As for the pain of others

I have to fall in love with another, marry another, maybe have children, older children, so that not having children is not a tragedy and I don’t fall in love with a ghost. as I have been for the past twelve years. But you, your memory, Robert, it’s so vivid, and it’s like rain. It doesn’t hurt and I can still see you smile and all I can do is wonder why it doesn’t go away.

Cape Town

I mean it’s not that the boys haven’t come to the house (cute boys with beautiful hair and striking eyes and all they want to do is talk and talk and talk, all I have to do is listen, which is the most easy in the world to do with people who are in love with themselves and all they want to do is escape to the past, back to you, back to the streets of Johannesburg, that winter, that fall).

All I can think about is you all the time now. I am not the same and you are not the same and you have a life and I don’t. You can stay up all night and I need routine. You have a family. I cover one. You don’t talk to me even in my dreams and I try to forget about the time when my life was perfect and I had a good time and I had a friend who made me laugh and forget that I was sick, sick of being sad, sick of being different, alone. Have you ever wanted an ordinary life? I was never a good girl. I was never the girl who was going to be good enough for you, good enough for your family, good enough for your image. It’s fun when you love a person, everything, and I mean all the details come together and I’ve had a lot of time to think about those details. Oh, the planning that went into it, how it all came together. Marry someone else, that was a good idea, but I didn’t want to do that because who would put up with me, with the suicidal disease, who would know when to take this and when to take that, that I had to take long invigorating walks and hot baths , have a cat or a dog.

You must have been extraordinary enough, extraordinarily perfect, charismatic, wise and beautiful, sensitive and fiercely intelligent, brutal, violent, aggressive, domineering, an introverted leader (oh, men can be beautiful too, many things, good things) to have left such an impression, muse, on me, my psychological framework, on someone so young, so inexperienced. I don’t really want to love anyone else. There. I said. You’re just going to have to put up with me from now on appearing and then disappearing from your life from pages of books, from poetry, from newspapers and magazines, quickly disappearing from view, from landscapes I’ve created in my own imagination, painted there as if you were my possession if only for a while and that is more than enough for me. You see, for a short period of time, months you really gave me the world and no one has ever done that for me in my life (I’m not that young anymore and I’m tired of waiting for someone else to come around and repeat what you did), for I’m usually just the quiet, invisible, Outsider, introvert and that was always fine with me. I do not want you to see me like that. Times have changed and I have changed with the times.

I had no idea what desire meant, to be the second sex, feminine and pretty (all those words sound so beautiful, don’t they?). I was very young when I met you. I was very cowardly, I didn’t follow my instincts all the time, I wasn’t very tough, I didn’t have guts but I have never forgotten you. I want you to know that even now after all this time. I do not want you to see me like that. I’m not strong enough to face the world on my own again, to face the world head on. Have you already noticed that I speak with less arrogance than twelve years ago? I have learned a lot, especially from you. I learned a lot from you, you know, and there were times when you were kind, very kind and patient with me. I’m tired of trying to love the world so much. Sometimes worrying too much because the world is so cruel and dangerous full of greedy sharks, hungry lions and tigers but I still dream and some nights I dream of you but more I think about the memory I still have of you. And the memory is bright. The memory I have of you is so bright it burns my eyes and it hurts to breathe (it’s funny how the simple things in life that happen to you when people are nice to you make it hurt to breathe). I must need you somehow. Isn’t it the subconscious that speaks when you dream? It’s like he inherited something wonderful from some otherworldly place when I think of you.

Of course, I only know how to hurt people so as not to love them because that’s all I’ve come to know about life, about family life, about the planet, about the environment around me, but plants and animals are different in a way and I think you know it too. I once wanted to be perfect, when I was younger, when I wasn’t sick, the wheel, the fine, intricate web of my brain’s navigational compass, all those fine threads that yawned wide if they weren’t tended to with love. I didn’t know what the word love meant until I met you twelve years ago. Love is like driftwood. When placed in the hands of the craftsman, it is a precious cargo. If it weren’t for you, I still wouldn’t know much about the world. I wouldn’t know what love and independence is, how strong a man can be when he takes his place in the workplace day after day, slaving over a wife, his children and his family, his community and what is at stake if He would lose everything. I would still be sad and lonely if I hadn’t met you. I would still feel vulnerable among all those girls having fun shooting around me with their soft scented hair. I have lungs I have wings I have discovered knowledge and intuition and I have walked towards the light in the blue sky. Yes, I have a dose of light in my heart, a raw energy. I am a new woman. Look at me now. I write novels. What is love? I look at my parents sleeping in separate beds and I see love. I look at my brother and his girlfriend pregnant with him and I see love. Once you were mine, how could I forget you, your smile, your laugh, your hunched shoulders, your neck, your dark hair, unexpectedly dark when you turned to look at me?

You told Louise how I made you tea. What is love anyway? Does it mean taking care of a person who needs attention, who is sick, who needs love, who needs treatment? This is enough. It is enough to have you at a safe distance where you cannot see how I am wasting away. Where you can’t see the dance of a nervous breakdown on my nerves, dopamine and serotonin flying in the center of my brain, the secret journal of lithium (that magic salt), how it once coated my blood vessels, the inside of my physical body until I gave up, gave up, gave up. Where you can’t hear what I can hear, the song of the caged voices that want to crush my spirit and where you can’t see what I can hear, the hallucinations, bright moving Technicolor lights, and all I want to do is sleep or reading a book or soaking in a hot bath while watching the bathroom mirror fog up and my hair getting damp at the nape of my neck. How I miss the old me, but often wonder who she was, this dream catcher, dreamy Lolita, skinny, skeletons in the closet. What did she understand of the world around her, was it a quiet paradise? I’m embarrassed now. Please don’t look at me. I don’t think she can take that, my heart being X-rayed. I just wanted to write this so you know that someone far away is thinking of you, dreaming of you.

This is your atmosphere and I don’t belong. The cowards do not belong here and the sick, the furious madmen who cannot string together lucid words when they are hypomanic. I have adjusted to not being around people, crowds, foot traffic, rush hour, cars. I much prefer rivers, lakes, streams, pollution (breathing ash, cigarettes or smoke from factories, the industrial part of town where they make cars and tires, where there is a chocolate factory and one that makes ice cream to the side, come here is where I live now, quiet and serene). I believe in God now, in scripture, my mother’s wisdom, my father’s words and deeds, so I honor them. I believe in going to church and reading my bible. I stay up all night. I no longer watch horror movies and the dream world of the dead or old zombie movies. They terrify me. I don’t relate to people. They terrify me. His ‘wish’ terrifies me. How they want to drop their inhibitions. How they have the audacity to think that they have the right to live without limits, that they have no defects, that they can do what they like and that they think they are beautiful because they are loved when no one has told them first. You are beautiful because you are loved. Many have waited my entire life to hear those words.

I don’t believe in love stories, but I watch them anyway. Sometimes I am moved to tears. Sometimes I laugh because I connect with the characters. I can relate to them even though I’ve only been in love once in my short life. I guess once is probably enough to last a lifetime. By now, you’ve moved on and I’ve moved on. Your ghost is still here. You have people-in-whom-a-world-waits. I have ‘my little family’ (the summary, the interpretation, my characters and the metaphors of my poems, of course my library, all my books that I have collected over the years). Instead of you I have Rilke. I much prefer the sound of silence after the role that conflict has played in my life, my childhood, the development of my personality. I much prefer the sound of rain, nature, birds. I much prefer the sound of silence in my bedroom, in all the interiors of the house, and if the television has to be on then it must be on the news channel but low so that it can feed my subconscious but not loud so that it makes a noise . I have learned to control my emotions. I know how to sit quietly in a room, in a sleeping posture, but not dreaming, but meditating. Meditate on a mantra or chakra and realize what drives those intensifying factors of humanity, social cohesion in communities in South Africa, what it really means to feel the accumulation of loss, the initial conflicting emotions that arise in your head when you experience grievance, the serious personality, the relevant opinion and of course the fundamentals of behavior of someone (the reset personality) who has had to work very hard to put his life in order.

Robert, I’ve watched you from afar all my life and it finally feels like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders, a weight I should never be allowed to carry in the first place. You never came to me. What does it mean to miss company? At best you tolerated me. I can see that clearly now and I can smile too. You were a traced dream, a psychological invention that I remembered when I needed direction towards a goal. You don’t love me, not like that, like that. Seriously, what was I thinking, so young, so brave, with those unbalanced patterns gathering, sharpening, weaving a magic spell into the heat, the glimmer of my mind’s eye wasting your time? In fact, it’s just a terrible waste of time for everyone. Pass the time. Memory changes in an instant. Here’s the thing. I adore you. I dream of you all my life. And every night you are a different person. You have a different name, a different face and I find you in a different place. And every morning I shake it all, I keep the old as if it were dust.