Tea Julia.
What?
I asked you if you wanted some tea.
No. I am not thirsty dad.
Did you talk to your mother about the flowers?
She did not seem very enthusiastic. She sounded tired.
Did you write anything today?
No.
No more stories then.
No more stories.

I suppose it will always be there. Touch. Life. Boys and girls always looking for answers. Always looking for intimacy in all the wrong places. It is inevitable that the children born from those unions end up themselves searching for intimacy at the end of the day in all the wrong places. It does not make them people. It does not make their parents bad people. It is just symptomatic of the world that we live in. I suppose just like earth that there will always be sad people in the world. People who keep to themselves. The savants and the muses. Childhood will also be there. Everybody has a childhood. Not everybody has a mother, a father, a home, and siblings. People can live in houses. I suppose no matter how I measure the love of my parents’ it will always be there.

I wake up in the dark and I still feel as frightened as I did when I was a child waking up to darkness. I prefer loneliness to happiness. I suppose that makes me strange and estranged at the same time. I prefer the black dog of depression to happiness. I prefer writing to not writing. I prefer not to make love. Not to laugh. Not to smile. I prefer animals to people. I prefer to forget that you loved me. I prefer sanity to having elegant answers to the despair of madness. I prefer to forget that you accepted me just the way I am. That you did not expect anything from me in return. I hear my voice. I can actually hear you listening to me. It reminds me of the word ‘tender’. It reminds of the words ‘measure of love’. I never thought that a person could measure love. I am touched that you are in fact listening to me.

I want to tell you that I do not want to go anywhere else, be with anyone else except with you. It will be madness to say such things and I know that in time, you will have moved on and I will have moved forward in time. We will have nothing in common. I will forget you. The more that gravity, space and time grounds me the more it seems I still remember you. I dream of you. I write about you, I am always writing to you, or I am writing to reach you. I can trace our history with a stick or with a pen. In my hand, the pen becomes a sword. In my hand, the sea washes away like a watercolour all traces of your name in the sand. It washes away all traces of insane me. I love you. I love you. I love you. I do not know where it comes from. I do not know why I feel this way about you.

Sometimes it makes me feel glad and high at the same time. My skull houses you. Your identity. The sum of parts of intellectual me. I wonder what you smell like now. Everything about you makes me happy. I suppose the last time you ever felt self-pity, small, wounded, hurt or frightened was when you were in England. Now you are a man about time, a man about town. I think of the sweetness in your swagger. I think of the village in your voice. My own bittersweet mental faculties. You are a piece of music that I prefer to listen to on my own with my bedroom shut. While I collect the impact of your throne king. While I collect the impact of your kingdom and realise at the same time that a woman can only love so much and give so much of her time, energy, personal space to a husband and children. You chose something else.

You chose someone else. You gave her handfuls of diamonds. You gave her your mouth and a crown of light. All I have in my possession is the dark. I am the birthday girl. I am autumn and winter. In your world, I was only a guest. The darkness, it covers me like a shroud, an American quilt. You did not give me any literature to read (an erotic book). You did not give me empty promises, any love poetry, any love in the end. Your loyalty was made of glass. It cut the empty space between us deeply. Then I was gone just like your empty promises. Then I was lost like your erotic little book that you gave to me to keep me company. I did not know how to conduct myself discreetly. All I knew was how to be or become like the ocean. Kept all her secrets to herself was what the ocean did. I invented you like schools of fish until your shark teeth became my shark teeth.

The things a female writer will never say or speak about ever.

Nothing made me happier than when I was looking at him. It was as if my whole being was filled with an arrangement of light, something that left me profound, that gave me a perspective on humanity and sometimes I felt I did not have any right to feel that way. There I was and I invited it in. He was a painting. He was music. In his hands, I existed. I could not help it. So I forgot about the illness in my organs. I forgot about loneliness. I fixed my hair. I fixed myself up and hoped that he would not see the real me. The madness life. For a while, I gave it up, the going was good and it seemed as if the impossible had happened. That I was healthy again. I was the perfect me again. All good things must end except I was not prepared for the end when it came. I put courage in my pocket, threaded a needle, and made tiny neat stitches to keep it put. I tied my wings back with a string.

Intimacy and perfectionism. Of how much the world is filled with promiscuity. The world creates a culture that a certain woman can inhabit. If she has the brains, if she is strong willed, if she has the intellect, the traits of having an ego or having the lack of one. Having humility on her side. She will come out the way I came out. I came out to an otherness. A world. There was a sacred contract. A museum of night covers me. A shroud becomes a quilt. Tigers stare right through me at the zoo. Every woman wants possessions and a man to call her own. What I need is the sun. I need to assert myself. Push myself forward into the world and not think of illness. Not even, think of that word. It does not give me liberty or emancipation only horror. It terrifies me still.

Stars. I imagined that they were a beautiful and expensive necklace around my neck that I could not take off. I hear silly music in the wind at night. I knew as a woman I had to turn my gaze towards a man. What would I even begin to find there? Would it be love? I knew I had to save the present somehow but I did not know how and so I began to write and record my daily experiences as well as my battles with my depression. The stars leave holes in the sky. The sky is taped to my forehead for an eternity. There is a bitter sweetness in illness. You know they are coming for you. The tigers at the zoo and that there is nothing that you can do about it. Only let them come. They will not be playful. They will want to take you over completely. Tigers.

I pretend these animals are creatures made out of liquid.

Then I can fight them. Then I can put them to bed. Then my nerves can relax. I know the odour of food when it has started to decay. It means it is ready for the compost heap. I have a tendency to forget. Still the tigers paw at you or make you their pawn. The winter has moths too but I have put my summer dresses away. Pretty dresses. As your bones get older, so the tigers come. To be a wife would have been a pretty hell. A lovely hell. First, I would not have known what to do with him. I played the game that all men and women play. Courtship but I was miserable at it. I mourned for the measure of loss that I experienced. I mourned for my second mother. I only learned about place and how it could define your personality when I moved house. Obsessive procrastination, moving from house to house, sunbathing, a madness life, a bipolar life, every mistake that is wrenched from the wreck of your soul will change the incomplete you.

When I moved from my childhood house, to my aunt’s house in Swaziland and then to Johannesburg. It began with a love letter to myself. Matter made me both alert and spiritual waiting for the photographer and the interviewer to come. I wrenched all the expectations that I had with this meeting with the two women and I put it away in the furthest corners of my mind. Instead of a husband, I have a mother and a father. One is my nemesis and the other is infirm. I play pretend. I write poems about eating and drinking. About the friends, I do not have. The friendships I have lost because of the illness. I am in awe of the human race. We live and we are fools if we think that just by living for ourselves that is enough. I feel sorrow. Insomnia.

I let it fall.

I watch my mother eat grapes and it strikes me suddenly how much I love her. Honest to goodness I play at make believe. If I had married, I would have married young and he only would have discovered the madness life later on in our married life. My mother was a bride at twenty-five. I was always the woman who quit. I was always the woman who was in love, who fell hard but it was never reciprocated. I have lived on an island for most of my life. I want to taste everything. Is that so wrong? I have had enough of spiritual poverty. I have grown a forgiving heart. Morning is my payment for making my way through an endless night. I have my letters. The paper smells clean. Before my handwriting touches the page, I feel a brightness, a bright intelligence behind my eyes. I have learned how to solve pain and all my problems. I learned to solve this by turning inward.

The truth of South Africa has betrayed me. The wuthering heights of post-apartheid South Africa lingers. While it languishes there, I see decay in people’s faces. I see crow’s feet, wrinkles and aging. Children being born into poverty. Street children that have nothing to live for. Street children that are orphans. You do know of course that sexual violence does not just happen to men or women but it happens to children as well. The rape of the lock. I tolerate the sacrifices that I have had to make. Although at times, I have felt this overwhelmingly. My desire to write is still there. To put words down on a screen, or a page or serviette. Rilke jumps out at me. I see what Hemingway’s choices was. I read Updike. I scan Goethe. How can I discard Salinger or the boys in high school that I went to school with? I loved them all. I am still in love with them all. I am still in awe of all of them. Their athleticism.

I have voices in my head. Voices I cannot do away with. More English than anything else does. Sometimes when I am lying down in the foetal position in my bed, I imagined to myself that if I was a heavy drinker I would be a wife and if I was a wife I would be a heavy drinker. My children would have to look after me. They would have to cook and clean. Keep house. My children would be independent. Still they would go on loving me. Still I would go on hating myself. Hating the circumstances that I had brought them into the world to. They only existed because of me.  They only existed to look after me. I have to live boldly and with imagination. I have to write because if I do not I will cease to exist. Once upon a time, I was an innocent. A stranger in the bushveld. Once upon a time, I was a child. Now I am an adult. Have responsibilities.

Are they here yet?
No.
I do not understand why you had to get up so early, and dress. Why do you do these things?
I just felt like it. Besides, I always do this.
Have you read the paper? There was a murder.
You know I do not read the papers. Everything sounds like either a sermon or a lecture.
I love you.
Do you love the biochemistry in my cells and my platelets as well?
Of course I do. I love all of you. I love all of chemical you.
I want nothing and everything all at the same time. I am greedy for life but also for hunger.

I know he will never come. The man. The husband. The nervous bridegroom. He will never come. Never, not in a million years. I will still have a perfectionist streak though within me through and through. I will still perform excellently as I am today. I stood at the window already dressed marvelling at nature, at birdsong. Thinking that nothing was out of ordinary for them as it was for me. We argue in order to live. I freeze stories, life experience and archive them until they needed. I live in multiple spaces of time. There are always paradigm shifts. Pockets of time or rather a significant timeline. It has taken me time to get used to having another body around. Another person’s mess. In that, mess lies perfection. In that, mess lies a kind of blindness because he is giving off a kind of image of work and I am giving off a different kind of image of work. These are early days yet in a relationship that is new.

Will it ever be enough to be touched? Was that enough for a woman like my mother? Did that restore her to wellness, to full health? Did that give her voice back? I invested in her and she invested in me. That is what mothers do for their daughters. I was a tyrant with bird-eyes. I was a shock to my own system, to my own nerves. There is a mirage in the treasure box from childhood. This also means that it does not come close to Pandora’s Box because what you have kept from childhood is each of something that has a dreamlike state. I fought with this for a long time. Charity begins at home. When people knock at the door, what I do is very simple. I give. I give away bread. I give away a tin of fish. I make a sandwich. I make tea. Is that what charity really means? I do not really think so. I wish I could do more.

Sometimes I take to my bed in the afternoon. I close my eyes and I imagine the impossibilities of their lives. What I have and what they do not have. I think I can feel my heart. I do not say any of the above or what is written below to the interviewee. The photographer is lovely. I am still groggy though with a kind of grown-up neon light and heat in my head. My thoughts became pre-constructed potholes but I still held it together. All I wanted was to go back. The picture of my smiling long-legged mother is not the woman she has become now. As if a phrase was caught in mid-air, I wanted her back. My bones are my anchor. My flesh is a meaty canvas. I am just a filament. I am just a filter. I am just a wadi, a ridge off island-things, driftwood and an immaculate magician’s roadside. I tell myself to keep calm until I fall asleep. The garden has changed the same way I have changed and the relationship with my parents. Do not think I told myself. Thinking too much is a monster.

I find myself saying these words.
I want a divorce.
I do not want to live with you anymore.
I never wanted those kids.
Leave me alone.
Do not touch me.
If you do not leave then I will.
Stop looking at me like that.
I do not love you anymore.
Just go. Pack your bags and go. Leave.

We want to be perfect. We want to have the perfect relationship. What we do not realise is that perfection is out of our reach. The words above, mum spoke these words. If daughters do, what their mothers did then perhaps if I had a husband he would have been a goner early on. All he can do is stare at me. Look at me and then walk away. The pretend husband of mine. It is daddy’s face and daddy’s name. I hear mum’s voice from far away. There is chicken and rice floating away on the breeze. Peas and carrots please. There was a cord tethered to her children. Perfectionists everyone. Brainy, cute and intellectual. One a poet and a writer. The other a photographer. Tears and sobs cannot be counted. Knees and hands under the bedclothes. Fist shoved into mouth so the tears and sobs could not be heard. I am frail in this special shelter. It was never my intention to be famous.

To be any kind of celebrity. I knew where I stood. I need the dawn. I need to have a kind of tunnel vision when I write. To focus on my life drawings of people. The observations that I have confined. I am not afraid of death, of the grave, of the dryness of the earth, of being placed six feet under. When I opened the door, no one was standing there and at first, I was frightened. What did this mean? I did not realise then it meant a lifetime of doors with no one standing there. It meant a lifetime of feeling frightened. Sometimes colours would flash in front of my eyes and I would feel as cool and as pure as rain. Something was broken. See something was broken inside of me and I could not give it a name yet. It was very simple to understand the fluctuations in my mood. The stillness, the silence in the bedrooms of the house where we had grown up.  My siblings had left long ago and I was the only one left. I knew I had to forget about having children. That was the sanest thing to do besides registering your ancestors.

We are just visitors with benefits under the machinery of the sun. The secret life of offerings, the participation of greenness, the material possessions of the earth. Night is worse. It just is. The nurse does not smile. If only she could smile and tell me in the end that, everything was going to be all right. I cannot detach myself from the business of writing. I love my parents. I love them to death. There were words before this translation. Enlightenment was important to me. When it filled my entire being, I felt betrayed in a sense. That I was not of this physical body and that my thoughts were not my own. I know who my enemies are as I stand on the threshold. I am a homeopath. I am a crow. I hatch hens. Watch them dance in the dust as I collect the eggs understanding that the yolk within it is just an object, more than an embryo. A marriage and an abstract test. I cannot handle the effects of the ammunition that I am carrying on my back.

Without a gun, I am just a stranger. I know what the word sexy means. Sexy is meant for a stranger. A femme fatale. There is bad news on the horizon. Not love. Death and therapy is on the horizon. Isolation is the future. Planning and having a direction is not enough to lose yourself in. It is just another version of what you think you are. Love, death, therapy, isolation, planning and direction. My people, my tribe trust in the future as if they believe in their ancestors. I am scheduled into someone’s itinerary. The walls become people and voices and a strange news presents itself to me. As elegant as an accepting child saying please and thank you. A child who knows what the word etiquette means and who knows what their place is in the world.

Heat changes everything around us in the world. Everything is or rather becomes spontaneous. You can even see the spontaneity in the flowers. It is just a part of the world. It is just how the world is. I try to look for lessons in the flowers. What are they trying to tell me? All they profess is beauty or ill health. I know what ill health is. Having lived with it my whole life. I had always been prepared for a life of solitude. That was okay by me. It did not hurt me anymore. The only things that could hurt me were people and I had enough of them. You exhibitionist are a part of the human condition. You introverted leader are part of the human condition. You child prodigy are part of the human condition. You who are depressive, competent and able, inhibited, withdrawn, and a firefighter and self-help guru of the mentally ill are all part of the human condition. Heat makes everything taste metallic.

I find myself reading more and more. Creeping inwardly toward myself. I have never felt more pure. Books are like worms. They worm their way through my intellect. Trees change in the fading light. When I read it is almost as if I am in a time capsule. I might get up and make some tea knowing that the telephone will never ring for me. Knowing that I am forgotten. Knowing that no one remembers me. I am just a memory like the sea. The sea may not pause but it has a kind of grace. The sea also has good seed. It also has a harvest. Sometimes it is robbed of its harvest. I have known what love is and that was enough for me. There was a thunderstorm the other evening and I switched my laptop off. Pulled the plug out at the wall knowing that I was a gone girl.

I am no faded beauty. I lay on my bed in my room blankets and sheets twisted at my ankles and I stare up at the ceiling. I can hear my father snoring. My mother is sleeping too with the blankets covering her face. What I want to do is sleep but sleep will not come. There is an envelope filled with marriage, with whispered sweet nothings, with an iron, with a voyeur, with something that is gaudy and with yesterday. I have a regimen. I have questions. I discard stuff, discard habits; I discard tubes filled with miracle face creams. What does a return to normality mean? The limits of engineering. There will always be a return to normality in my life. Recovery. Relapse.  Recovery. Relapse. Hospitalisations with bouquets of flowers and fruit baskets.  I am a heron. Something gamine about my features. Preternaturally young.

There is an agreement between a woman and a book. Literature empowers and uplifts me at the same time. It is like a river. The words have a lightness in the shallows. My brain is an oracle struggling for affection. I love Kubrick. I love Nabokov. I hide silence in a vacuum. All three are ghosts now. There is no affection in the light only in the dark. I wish and want with all my heart for the emptiness that is in my heart and the rest of my organs to fly away. Then I will feel clean. The way I felt when I lived in Swaziland. A girl. The way I lived in Johannesburg. A girl. The way I live in my childhood home now. A girl. I want to forget but in the forgetting there is also, a great amount of loss. Of memories that I cannot hold onto. I removed my garments and slip into the bathwater. As the evening goes, I feel smaller and smaller.

I can see the affection in my parents’ eyes. Daddy loves mummy. Mummy loves daddy. What is left for me over the passing years in this old, ancient world? Woman, man, house, country and child. None of them belongs to me. All of them are cages designed by the hands of a man. You see before I begin to write I can already see what is on the page. I hold grief in my hands amongst other things. Karma too. Chakras. I have visited a medium. I have gone to spiritual meetings. I have attended church but now I sleep late on Sundays. Now I feel misplaced. I am an iced vessel that feels nothing and everything at the same time. Whenever I feel blue, I go to the sea and I watch the waves safely from the shoreline. It is when I feel that I can relate to everything cosmic. I tell myself repeatedly that I am the only one who is in control. I am the one who is boss.

I read. I learn everything that I possibly can about the princess in that book. Her maladies. If she is bookish and serious, I love her even more for that. I snatch at all the information in literature. False and compelling at the same time. This is how I find women. This is how I find women like my mother. There is an impulse. There is a something, it is singular.  The process of which is singular. If I am a witch I must be protesting about something, marching for a cause and I have to learn to be more accepting of the challenges that the world places before me. It feels sometimes as if I have been anxious since birth. I have kept a notebook to freeze all the wild things, the spotlight, all the careful considerations that I have made over the years inside of my head. You can never remain indifferent to thinking no matter how complicated it becomes. I am not perfect. I am still in awe of that though. Weakling, flawed, netted potential. I am blind to all of these things.

I am just an image. A reflection that I project onto the world. I am either accepted or rejected. There are some days that I am afraid to wake up. Afraid to breathe. I live for the narrative. I live for stream of consciousness thinking. Everything has a price and at the end of the day if you listen closely enough everything sounds like the keys of a piano. It is wonderful to be alone. It is also wonderful not to remember. I am afraid that when faces are cracked in memory that writers overall will always seek revenge. I am that kind of girl who has mastered language. I am that kind of girl who has solace on her side. I dread the system that labels girls promiscuous. I am a river. A river filled with customs and algorithms. A river filled with dust. There is power in this. There is a certain kind of power, incorporeal suspension in those words. A Californian shine in post-apartheid South Africa.

I am living but people do not understand this kind of living. With an infirm and elderly father and a mother who has been my rival since birth (whom I love to death). I do not try to explain. What more can I say except this. I am in love with both of them as every child is in love with both parents. Living for other people means marriage. I supposed it is important for some to settle down, harvest a house, a car and status out of money that they will work for their entire lives before those grandchildren, before dying. I fear a good man. They do not exist. I do not even think that my father was a good man. I think that at times he neglected my beautiful mother. I feel at times that he abandoned her when she needed him most. Sometimes when I was a child, I felt I had to pin down my mother. I was so afraid of losing her. In the end I did. Here messages of night and darkness were given to me. My mother was a phenomenon.

I pick up my notebook and I begin to write. First, I write down all my goals and dreams for the day, next how I am going to fill my hours, last the grocery list. I try not to think about alienation. That alien feeling, the guilt trip that I feel inside my own home. I do not believe in marriage. There is a freshness I have in my eyes. A youth on my side that will never go away completely. I was only twenty-two when a man humiliated me. A feeling that has never left me. A feeling that leaves me bone-cold. There is an emotional-imbalance in my flesh that I can never get away from. For as long as I live, I will live with the insanity of the heat, lightning pouring down from the skies but I will also live with the rainy days that will happen any month. I will never forget the electricity in my brain. The softness of twilight’s skin. I never truly belonged in Johannesburg. Never truly belonged to anyone.

I will go on thinking that. I will go on believing that for all of my days and nights. All I wanted was to feel youth again. Adolescence on my side. Boys who would escape me. Now I live with denial. As an adult, I still have the insecurity I had when I was an ingénue. Sometimes the weight I feel are only the questions I still have of how other people have found love and I have not. I am different. My head is a golden mess because I dream too much of holding onto things that are not real. Perhaps love can finally stop me in my tracks and say finally here I am. Have you not always been waiting for me, or wanting me. Yet, I am still afraid of my innocence. The mistakes that I have made and the ones that I am going to make in the future. I believe in nothing now. I think that everything is perfect the way it is. If something is beautiful, I suspect that there must have been a committee behind it.

Mementos come from a period filled with angst. Wrinkles, grey hair I have them all now. Sometimes I feel the electric glow of hysteria. It is like the death of a candle. Fungal. A ghost-bright moth is a gift. I still do not feel like packing up my bags and travelling. I have made agreements. Every month I have to see the doctor. I am filled with nature when I am outside even when there is traffic. My father is an antique. My mother my muse. It is fashionable to have your mother for your muse if you are a writer. I watch her everlastingly. She is Orion. She is the Southern Cross. I house a fashionable brightness in her. In that interior, I know that there will be trouble or a wired spectrum. It is only right that I love her. It is only right that I embrace all of her.  I am present because of her. She gave me life. I hope to inherit all of her things. I hope to inherit her wedding album. My mother is always right even when she is dead wrong.

There is a script that we live by but what we do not realise that it, life, is out of our hands. There are impressions in that script that we live by, that rule our lives and sometimes that is enough for us. Enough to call ourselves a human family. All I see is pictures. Life in pictures. Life in photographs. Sometimes when I look at a picture of my muse something inside my heart shatters like glass. I cannot put that together again. Her face looks so sweet. Something shifts inside my heart. The insomniac nights that I recall are blue. They are either blue or black. The nights smell like incense. A kind of jasmine or lavender or a combination of both. In those hours, my spirit confesses. Sadness has deep waters. I drink the tea mechanically whenever I am in distress. I try to distract myself with reading a book no matter how hard it is to follow the sentences. To grip them with my teeth. To grit my teeth.

I wish I could forget all about the congealed egg that I had for breakfast. The orange marmalade that I had spread on the toast. The steaming hot coffee. There was always something arresting about whatever I had for breakfast. Whether it was a bowl of oats or eggs. I knew I needed my rest. Depression can do that to a person. I had no idea what love could do to you. I had never been in love. I had found an antidote to not falling in love and that was to eat. To either starve myself or to binge eat. Candy, chocolate bars, crisps found their way into my heart and soul. I think it was physiological. One day I was thin and the next few years I was not. I was literally piling on the pounds. Self-hate is terrible. It has its own alien nation, Bethlehem and magi. It has its own clouds, logic. It has its own country. It has its own men and women. It has its own popular songs. The wind has an edge to it as I stand on the shoreline and I watch all those cute boys surfing.

They are the ones who remind me that I am not cute. That making love is not for fun. I only know how to perform for dad and mum. How to cook and clean. I do not know how to love anyone else. The love I have in my heart is the love I have for my parents, for the magic drama inside of television. I imagined that there were rhythms in everything that I began to see and hear. There were patterns. There were waves. All I had to do was reach out to life and then I would begin to visible again but at the heart of me, I knew that this was not true. What had to be resident first was virtues. I believe in characters personalities having details. I believe in writers having details too. Sometimes I feel threatened by the apparitions in my head. They live there or rather are suspended by time and place. I try not to focus on them too much because I know that in the end that will be the death of me.

My parents’ marriage is made up of bones, flesh, wings, birds and a feast of chicken. A roast on Sunday afternoon, three children, whispers of sweet nothings, sparkling wine with microwave dinners, and vulnerability. Sweat, blood and tears. They have never banished any of these things. As a child, I grew up baffled by their love. I think that perhaps they loved each other too much. They did not know what to do with all the love they had for each other. Instead, they stored it up in reserves. Even for their children. There was both sadness and anger. We grew up with it and stored it in reserves. When we were injured, we did not know that we had to scream for help. Instead, we kept it away from prying eyes and accepted the fact that perhaps we were peculiar as children. Now we do not know that we have to keep in touch as other siblings do. My brother has a bright charisma. My sister has a physical beauty. For a woman to be always beautiful in her surroundings that becomes her sole career for the rest of her life. I know now that people will never be interested in my sister’s intelligence.

My sister wears her beauty as a shroud. I am not interested in her intelligence. I do not buy it. I have realised that there will always be opportunities for her but not the same opportunities for me. There is always a warning in her eyes. I feel I cannot trust my sister anymore and my brother I trust even less. The love we had for each when we were younger is no longer there. The self-limiting trust and spirited loyalty games that we played are gone. We only play adult games now. I can feel my sister’s bitterness and her sadness and there is nothing I can do to shield me from her gaze. She has won. She is the prize. My brother is handsome and wise but is being handsome and wise enough. It is enough for some. Not enough for him. Christmas and holidays, I cannot evade them. It feels as if I am still in school. It feels as if there is still so much for me to learn. It feels as if I have been left behind.

Johannesburg. This city healed me the same way fruit did in a way. Gave me a voice when I felt bankrupt. I am twenty-two again. I wanted him very much to ask me to stay. To stay with him as if we had a future together. As if we could build a house and a have that family that I always wanted. Have those kids. Walk down that sunny road. I wanted him to hold me close, pull me toward him and say that he loved me very much and did I feel the same way. Now I knew how impossible it was for him. The loneliness within me was talking. The girl inside of me that wanted this. That wanted him. He made me feel exotic. My voice became a whine. Love me. Love me. Love me. It was so easy for me then to tell him to please me. It was so easy for him to tell me to please him. I would have done anything for him. Now I am in a different space and time. The person that I was then has gone up in smoke and mirrors. In the end, he was right to let me go. In the end, I was right to let him go

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Abigail George has a new book in the Ovi Bookshelves,
"Brother Wolf and Sister Wren"
Download for FREE HERE!

In the same shelves you wil also find one more book from Abigail George
"All about my mother"