I have no children of my own. In reality, I exist. In non-reality, I am non-existent. I am more demon, than angel now that Mick has gone. I still have those same fears and yearnings. My vagina has those same fears and yearnings. I thought that there would be this shared recognition between Mick and me. He had been the one for so long. The only man in my life. He chose another. I tell myself that on the dark nights when we could have been making love. Everything has become a river leading to honesty, breaking down walls of fears and yearnings. I wanted someone to tell me that I was beautiful, but the world in its entirety tells me that I am beautiful now. What am I living for, now that Mick has gone, I mean, he was on his way out of my life anyway? What is love in the modern age anyway? There is no time to play. My father never approved. But it was my choice, or Mick’s choice, or Mick’s mother’s choice. Believe me, it turned out all for the best anyway. He will marry, I will not. He will have those children; I will not have those children. I belong to the world, and the world belongs to me, and every global phenomenon in it. Is there any man in the world who can understand that? Inside my heart is breaking. Mick is leaving for forever. We’ll see each other around. We’ll wave. But we don’t dare hug anymore. That proximity, so close to sex, that rarefied atmosphere of friends who were almost lovers inside my head, no more, no more, no more. Now there is quiet respect. Now there is admiration. He’s doing his thing (filmmaking), and I’m doing my own thing (my writing). I doubt there will ever be room for collaboration.
I live in poverty. He is wealthy. I am an artist. He is an artist. And I suppose my choice of lovers, and the men whom I choose to love now is all on me. I do love, but it never ends up in the bedroom. It ends up in on the page. It ends up freeing me. I am a bird with fears and anxieties. I am just an average dragon-woman. I am just an average dragon-beast. I have everyday flame inside of me. Mick does not return my phone calls anymore. He does not come to the house anymore in his car. I still look out for him. I will be doing that until I am eighty years old. For now, another love has come. The world is on fire. He makes me laugh, and think, and feel in ways Mick never did. I am sad. I am happy again. I tell myself that this is just preparation. I’m hungry for it. I am going to do it again. This time, I am alone. I am on my own again. Of course, I tell myself, there’ll be sadness. Why, oh why, does there always have to be this sense of wishful thinking, why this sadness. Always flying solo. Mick, I wanted you to feel the cold like I do. But you are heat, and all-heart, and warmth. I will be writing to you until I am eighty years old. Still trying to win your heart. I am a voyager. The new love is also a voyager. I exist. He exists. It is a new day, and dawn is breaking over the globe, and I am generous and this love is also generous. More giving, more prepared to take me on. I do not think he will be calling me intense to my face, perhaps behind my back, not even then. Not even then behind my back. I am doped up on love again. Mick has become another city (and this new love has empires, empires to build). Mick has become another tale of love lost.
Nostalgia. Whatever love means, it is not Mick, and I am still writing this novella as if it was an introduction to Mick and my old love, as if this was a story about an old flame. But this is a story about a philosopher-educationalist, the impact he is making on the world around him. And for now, he is perfect for me. The thing you do not know about me is that I tell people what they want to hear mostly, but if I like you, I like you. And your home, becomes my home. My home is where the ocean meets the shore. My mother loves money. She loves that lifestyle. So, I have convinced myself that I can buy my mother’s life, I can buy her love. Men are the only fixtures in my life. The only men who save me are my editors. Love has a way of conquering all. We sleep to dream in this house. As painful as our past once was. We make believe happiness. It is only an invention that masks who we truly are. Like the seasons that are so determined to change, I will rise above these circumstances of falling in love, and then losing that love, and watching that brilliant, brilliant man walking away. And this, this will always be somewhat of a performance. People, believe me, don’t want honesty. Honesty kills trustworthiness, childhood continued into adolescence, and there is, here is the blue hour. There is, here is an unbearable lightness. Mick’s gone. Playful and sweet Mick’s been replaced by love. I should be used to this game by now. Playing this game. I do believe in love. Love is a jewel in the dust. Love is a turning point. There is even faith and obedience in love. Love is a state of emergency. And I have learned obedience from what I have suffered.
I am just a servant. Watched, observed, studied, and I know this. I know this like I know the back of my hand. The men will love me, and I will love them in return. I will love. I will be loved. And all the men I still love them. They are still very much alive, and human in a kind of memory form or blueprint to me. If they want to take me to bed now, there will be no hesitation on my part now. Just me. Dreamy, composed, and calm, and still as they enter me. Afterwards, they will leave me, as they all did in the past. Humiliation and embarrassment will return, along with progress and preparation. My life will go on as before. There will be love. I know it. There will always be love. This big dreamer, this damsel in distress mostly will betray nothing. This hunger is torture. This spiritual hunger is torture. But love, and falling in love is like a beautiful dream. The blue light of the day becomes even more blinding. And even the leaves have a kind of psychopathology. It is safer for me to embrace life in winter rain. And every day, even though the sun shines, the rain pours down upon my soul, the wilderness of my soul. My love, my love, I am writing again. You would be so proud of me if you could see me now. In the same way that I am proud of you. No more names. No more accusations. No more hugs. No more kisses on the cheek. No more sad looks. Your heart belongs to another. Your heart beats for another. Your daughter, your daughter. And, yes, I believe that there is righteousness and justice in the world. Yes, I do believe in love. Love can build the dimensions of a foundation, and this, and this, is how much it takes to love you.
David, this image of you in my imagination. And for me, love is suspended in mid-air, and for me it was always safer to embrace the life in winter rain, (as I have said before). There’s life in everything, everything, everything. There’s love in everything too. I never could understand love. Never saw it between my own parents. Only the sexual impulse in my mother, her modus operandi to have children, her depression, the fire in her eyes whenever she looked at the togetherness of my father and me, the peacock-blue eyeshadow on the lids of her eyes, the thick black mascara on her lashes, her G-strings, thongs reserved for the sex act. There were always empty bottles of sparkling wine under the bed, that I discovered the morning after. Whispers in the dark, finding my mother’s g-spot, amorous laughter (her amorous laughter), and daddy would sometimes forget that I could hear everything. The shower would run in the middle of the early hours of the morning. I would be looking for a pen to write with, and discover condoms in his side of the bedside table. How does a woman become a lover? How does a middle-aged, grand dame of a woman become a lover to either a man, or a boy nearly half her age? It happens. It happens. But husbands never leave their wives, unless of course the lady in question is half his wife’s age, or, looks like his daughter, or, has the looks his daughter has. A girl becomes a lover. In the books, that I’ve read from Updike to Kundera, Brazilian Paulo Coelho, and Russian American Vladimir Nabokov, it is girls that become lovers. It is girls that become wives. Just memories. Men are still men.
Boys are still boys. They look at her. Sometimes they stare at her. I am her. She is me. I take note of the stares, the smiles, their stares, their smiles, their proposals, and the flirting, the talk. The talk it burns me. And when I go home, I meditate on the way they look at me, speak to me, and imagine them, either going down on me, or, turning me on so much that we make love, or engage in sex acts. Having a good time. Pleasure is fun. And then I think of the kiss. Do you not only kiss people that you are in love with? Do you not only touch people, well, I touch men a certain way, that I like, that make me feel safe, that I would go to bed with given the chance. Love, or, rather the physical aspect of it makes me feel anxious when I remember what happened in the past. Anxiety and fear, and uncertainty, restless, frustration, apathetic. What if I can’t perform because of the medication, or the depression? It has happened to me in the past. In the past, I was humiliated. Most of all, he was humiliated because he thought that it was his fault that I could not climax. I was so young. In those situations what does a girl do. Admit everything about her past? Confess everything about her recovery, relapse after relapse, stints in mental institutions, state hospitals, expensive private clinics? A proposal is either decent, or, indecent. This kind of proposal from a man to a woman reminds her of her own sexual appeal, and sometimes this woman remembers those nights of her parents’ when her father and mother would turn into lovers. And then even daughter would become lover, touching herself in the dark, removing her panties, thinking of men.
Men old enough to be her father. Or, men standing in front of her desk, teaching her in the classroom. I knew (even then, even then), how to fly. How to focus on the fact that I had wings. I was mute. I was on remote control. I was a mute. I was a machine on lockdown when it came to my academic work. Running, like Haruki Marukami, made me feel. It didn’t make me feel the despairing emptiness. It is my mission to captivate man’s imagination. I tell myself that. Even when there is a monster beneath the bed giving me a fright. If I knew any better, I would think that it was my imagination running wild. A trick of the sunlight falling on God’s wisdom. I believe in diaries. It made me feel something other than erotic. I did not call my grandfather veteran then. Did not know what epilepsy was, and that it was just a form of trauma, like my own brain injury. That every brain injury stemmed from an incident. An incident of trauma (I loved my grandfather very much, and in my mind, he lives forever like all the men, the men I have loved). I did not know what combat fatigue was then, way back then. I did not know what shell shock was. And as I grew older, my paternal grandfather became a distant memory. The voices inside my head sound very far away now. I have had a good rest, if I can call peace, having peace of mind that. It has motivated me not to think about religion, but spirituality. I do not like the dark. It is true. My physical body wants nothing to do with it. Adeline Virginia Woolf never stopped writing. Emily Dickinson never stopped writing. Anne Sexton never stopped writing. I will never stop writing. My sister, my sister.
My sister. Born four years apart on the same day. We never speak. I think of the phases of our childhood, the chapters of our life together, and how we grew apart. She was play-white, with her blonde friends. I was the one who was of mixed-race descent. Who was fake? Who was fake? Now I steal her clothes. She wrote me off years ago, like both sides of the family. Both maternal and paternal family. My brother is the only sibling I have left. He has fallen in love. The girl is mad for him, wants to marry him. I am not included in their family plans. Soon, I must make my own way back into the world, like my paternal grandfather. You can see my slave ancestry from Cape Verde and Saint Helena in the texture and colour of my hair, my brown eyes. I am half-white, and half-black. There is Germanic-blood that runs in my mother’s veins. She is fair of complexion. She is beautiful, and larger than life, both complex and complicated, both religious, maladjusted, sexually abused, molested from early childhood (as I was), and when I look at her, even now, depressed, tangled hair, as we both miss my sister, her daughter, the one who looks like her, acts like her in the world, feels like her in the world, all I feel is affliction. Affliction for all the wounded in the world. It seems as if I only write about people who have left a mark on my soul. David, the Sussex-man, Mickey, Salinger, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Freud, Adler, Jung, Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Ben Kies, Neville Alexander, Fikile Bam, Bhadra Ranchod, Gus Ferguson, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Mzi Mahola, Ayanda Billie, Razeen Davids, the new man in my life, and the list goes on, and on, and on.
And if there was any justice in the world, I would be with Rob. But I cannot catch a thief.The women despise me. The women despise me because I am unattached. I wear no ribbons and no pearls. I wear no wedding ring. Although I want to. I want to very much badly. I doubt that they (the women, the wives) will very much understand this, my reasons why I have never married, never had children, never met the one on that sunny road. The women will never understand my sunny disposition, the smile I wear pasted on my face. The fact that I go to war with girls and women every single day of my life. For most of my lifetime, I have gone to war with my mother over the adoration, affections, praise, and worship of my father. For my sister, it was different. It was my psychopathological disposition. The bipolar mood disorders. My ups and downs, lows and highs, the medication that numbed and deadened both the emotional, mental, every fibre of my moral being, and physical pain, and my spirit, my soul to the outside world around me. Now I imagine (my sister says). Now I tell stories (my sister, maternal family, my mother says). Now I have no wish to speak to my other half, my better half who will spend Christmas in Berlin this year with her German boyfriend. I do not love her anymore. Yet, I say that I love these people still. I wish them well. I forgive, but I have a long memory for painful things. My gift to the world is both twofold. My gifts are my soul, and my writing. Mahatma Gandhi’s gift to the world was his soul. Same with Luthuli, Mandela, Mbeki, Hani, and Arafat. I am waiting upon the world to save me.
So, mothers be good to your daughters. Your daughters will live like you do, learn like you, and love like you. I do not have the capacity to love anyone as much as I love the men. Do I loathe women? No. They loathe me. Do I desire women in the same way that I desire the men? No, I do not desire women. I am not a lesbian. Neither, neither am I a prostitute. I do not accept gifts of cash for the sex act. I think of the elitist allure of Salinger. Jerome David Salinger. I think of his epic hurt. I think of his epic hurts in life. I think of his epic hurts in love. I think of my own epic hurts in love. I cry like a baby. I can hold a man. I can hold a vulnerable man who can put it all on the line for love. I can hold a mentally ill man, a depressed man, a man who has lost everything, but do not ask me to do the same for a woman. You see, as I have said before. I only write about people who have left a mark on my soul. It is good to feel loved and accepted. Only men have loved and accepted me. Every obedient and disobedient part of me, whole, or, broken, with all of my heck, with all of my wise nature. Once lithium too was an idea, just an idea, this miracle salt, like Europe had been an idea. I have later prophecies on my mind now. I have rewriting on my mind. I have proofreading screenplays, and pre-production in mind, but not a future filled with happiness, and prosperity, a family life, a life marked by settling down, raising children. I’m thinking of nations, and of bringing nations together, stopping wars, building democracies across Africa, reconciliation and equality, negotiation and diplomacy, generations marked by an unfolding.
An unfolding of a divine mystery. I think of the hours. I think of how I can fill those hours with activities in the same way John Nash did, in the same way Trump does with purpose. For all who are called to service, are called in the same way to sacrifice and responsibility, accountability and blessing too. I see abundance everywhere now, parachutes in September, and for my sister’s sake, and for people like her, the alignment of bipolar to brain injury. I stand in the shadow of the rhino, of Africa from the east to the west, the wildflowers of Africa, which are the voices of Africa. I think of the girl child, and the transformative powers on the confidence of the boy child (once sinner, once child soldier, now activist, scientist, inventor, educationalist). We are all living in changing times. I stand in the neutral shadowlands. You will never see my grief observed. You think you see me; you know me, you hear me speak, you think you have some sought of forewarned knowledge of me. You say hello, I say goodbye. It has always been like that for me in relationships, for in life, for in my life there is always more grief, and sadness, and emptiness for me, than happiness. I think of boys who have moves like Mick Jagger, and as I pass them by, I think of the high art of confessional fiction. I love. I am making progress there, but I do not kiss. I do not betray anyone. I do not write and tell. I do not kiss and tell. And believe you me, if I love you, I love you for you. For you are revolutionary, for you are photographer of the African National Congress in Tanzania, for you are educationalist, and even though you don’t even think it, you are philosopher.
I will love all these men for an eternity. Until the hereafter comes for me. I think of all the men, and their sons and daughters, and the women who have given them those sons and daughters, and I wonder to myself are they in love, are they still in love. I wonder sometimes, more ego talking than anything else, do they sometimes think of me. Think of me in their arms, tired. So, tired of life. Relationships are challenging to me. They challenge me on every level. As I am sure, every book that I write challenges the reader. For me, personal success overrides personal happiness. My father taught me that.
