afternoon jaunt to his aunt’s house for lunch in Gelvandale. Afterwards, we’d go to the beach. If the weather was warm, we’d go swimming, wade into rock pools, and explore in my white tennis shoes, his boots. Elijah did hit me, but if it that was domestic violence, I certainly didn’t know it, felt I deserved it, even thought he did it out of love. Men did hit women out of love, didn’t they? He held my hand. I didn’t want to hold his hand, feel his fingers tangled up in mine. We bought ice cream. I looked at the mansions, he looked at the girls. I remembered Susan. How he said that the three of us were going to play a game, and I could smell the earth on her, she was cold, she complained, but I didn’t care. Her mouth tasted like cigarettes.
Out of the sea comes driftwood like champagne, like a supernova. You gave me a fright. I think sometimes to myself that I must be a bit of a joke to them, and I have to let go, surrender this feeling. I take a long walk, pass the children’s park, my estranged aunt’s house who called me ‘a mental patient’, and for the first time I realized I was at peace with being the black sheep of the family. I loved her, truly I did, and she was a survivor like me, having worked thankless hours in a factory for most of her life, without earning a pension, putting her two brothers through the Bush University. The University of the Western Cape. The last time Charlie was in my bed he didn’t want to make love. He wanted to read.All I wanted hm to do was touch me, stroke my hair while lying in his arms. He was lost in Andre Brink. Forget this place of weeping, this succession of death, think of the gathering rain instead.
All I felt was sadness when he looked at me, mouthed that he loved me, I felt a wretched sadness that only Radiohead could solve. So, the karma police came marching in, the memory police gave their marching orders. Fragile. I was fragile. Elijah was fragile, just like all my other university boyfriends. I thought of his mental state, my own mental state. Salvage, and reap, reap, and salvage, that is the key to survival, to the art of my own survival.I did feel scared that I would always be on my own, not amounting to anything much. Sometimes I wished I was dead. In Elijah’s arms I felt numb to the world, jaded, unaccomplished, and the surface tension d not want to seem to lift. Sometimes I thought he found life with me impossible. I didn’t understand how we had made it thus far as a couple. I want to scream, I want to shout, but I know that deep down he won’t respond to any of that.
God, he doesn’t want me, not like I want him. It’s over. It’s over. It’s over. My life moved towards my postgraduate studies once again, my research, my thesis. I was writing a travel column for a national magazine, about the European countries I visited in my gap year after matric. The kettle is boiling. I eat the noodles straight from the pot, not really caring about my unbrushed hair. They don’t taste like beef, which is what the packaging promises. Everything tastes like chicken. And when Elijah is gone, the bedwetting starts again. It’s the sleeping pills, and the tranquilizers I take at night. I need to sleep. The sheets are wet, my pajama pants are wet, sometimes I cry. I cry at the unfairness of it all, of Elijah leaving me. I cry. And then I get up, take a shower, change my clothes, change the bedding, do the laundry, chores around the flat that Elijah, and I used to share. I become promiscuous again.
There’s another strange man in my bed night after night. The lovemaking is all machine-like, I’m like a robot going through all the motions, the sex is hurried movements, and under the covers. I stop taking the sleeping pills, and the tranquilizers. I’m transformed into an educated, selfless wifey, making breakfast, making coffee, making half-burnt toast in the mornings for these men. I’m empowered, I tell myself. I’m in control. This revolution is done, or rather I’m evolving.I think of the branches after midnight moving outside my window. And not for the first time I think of being raped, and murdered in my own bed. I think of the poet Susan Lewis, the writer Pat Spencer. I think of hibernating in my bed, lying in the fetal position, and sobbing, mostly because Elijah left me, and not the other way around. The river seems to mask everything. It is observer of my anxiety, and fear.
I buy a color television. It is my first solo electronic purchase since Elijah has left. Men look at me now. They give me the once-over. They stare. They glance my way. This makes me feel attractive, but not for long. I can end up with anyone in my bed, I tell myself. I still wet the bed when I’m on my own. The men don’t eat the breakfast I make them. Some smile at all of this, others take a quick shower, a few make up the bed, eat cereal, watch cartoons on my television, or they want me. Sometimes I feel as f they are predators, what am I doing here, giving in repeatedly to sate their desires. The branches after midnight sing their song. Elijah could be tender sometimes, he meditated, and fasted, and baked croissants of all things, that I would eat obediently at the coffee table in the family room of the flatlet. And when Elijah was filled with tenderness, I became survivor, not victim.
I, a disciple of Louise Hay, and Marianne Williamson, was filled up, up with love for him, and a quiet kind of bone season desperation. And I remembered that last night, Elijah was sleeping, and it felt as if there was a continent between us, a narrow space between our bodies, and the bed was like the sea. All men inspire the skill, and expertise of lovemaking, and controversy, and shame, in their women. And I thought of the missionary position, Elijah inside of me for the last time, and I felt as if I was Homer. I knew I would miss him, his eyes would be tender for another soon, soon, and saw, I swear this. I saw my future self, lying in an empty bed, the university days, the ex-boyfriends, the Susan, the lovers like a vanished community. Their gestures all innocent, and I craved them like I had craved them once before, like rain, and starlight, like insight, like meat drained of taste.
And I knew that life would be a gathering for me, always a gathering.The men would be the hunters, the women, the females their victims. That night I dreamed again of Patagonia, and this island there. I felt safe there. I was older, in my forties, with no man on my arm. I was still a goddess. All women, whatever their age is a goddess. Flight, and adrenaline had erased my insatiable hunger.
Whether they are abandoned, or not. Whether they become creatures of habit, set in their ways, or not. I felt empty inside. In my dream I felt empty, because I could no longer remember Elijah’s sensitive hands, his artistic hands, and his interesting face. The island was masculine. Elijah was still a book, instead with time he had become a novel. I thought of Bessie Head then, a lit cigarette in her mouth.
