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March 18, 2024

The Scholarship Girl 06

By Abigail George

It feels like winter in September and the sky is just supposed to be pieces of blue sky; instead they're slate grey with the beckoning, darkening rain clouds not yet completely rinsed out of them. My sister and I do not have a perfect relationship.

We are not close and when it comes to the question of God, we are as far apart as Cassiopeia from the planes and landscapes of this planet. I wonder what the devil has got into her and console myself with the fact that all demons are spirit. They are not forces to be reckoned with only negative thoughts. I cannot take that haunting divide that lies between us away. I cannot wish it away. Wish it gone into air; wish its legacy deceased. So I walk away, navigate the swollen crossroads and pathways of letters on the spines of books searching for something all consuming; that will take up my precious time.

I just got off the phone now, talking to her, trying to control my voice as hers went higher and higher. I was calling to tell her about our father and how disoriented he has become. I have even become aware that there are symptoms of Alzheimer's. I do not know what to do. I do not know what I am supposed to feel or do anymore. I am left wondering just how unfair life is now.

All she does is take leaving the details and lines of the shape of my heart hopelessly mismatched and in denial. Just the day before we were laughing as if we were best friends, all she wanted was a boyfriend; she spoke about flirting at her office and the number of men who asked her to go out for coffee. I wish she were more dedicated to family life, instead of shutting herself out and becoming withdrawn when shapes of negativity come up. Perhaps my inconsistent misbehaviour is to blame for this when I was growing up. Therefore, she speaks to me as if she birthed me even though I am older than she is.

My spine turns to jelly, as if someone's cool fingers are playing Bach on it. I am mad with grief; slowly going insane as if the juices of the fat are not the way I want it to; dissolving, melting into curves and circles into the potatoes next to the roast in the oven. In everything I did since I was an infant I took instruction, gathered it from my father. Words like 'erudite', 'perusal'. I picked up 'jargon' and 'verbose' from one of my favourite teachers who also happened to be my principal when he took our English classes when our normal teacher was absent.

My sister and I had never whispered secrets to each other breathlessly under the covers of a camp made in the family room out of pillows, blankets, and seats that we removed from the armchairs. Instead, we watched films and she followed me in my footsteps in studying it further after high school. Instead of being a documentary filmmaker now, she works in a bank.

There is a rumpus in my head. My mother's ovaries are exhausted. My father's voice a peeling ceiling and my grief over his condition goes unnamed. It is a splash of red; a keen, stunned abortion of small nothings.

I watch old black and white movies: Casablanca, Now Voyager and Night of the Iguana; I drink lavender sweet vine with my version of the Mona Lisa on my lips, I am caught up; predatory, psychic -- it is not the first time I hear the word 'intense'. I am described as being emotional. I wonder at the self-awareness of it all, its delicate design foisted upon me, I question its authenticity, God ceases at once.

Choose me, I say all angelic, I pull through nausea; the origins lie in novel, candid translations. I hear the croaking of a frog when I go to sleep just outside my open window -- in the morning it is gone, shut up into a literary space, belly full of rumpus, neck restrained, a baby's crying voice in the night air from the house next door. All this attention comes slow motion, riles me; alerts me to the battalions of flitting, whitish moths overhead, their seed pulped against the walls of the lit bathroom, a sniffing dog on neighbourhood watch howls to the moon, scratches itself, a flea's temple of delight.

I am not yet in need of self-help, there are more needful things at hand that I have to deal with. I give my neuroses, my pangs the cold shoulder; the pupils of my eyes dead to the world. I ask, hinted at war children, schools of fish to come to me.

Standing at the water's edge at the local swimming pool human bodies' poke out of the water, limbs akimbo, loaded, they float on the water in the pool faces fluid, pure, relevant. My father's quiet footsteps in the early hours of the morning come with shifty bliss; order in chaos.

There was writing and education; a knowing factual atlas, he came with a prescription for anti-depressants, hustle and fuss. Three babies brought up together, mirror images of each other packing an alluring shameless stage, a censored shopping list knitted out with pharmaceuticals, kitted out with it; shelved under the tongue of a brother and two sisters. The knives are out, insomnia grazes our brains; tell me what you want to hear, a feast of gossip?

What am I supposed to do now since my mother put a stop to it, she touched the nape of my neck? When I said I have taken as much as I could take I moved into focus, into view, understood the trials of motherhood. Her trials that she went through with me that I could never fathom before; how it killed her to see me wasting my potential in a hospital full of restless crazies. I remember her perfume and how she fingered her wedding band. How she wore her hair down and how it brushed in a fashionable bob against her shoulders. How inside I felt so terrified that she was leaving me behind because she could not 'handle this' anymore. I failed her.

I remember how I could see pieces of blue sky from the bars on my window. Vincent van Gogh painted it, lived it and every part of his physical, emotional and spiritual being was consumed by it. I was not far behind. As the depression lingered so did my guilt. My insomnia rivaled it. Getting sleep was like a present; feeding the beasts inside.

He saw me first.

Fractured, embellished, setting a precedent, drowning in misery, depression, the loveliness of honestly gained happiness; it imprisoned me, healed my old wounds, old things, fashioned the new, shooting into the hemispheres of my brain, blinded me, made me realise that the negative self is not the real self.

Our love was a love that was fleeting, that came in sublimely playful and adventurous and pained installments; the only difference was that he was white and I was coloured. He was a sad and beautiful creature who could cut me with ease with a word that sliced through the air. I did yet not have the mental toughness I have now so I often ended up in tears, blinking them back as I did with the lump in the cave of my throat. He could silence me with a look. All I wanted was to be loved and for him to daily message that to me.

He could be fun but also a sullen beast.

There were days when our relationship felt like it was a long journey. It nourished me, it spoiled me (some days I was adored, others I was abhorred), it made me militant, gave me guidance that spoke to my inner core; so what, if one day we were kindred spirits and the next at war with each other.

He had his own ways and means of getting under my skin. I was just happy that he paid attention and that he listened. He had his own moods. I had mine. Together, when he was up and I was down we drew blood, lines on the ground of whose territory belonged to whom.

We were crossing the subtle barriers of race. Interracial relationships were then fraught with anxious poses in the new South Africa. It is hard to remember what other people thought of us when I look back. It was so many things. It was hard to erase that it felt both alien and like home when I was rooted in his arms.

I could memorise all the times we had fallouts. We never really dated, we just hung out. We never held hands or went to the movies. What we did was talk a lot about everything. His head told me I spoke a language he could not understand. I wrote to him. I wrote him long, passionate letters that spoke of a girl's love. I could never be as forthcoming face to face. I would bare my soul in these letters to the very last drop and then bestow it in his lap as a gift. He never wrote back. This should have told me something in the early days but I was wrapped up, transformed by someone who could so easily make me smile and laugh at myself.

He was ruthless at doing that.

Sometimes they were about the grief I felt, the negativity and insecurities I felt so deeply, that moved within my gut that never seemed to dissolve or grow weaker no matter how much he touched me and reminded me of the dysfunctional, loving, father with the soft heart, neurotic mother; home of my childhood that I left behind; a home that I could have sweet memories of.

Once I surrendered to the unknown, his beautiful bones I was caught in his tender poise. He was not willing to give me more but I was more than willing to put my enchanted, productive heart into it; to give it place and function. I was mesmerised by the dewy stars, sparks in his eyes that made me shiver.

Now I recall it was just a phase that we were both passing through, maturing in healthy patterns, we were moving in layered circles, growing older, learning from each other and naturally on towards other burgeoning destinations; other relationships with women and men when it was over.

Of course, in the mean time before the relationship between us cooled, he grew colder, meaner, humiliated me; this is what happens in all relationships between a girlfriend and a boyfriend when one is dominated by the other. It hurt. Our world soon became a cell. I could see a patch of blue sky through the bars but there was no escape.

Growing up I was taught to generate a feeling of hate towards whites. They had, we did not.

I only could dream about eliminating the tension between us; thought his only mission was to break me down.

He was my first everything. I shadowed all the kinks in his armour. I drew strength from him.

I learnt a lot about life, about the source of love that it takes a lot of discipline and practice and that the world has no power before the power of God. I believed we were two outcasts in an unforgiving and hostile world.






Article © Abigail George. All rights reserved.
Published on 2017-06-19
Image(s) are public domain.
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