The Green Jalapeno On My Tongue

I think of the man who was very briefly in my life. I don’t want to think of him but I do. After all this time he comes into view but this time he is saying goodbye. The relationship doesn’t feel quite as magical for him anymore. It’s twenty minutes past one in the afternoon. It’s raining. There’s a chill in the air. I give up wondering who he’s with, what food he’s eating, if he still does his laundry and irons his shirts, or if the young woman in his life does everything for him, like the cooking and cleaning in his house. He was always interested in property and in having plenty of space around him.

You are a newborn. I count your magic digits. Your nose, lips, eyes and mouth are a requiem. You have eczema. I was unemployed. Across the valley’s face you came home. I did not expect you. I did not help paint your room a bright sunshine yellow. I regret that. This bundle. The science of sinking flowers. Magus visiting on a floating ship. Milk-fever on your brow. You cannot speak my name yet. One day you will hate me and say I hurt your feelings. This will happen as a self-aware four year old. I will feel ashamed of myself. I shouted because I was afraid. Afraid you were going to hurt yourself. I did not speak when you turned your head away. I felt afraid. You’re a good psychologist at five. You tell me a baby will make me happy. I believed then in hope like a girl. A man enters the picture when I am thirty-nine. The man I think I am going to marry. It doesn’t work out. In reality it doesn’t but in my head it does. I can hear something that draws my interest as I try to fall asleep. The dogs move in the dark. Their silent maneuvering was disconcerting to me at first. The one walks behind the other. 

Then it is the art of serving and helping during Covid-19. Everybody thinks it’s the apocalypse. I don’t think of anything but of getting out of this tiny isolation room they’ve put me in. Now two years seems like such a long time ago. I shit in this room and everyone can see. I pee. Everyone can see. That is not lost on me. My paternal grandfather came from Saint Helena. I was a guinea pig. When I was in the normal ward, whatever normal means, the male nurses could see us showering and would just stand there and watch. They had to. To keep us safe because of safety matters or matters of safety. 

The aftermath of the promulgation of the Group Areas Act in post-apartheid South Africa should be a matter of every South Africa’s interest. Might I add it is very much a disquieting Jungian path. 

To a sister in Europe that I feel as if I’m learning these things much too late. The things I needed from you. The things you needed from me. You needed someone to listen to you. Well I needed that too. It has come much too late. 

I conducted an interview with water in the swimming pool. The droplets of rain feel like ice on my skin. Underneath I am surrounded by giant tap roots and blue trees. A safe blue forest. I can live here forever like I did in high school. I was baptised in the swimming pool hitting forty by an Apostle Harmse. 

My mother’s face falls. My father interprets this as both cunning deceit on her part and lovely. Joyce Carol Oates frightens me. The way her mind is engineered to think. Her conditioning. Of this I am certain. Gravity. The leaf falls. You are something that I have lost and that will never be returned to me. 

I know the wildflowers of pain. It sucks. I know how to live in the moment. Sometimes it is cool to live in the moment. To wait for the eclipse of this sweet reversal of fortune. The edge of this knife-jab-twist in my sobriety. You, the gorgeous saint of a man who was very briefly in my life, I think have sufficient world peace now. The peace that you were longing for. That I could not give. 

I am trying to get my ficus plant to hit the ceiling. It means I will win a prize. The universe will just hand this to me and say, “This is your consolation prize for never having got married. Never having those children.” You never think of me anymore. This of course comes as no surprise to me and why should it? It’s been years. Nearly half a decade. 

I wonder how your coffee tastes in the morning that the woman now in your life makes for you. Does your lady make it for you in the exact same way that I did? I wonder how your doctoral studies are going, are you thinking of teaching again, taking up that vocation? You told me that you would only do it for the money. You also told me that you would only teach overseas. 

I wonder if you’re still inventing robots in your garage. After all this time, I still know pain. I am still writing sad poetry and books about the woman who never gets the man, who never quite gets it. Love or the domestic affairs of the heart. My parents are still alive. My father is eighty now, can you believe it! He outlived his university contemporaries. 

A very young child’s toys covers a mat. My brother has had a daughter since I saw the man who was very briefly in my life last. The child’s mother works at a fast food restaurant during the day. I take care of her daughter with my mother and brother’s help. The child is my consolation prize. It’s not raining so hard anymore. 

I joined a film forum. I have a film that is in production. Life is good. It should be good, right? But I keep telling myself that the man was my twin flame. That we were meant to be together. There are others, but what exactly does that matter?

What’s a Cambodian sunrise like? What was a Cambodian sunset like? What was life like now so far away from everything you’ve ever known, what you grew up with? I just wanted you to know that I still think of you sometimes and that when I am older than I am now I will probably still think of you. My tears, a forest of tears, are falling now but I have no idea why I am crying.

I sit in a darkened room drinking a woody cup of tea that nourishes my spirit and I think of my sister far away in Europe locked in a battle for her own survival. I think of my brother falling out of love with the mother of his daughter but who he still sleeps with. I think of my mother whose beauty has never faded, my father who still has all his mental faculties intact. The man who was very briefly in my life has faded from view. Once I walked victorious but now this man is in love with another. I still long for those inescapable moments where he held onto me so tight as if he would never let me go. My being and his were interwoven. It gave me courage and now nothing does. All I want are answers to my questions. Why did the relationship come to an end, why could he not love me, marry me, why could we not make it work, why did I fail to hold him captive and why was I so easy to replace?

Children are in my life now that have replaced the man’s absent love. My brother’s children. A son and a daughter. I am growing older, past the marrying age, past the age of having children. I dream of having a past in which the man is non-existent. Then I won’t have to think of him anymore.

There’s a sweetness to the day, to this light pouring into this winter’s day and the cold, pouring into my limbs and the whistle of the boiling kettle, pouring into this simple meal for a financially inept individual, an individual who finds it difficult to save. I bite into a green apple, make a face at its tartness, its sourness and chew. I swallow the apple and feel calm. The still air composes itself anew at the open windows. I watch a bird fly into the window and compose itself anew and fly off again. I get up and close the window and the thin net curtain in the sitting room. I remember a thin woman called Althea from high school who I didn’t like. I wonder what her children are like. If her husband makes her coffee and breakfast in the morning. She is a doctor now. She’s done well for herself but I remember how she used to make fun of me and pretend to speak like me. I remember her friends of Indian descent. How they seemed clever at life, had all the right moves and always aced their tests. With their high test scores, good looks, fathers who were an amalgamation of dentists, doctors, pharmacists, and business-owners who drove minivans or posh sedans to drop them off they seemed to have it made in ways and means that I did not have it made.

I think of feeling numb. Coming home in the afternoon after school and having no friends, nobody to speak or communicate with. I would wait for the arrival of my younger sister and brother and mother. I would sit in the front of the house and listen to CD’s. I wasn’t frightened of loneliness yet. I didn’t have words yet for that altered state of consciousness.

It is winter but it doesn’t feel like winter yet. It’s still warm outside. I feel hot under the blankets and kick them off me. I have regret on my mind that comes to me in waves. Regret becomes this kind of a personal attack on my sobriety and I think back to what the loss of the man meant in my life and the hours it took to produce published and unpublished manuscripts. Both were significant losses. My brother thinks he is in love but he has experienced much sadness in his life. The kind of sadness that is windswept and forlorn, torn between the wildflowers and the beating heart, the sun and interplanetary alignment. I want to ask the dark shadow of the man looming over me in the shower, in the garden, in my childhood bedroom, in the kitchen, in the lounge who he loves now but instead I lose my nerve and light a menthol cigarette instead. I blow the smoke out of my mouth, bite my bottom lip, and chew my fingernail, and stare out of the window remembering when he held me close and told me that he would never let me go. But he did. He did. Whether it was because of my chronic illness or disability or my poor mental health or my weak, limited thinking I will never know but what I do know as I stare into the past and into the eyes of this illusion that I had loved and given my heart to is this. I wish him well. Yes, I wish him well. I play Erik Satie and as the music fills this room I wish that the man is happy and in love with life. That after all this time he has found what I could not give him.

I write to his mother. I still write to her even though her son is no longer in my life. I still write sad poems about the end of our relationship. The end of this tragic yet significant love affair. She writes back. She is full of wisdom and spiritual insights. She tells me to move on with my life and forget all about him but it takes me a while to do this. It takes me years. I even find myself dreaming about him sometimes. In one dream we attend church together. In another I drove around looking for his house. I listen to Hillsong. His favourite band. I sing along. I lift my hands and sing and do praise and worship and then I think of him flirting at church, flirting in the workplace, in high school, in bars and clubs. It makes me feel better to think of him as the villain and myself as the victim. Sometimes I do think of how he has made me happy and then I smile and start to cry when I think of how I called him “Husband” and he called me “Wife”.

I made a bottle of milk for my niece. It’s the children that are important to me now. Other mothers’ progeny. My father and I watch cartoons with my niece. My father sings and does actions. I drink lukewarm coffee. My heart aches for something that doesn’t exist anymore. A love that might have been. It gives rise to a feeling of indecision. The clock ticks away while I sink into a lounge chair while light fills this room.