An Apology:

In my younger years, I wrote poems about the boy I loved, and named him ‘Parasite’.

Of course, we must take into consideration that in my younger years,

I wore shuffle socks and

followed soap operas and

learnt dance routines to Canadian pop songs.

 I’m muddling time now, memory betraying me so that everything up until this point is a custard of Sunday afternoons , my father’s hands, getting a rabbit for my 9th birthday, and my first period.

 As a child,

I believed my sister’s word gospel and hid behind my brother’s door while he rehearsed flirtations with girls from the neighbouring school, and learnt to sing his favourite tracks off our collectively-owned copy of Pop Shop 36.

 I thought my grandfather untouchable,

Before I noticed his bigotry and I battled with the truth of the man versus the obligation to only speak of the dead in golden terms.

 I expected to live with my parents forever,

took glee in spitting on mosquito bites,

obeyed commands from my older-wiser-impressive friend to practice French-kissing on my pillow.

 In my younger years,

I punished you for every moment received and unreturned.

I really did believe I loved you – it felt similar to descriptions in Sweet Valley High novels, snuck in shadow on late afternoons in the school library.

Presumed

Imposed

Coerced

you,

poor little thing, who wanted nothing more than to

laugh and

learn to jive-dance and

achieve a position on the cricket team.

 

I believed my dead grandmother a ghost, dead pets ghosts, Std 3 teacher…

Now you are ghostly.

 And I’m older now,

with more room in me for ghosts.

And I’m learning that a child raised on indulgence, dangerously called ‘romance’ in music, poems, adolescent pulp fiction

sullies

sulks

debases

her own chances at the entire affair from the start.

 

And I see that I was a bully.

That it was me doing the damn parasiting,

So that I was as impressed by my proclamations of love as I was by my new LP.

 

And all you wanted was to be a boy

who played with beetles,

and won at marbles, sometimes.

Editorial: Summer Lovin’

Editorial: Summer Lovin’

 

So, the month of love and Hallmark cards is done, and I can creep out of my single girl’s shameful closet.

 

I got dumped for Valentine’s day.

 

Don’t feel sorry for me, I had bigger fish to fry; a little dumping was nothing. And he wore terrible shoes anyway, and was far too in need of a mother for my liking. He liked those sandals with the woven straps that only Germans should be permitted to wear. And even then, they shouldn’t be allowed, but they’re German and that means they’re scary and I’m certainly not going to stop them. Apologies to Germans everywhere, but you terrify me.

 

Valentine’s came and went and roses were given and dinners were had and single people ranted about capitalism and the meaningless of it all. I couldn’t leave the house that evening. Flatmate and I wanted to go for dinner - single girls on the town, laughing, drinking wine and watching the couples of the city make eyes at each other and sweat through their romance.

 

But we couldn’t.

We’re tired of looking like a couple.

This isn’t paranoia.

 

A few months ago, while out for breakfast, we requested two glasses of water and when brought a single glass with two straws carefully placed, we realized that we’d been mistaken for lovers. Like two characters at Pop Tate’s in some liberal version of an Archie comic.

 

“Um, it’s just, uh, I thought you were, you know…” stuttered Waitress as I questioned the glass situation. I have never actually seen a person flee before. She fled.

 

It’s happened many times. We ain’t batting for the other team, folks, we’re just finding it hard to hook up.

 

There’s a new trend-word out at the moment. Bromance, referring to the unusually close bond between two heterosexual males.Valentine’s day, across town, two of my most caveman male friends meet for dinner. One is celebrating his birthday, the other arrives with a gift. The two spend dinner making smalltalk and worrying about whether their body language suggests they are engaged in the Valentine’s woo.

 

Oh it’s all so complicated.

I scouted the couples I know. All stayed in on Valentine’s.

Only one pair went out. To Spur at Ushaka. I love Spur, but it’s not exactly the Official Restaurant Of The Subtle Seduction. And as for Ushaka, well, I’m told there was a man wandering through the grounds serenading folks with Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’ on his saxophone. Beautiful. Still, if I’m gonna get Wet and Wild and loony by Cupid’s bow, I’d rather it not be on the supertubes, you know?

 

I had a boyfriend once (it ended badly, surprise) who was perfectly adequate in the romance department. He took his cue and dished up the flattery and smoochy bric-a-brac when necessary. But on Valentine’s day we were not allowed to communicate. Not even a flirty SMS. Nothing. He said it was too much pressure. Something about commitment, something, something, fear, something, change of subject, something, the Blue Bulls are bastards, pass me the remote, something, something.

 

Truth is, I don’t want to hate this stuff. I don’t want to use Bridget Jones logic and curse the smug marrieds and phone up my single friends and drink until I’m slurring about my freedom.

 

In Class One, I put a Valentine’s card in my crush’s chairbag. He was good at colouring inside the lines and I thought he was dreamy. He cried and told on and the teacher made me eat my lunch alone at break. Things haven’t really changed that much.

 

Still, we won’t complain.

Happy month of March everyone. Ding dong cupid is dead.

From the Book Bag

Visited the library today.

 

I have a book bag now, exclusive book bag for library books. I like the way it slings over my shoulder and sits perfectly in the small of my back. My small of the back bag book bag.  The library. I’d forgotten; haven’t been a member since, when- my late school years. No, when university began and I moved to the city and started calling everything from home provincial, that’s when I stopped. My adulthood appears to be a considered undoing of everything I have been up until this point. I’ll say the same thing of myself in twenty years, or one, who knows. I find myself in the phase right now where I talk about all the phases I’ve been through.

 

To hold a book in my hands. To read, not to scan. To be here, here in the living of this moment, this one moment outside of windows which can’t be swapped and pop-ups which can’t be blocked. To smell paper, old sheets – which has become a contrived sensory sneak now, made mundane by all the chick lit which has come before, where gentle young women turn pages and take in the tea stain and old print of their books with the cracked spines and dog-eared sense of serendipitous things. My awareness has become such a scathing thing.

 

I treat my books like lovers. Obvious. The only romance afforded gravity must be laced with something sort of dangerous, violent barter; high stakes birth significance. Fiercely loyal to a group of writers and unwilling to try anything else. More interested in the later letters of the alphabet, rather than the early ones, with the supreme exception of Julian Barnes who writes melancholy so well, laced with a consistent awareness of self and hatred of his homeland, his Britain, which I similarly despise. I don’t know what the metaphorical sidetrack is there.  

 

In the bath this morning, I couldn’t reach a part of my back, and I thought of how many films use the washing of backs between lovers as something intense and representative of everything that lives between them. The semiotics of hygiene, I guess. And I imagined a woman who would spend her nights bathing, never able to reach that spot reserved for an imagined lover, and otherwise left untouched as she spends her days alone. Each evening, back to the bath, spot on the back unwashed. I imagined how she would die and be found, and examined, undertaker or surgeon taking note of a little mouldy spot just under her shoulder wing.

 

Then I thought of how kak and melodramatic I tend to become. I am often nostalgic for things not yet found.

 

Never felt so liberated as when I was openly termed ‘depressive’. Delicious, the relief which accompanied doctor’s declaration. I was, “grieving for my existence”, doctor said, which sounded to me suspicious plagiarism of Chekhov’s Masha who lived in mourning for her life and so I begrudged his qualifications as I did his Picasso wall prints; Westville hospital, see for yourself) – I’m not sure which words to choose, but they’re somewhere around the dread of an impending deadline which evaporates when an assignment is suddenly cancelled and you’re – hurrah – on holiday. Life was the assignment and I’d been given the permission to forfeit. It seemed that functionality was effort; I had become lazy and I knew, knew it was that simple and also that oafish; my arts education already teaching me that dark was not necessarily deep and anyway, all things were ultimately redundant. I was, for a short while, put on a type of in-house suicide watch, which comprised my father being too patient and my mother too afraid. The night I swallowed thirty five anti-depressants and half-heartedly nicked my arms, I’d gone dancing and, at the point when my drunken friends whooped along to the climax of some irony-laden indie pop track, I felt my equally drunken self identifying an inherent pointlessness to things, and in that instant, somehow, I equated their dancey, playful writhing as a symbol for everything great and I could find no reason. At the same time, my adult self, from somewhere in my distant future, was living with me and looking back, so that I was at once my present and my hindsight and she could not comfort me and I offered little back. We could not tell each other apart, my immediate and future selves, and we grew sad for each other then.

 

Sometimes, almost always when I brush my teeth, when I give in to my narcissistic tendencies and indulge a mirror-gaze, I feel my soul looking out from behind my eyeballs, clawing for some recognition with the reflection it sees. Some indication that they are the parts of the same whole, that abstract self and solid reflection. I cannot fathom it. They are like strangers wanting to escape an uncomfortable supper.

 

This is not therapy. Only, why I can’t write.

 

After that, the story goes as it goes. We heal and grow. Grow less panicked, less impressed by the hysteria of a painful life and begin to delight in countless strings of little things. Magical, ordinary things. Aircon units humming just so, chance meetings, projected profundities in our tea and biscuits. If we can only outlive our masochism, we grow up.

 

Amongst my regrets in life is, I’d guess, my crossing over that Freudian line when a baby discovers itself as ‘I’ and walks into his or her own ego. Accepts possession. If I could write with absolute omission of me, my ‘I’, there may be something.