A woman who has been abused has deep trust issues. She either hates men, or becomes promiscuous in her sexual lifestyle. She realises that she wants love, and that she needs love and that that love is only forthcoming from Jesus Christ. She prays usually the same prayer at night. Help me. Please help me. God are you out there? Jesus Christ are you listening to me? Nobody loves me. I am ugly, elfish, worthless and pathetic. Today I only ate a yoghurt, a carrot stick and a lettuce leaf. She thinks that nobody understands her but God understands her. God loves her. God wants to forgive her, for after all she is His child. All children are deserving of love. She tries her hardest to understand why she is always walking away from relationships. Why her mother took her innocence as a small child? She blames herself for what happened. She only knows how to abuse other people and doesn’t understand what unconditional love is. She keeps waiting for someone to show up. She keeps waiting for someone to save her. She doesn’t understand that only Jesus Christ can save her and love her. In her heart of hearts, she thinks that because of the sexual, physical, mental cruelty of her mother, because of the sexual harassment in the workplace when she was 22 years old, ingenue, naïve, but thought of as a femme fatale.
She had all the men falling over their feet. Is it too late, she asks herself, for the man of her dreams, for Holden was always the man in her dreams to save her again? Does she perhaps have a future with him at his side? Will he ever understand why she walked away from the warmth in his arms? Why she walked away from Johannesburg, why she walked away from a media empire that she was helping to create, why she walked away from the man of her dreams, the husband that she had been looking for her entire life? God, she says, if he still wants me, is still unmarried, or if he is married, bless him, bless Palesa, bless the people that he works with, who love him. In spite of twenty years, in spite of the age difference, his vast life experience, her limited life experience, she wanted to know if he would still love her. I came here to forget. I came home to forget. I want to be loved. That is a universal phenomenon. “Mum why didn’t you love me”. She is my protein and my angelic conjured-up myth. She is my extended piece of poetry. But now there are glacier between me and Mrs Rochester in the attic. There’s an ice picnic. Nothing of made up of childhood chronicles remains only the great thought of a child, and the movement towards the bright lights of a city warms her heart now, that gives her hope.
Warm body, cold hands, cold feet, cold heart, blue, blue, blue but I want justice. We’re civilized now when we meet. No more tea parties in the garden for us serious ladies in our mother’s church hats and shoes, lipstick on our teeth, our cheeks are pomegranate-red and our perfumed hair that smells like flowers, our happy reflections in the mirror. I think of my spiritual hunger, and my shame at being raped in a nightclub when I was 22-years-old. How my innocence was stolen over the years by men, and by women. When you know better, you do better said Maya Angelou. So, I keep waiting for a kind of epiphany, a watershed moment to come. Someone who will keep me safe and warm from mental cruelty, abuse of any kind. Someone who is kind and strong. Someone I can take care of for a change, and in return care for me. I think that I am talking about love, I think. At 40-years-of-age is it too late, is it much too late. In my heart of hearts, I think the time is right for me now to make my move. To move forward. Onwards and upwards. I think he’s the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen in my life. I want him in my arms. I want to obey and submit to him. I want to wear a meringue and take vows in a church.
