I didn’t go to the poet Mzi Mahola’s funeral. Ernest, another well-known Eastern Cape poet, said that he would give me a lift in his car but I did not go. How much light there is in this room is the test. If I will wake up and greet the day or if I will sleep late. I am a writer. I tell myself I am capable of doing anything today. I can sleep late if I want to. The miracle of this awareness penetrates me but it also frightens me when it is not soothing me. I look for a vein. To remind myself that I am still alive, still breathing, still relevant, still anonymous. I look at the empty juice box next to my bed and remember last night.
I live like a monk. I pray like a monk. I read the Scriptures. I meditate. I’m spiritual. I babysit. When I look after the baby I don’t write. I don’t have the time. The baby is extraordinarily beautiful. I watch YouTube videos while she sleeps. I listened to a recording of a Joan Didion essay, and an interview on Charlie Rose. I think of David Foster Wallace. I watched everything about him on YouTube. I don’t read as much as I used to. I don’t swim laps anymore. And I am not that young anymore. Time has marched on and now I regret too many things. I regret the man. That painful interlude. Oh, well. I always preferred being on my own. I always preferred the solitary life.
Chronic illness has changed me. Taking psychotropic medication for two decades has changed me. I have worn the mask well. I don’t have the understanding within me to feel anything anymore. I have lost the will and the energy to live. I don’t carry that instinct within me anymore. I don’t pick up the phone or answer messages, not that anybody writes or speaks or listens to me. Depression has that effect on people. I have become quieter and more set in my ways as I have become older. I am middle aged, unmarried and I have no children.
There are times when I sink into a state of despair and reflection about this but it was my choice. I think of the beauties that I fill my journal with that co-exist in the morning rays of light, being outside in nature, in a shiny green bottle of ice cold Savannah cider, finding myself in a princely blue pool swimming laps, stomping my boots in the rain on a pavement as I come into the house, squelching wet sea-sand between my bronzed toes. I think of my clay fingers that have never worn a ring, that has only written poetry but how it was my choice.
I have struggled in my life and I am not proud that I enjoy a light beer now and then. I have a difficult relationship with my beautiful mother. People do not see me. My family sees the illness first. For the most part I am estranged from my immediate family. You are vertigo. You are rotten bread and as pale as milk, depression. You are cold rain pouring down from the sky, winter sun in my eyes, you are a wilderness cave at the back of my throat, you are smooth gull feathers, and then I think of love. The love of my brother’s ex-girlfriend’s children, her baby on the way, the baby daughter that he has with his latest girlfriend. There are times when I think of my twenties, how good I was then at holding a man’s attention, how relapse after relapse followed that and my thirties and then a dull heartache in my early forties.
I pull the blanket over my head in bed at night and watch ASMR videos that pluck the tension and stress out of me and help me fall asleep. My sister has come home from Europe. She has brought rich chocolate biscuits filled with cream with her. I eat a few, lick the cream off my upper lip and realise I hardly think about the man anymore. Perhaps the same scenario plays itself out in his life now. He doesn’t find himself thinking of me. Once I called him Husband. Once he called me Wife. People do that when they are in love. When they make plans for the future. When they decide to get married. The butter chicken dishes are waiting. The butter chicken dishes from two days ago are still waiting in the sink. The children are sleeping. C. and E. and R. are sleeping. They are worn out from playing the entire day.
I heard the news from a friend who also writes for African Writer Magazine like I do that I have won an important poetry prize. They were paying for the plane ticket to the ceremony and accommodation. I am looking after my father. He is depressed. I write to let them know that unfortunately I can’t go. On the day of the prize giving it is my brother’s girlfriend’s mother’s funeral. She had brain cancer. I also have a very bad flu. I can’t stop coughing, sneezing and vomiting up everything I eat and drink. The first congratulations I get comes from Abenea, my friend. The friend who writes for African Writer Magazine.
That night I eat Lindt chocolate, I listen to a Christmas carol, I stare at the lights on the Christmas tree, I cry for everything that I have lost, I cry about the psychosis I experienced, my relapse and covid scare at Provincial Hospital, but strangely the first thing that I don’t think about is the man that left me three years ago who now lives in another country. I am forgetting his face and it seems as if enough time has gone by that I am letting go of his hair, skin, nails, teeth, hair and his black sneakers, his shiny car that was as big as a spaceship. The Gauteng Book Fair where they handed out the prizes was well attended. Crowds make me nervous. I wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t like this in my teens and my early twenties but illness has changed me and my father’s depression.
Finally I open my eyes and greet the day. It is so quiet, there’s not even birdsong and the room swells up with tenderness and a grace that I do not have it within myself to carry anymore and I try and forget the fact that I wrote a poem about the man and that it won a prestigious prize. You see, he has already forgotten all about me, as if I had never even existed in his life, while I ache for him, and my heart burns and I think of the light that existed between us in the initial stages of our relationship that I rediscover in the pages of Mangaliso Buzani’s poetry book, and the bones of Mxolisi Nyezwa’s words and my copies of New Coin. I think of the poetry launches that I am invited to, that I never attend because I am deathly afraid of crowds now in my forties.
I look at my mother in her dark sunglasses that she wears now after her two eye operations as she feeds her grandchild mashed banana. I think of the love that I feel for my brother’s child. Sometimes I think to myself what my life would have been like if I had had a son or a daughter and how it would have destroyed me leaving them in the care of strangers if I had had another relapse. If I had had to be hospitalised and I think that the more I write about this, I come to terms with a certainty that this quiet solitude will not kill me.
While children and the vulnerable die in Sudan, I write. I write to reach them. I write to reach their arms and legs like branches, the nobility in their eyes, the grace in their limbs but all I see is depleted energies, red, bloodstained clothing and fingernails.
God is waiting upon all of us to react.
