Thursday 7 August 2014

Cuddling Pillows



After pleading exhaustion, I asked to be taken home because I was as they say here in South Africa, ‘gatvol’. Gatvol of making nice and small talk that really got me nowhere. The longer I was in his company and hoping to get a straightforward explanation from him as to the fuckery I had to endure over the past fortnight was just an exercise in futility. I don’t particularly take well to being patronised and plain being lied to.

Any libidinous feelings deserted the tense air between us and all I wanted to do was go to collect my child from the babysitter and head for a nice bath, a calming bedtime story, prayer and Kung-Fu cuddles. I felt physically, mentally and emotionally spent. There was nothing left there for me to even tap into and hold up the pretence.

Having heralded the earliest ending of a lover’s reunion ever by driving the point home with some face splitting yawns and exaggerated stretches, I dragged my shell to the car. It was uncomfortable to say the very least but for the first time since the shouting began in my head there was silence...glorious, blissful silence. Whether this silence was as a result of shock or genuine apathy remained to be seen, both of us were very aware of this.

With the perfunctory kiss goodbye at the gate I made a bee-line to collect my baby and both she and the babysitter were clever enough not to probe why I was home so early. My child due to genuine respect and an innate knowledge of how to read her mama’s face and my friend due to fearing for her life coming into the line of fire when my plastered look of composure cracked. Nemesis sent a message to let me know that he was home safely and when I didn’t respond after ten minutes he decided to give me a call to check if I was alright. I said that I was fine. (He should’ve known right there and then, a woman is never ‘fine’- men please take note)

Calmly I told him to give me a few minutes so that I could get through the housekeeping and admin so that we could chat without anything rushing me. He asked how long I would need and I informed him that an hour would suffice. As it was still pretty early I knew he would not sleep until I got in touch with him. With my child planted firmly on my bosom and drooling contentedly I dove into the maelstrom that waited.

 Once the perfunctory niceties were dispensed with I asked him which part of any of what was happening right now made sense not to me but to him. He immediately pointed out that my behaviour that evening was nothing like what he had come to know me for. Having had that pointed out I asked if he had even the slightest inkling why it was thus, to which he expressed how he had expected the usual rousing welcome accompanied with pompoms, cancan dancing, cheerleaders and some hot sticky cuddling to cap off the night...but alas he was in his bed alone trying to mould my Nubian form out of some very reluctant goose-down white pillows and failing dismally.

I expressed my sincere disdain and commiseration at his circumstances and assured him that not all days are the same, again reiterating my exhaustion. He asked if he should let me alone so that I might sleep to which I responded that attempting to sleep when my heart and head were not settled would not solve anything, I knew for a fact the sun would come up the next morning with me still lying in prone staring at the ceiling and fighting myself in my own head. Finally he asked what was wrong -as if he didn’t know, but I saw his angle and he was not going to get a word out of me until he acknowledged wrong doing, gave a satisfactory explanation and made things right.

What came first was the apology.

Grunt!

“What are you apologising for?” I asked pleasantly.

“I have not been honest with you and I have let you draw conclusions off my silence that are altogether wrong,” he said.

“Indulge me,” I said as I sunk my back deeper into my pillows and rolled the now sleeping bunny from on top of me.

He asked if I was being sarcastic and as serenely as I had been throughout I responded that I wasn’t being catty at all and was dying to know what he had to say for himself. I was only going to be in a position to accept or reject any apology from him once I knew what was being apologised for. Nemesis was conducting himself as someone who had done no wrong and expected the excitement of his return to overshadow the obvious misgivings his whole departure and absence had caused. To add insult to injury he expected a hero’s welcome, receptive arms and a moist, throbbing receptacle for his turgid, throbbing member.

He admitted that his treatment of me had not been fair and that I deserved better from him given the place I held in his life. I exhaled loudly and let him continue, all the while fighting back a sudden well of tears that had begun collecting in my eyes. Listening to him talk I could sense his sincerity, either that or he really puts on a good show. He was in a position where he had trapped himself solidly by the path he had let his life take and there were things about it that he could no longer fight or try to change. He loves me, he never planned this. It has him off kilter because his life is so planned that he can right now by his calendar tell you exactly where he will be on the 7th of November as early as the January of the same year. If anything deviates from the course that has been predetermined it totally screws him up. There is no disambiguation between his personal and professional life, hasn’t been for over a decade.

Enter hot blooded female...

Surely this would be the time to take a chance on feelings that you declare to be real and a source of great peace and joy and factor them into your proverbial calendar. 

Well not if you are Nemesis!

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Tuesday 5 August 2014

Family Issues and then some



I’ve learnt to not believe myself when I tell myself that I am beautiful and intelligent, resourceful or strong anymore because these things that I know about myself have been used against me by those whose voices I have lent my ears and heart to, repeatedly. The only thing that makes them different is their timing and placement. I can’t help but listen to the turbulent, rushing sounds of voices in my own head; the declarations of love especially -those just take on different accents and project mental images I find harrowing instead of them being pleasant memories that warm the darkest depths of a soul turned stone cold by other people’s self-serving adulation of me. 

Nemesis returned.

The territorial heart skipping beats at this news refused to come to the party. All I wanted to do was burst into tears. I was torn between wanting to see him and smothering him with kisses and feeling like beating him into a bloody unrecognisable mass of human pulp. In my heart of hearts I know the exact point when our relationship took a turn it never recovered from; it was that trip in September. I prayed for sanity and composure. I pep-talked myself into ignorance anytime I heard those demonic, raucous voices start clamouring for attention. I prayed to be able to look him in the eye without giving away how fragile and betrayed I felt. I prayed for the warrior in me to not use words that I know would cut and make one bleed to a slow painful death like a slug to the intestine.

Is there a feeling worse than feeling utterly stupid? Is there a cure for it?

I agreed to meet with him for dinner and did everything I could to bite hard on my own tongue until it was over. Astounded by my own resilience and belief of my own make-believe I found myself shaking myself aware to avoid relapsing into surveying him with the same eyes that had looked at him that night I found the hair in the toilet. Most of what he said about his trip was inconsequential to me. I just wasn’t interested. I have enquired before as to what sort of family he comes from, who his friends are, the exact nature of his job/career/aspirations and at all times the walls come up so rapidly they choke off conversation and make one feel like they are being subversively accused of prying and having no real way to articulate how they got to that point.

Let’s go over the facts for a bit here...yes Nemesis is of the Caucasian persuasion, by his divulging he is the oldest and only son out of a family of three, he has two sisters. I need to make a quick correction here, the wedding he had attended was not for his niece- it was his sister’s wedding, his 2nd sister and not particularly his favourite sister and apparently it is du jour to have preferences where your kinfolk are concerned. That’s why it smarted as much as it did. Granted we all have our favourites in terms of siblings and relatives but liking my family as much as I do, their pictures are firmly in photo albums where I whip them out when the homesickness gets me good. Having two brothers and two sisters as I do, you will not find now or at any point in my life pictures of them displayed all over my home and then to especially have one specific sibling to whom whole tributes exist above the others, even reaching as far as into my bedroom. Say for instance the desire to masturbate took me, would it not feel somewhat filthy to be fapping away at myself with an image of my sibling posing and gawping directly at the bed where I am. Much worse is banging someone’s head into the wall with your sibling “present”. This was the case in his home.

Let me put it another way for the sake of context, you have two sisters- Laura and Sandy. You like Sandy a lot more than you like Laura and you have two pictures throughout your home of Laura and by last count a total of thirteen pictures of Sandy including two in the bedroom. When you go to visit your family you stay with Sandy at her house/your house as you have done for the past 10-15 years you have been globetrotting. She regularly comes to visit you in deep dark Africa to the extent that she has a standing supply of toiletries and her make-up mirror that have a permanent place of habitation on your dressing table top even though she last visited you more than a year ago. Yeah yeah so maybe you and this particular sister have such a comfortable relationship that if she comes through, you move out of your own room and bathroom just so that she is comfortable in the covers you use and with the shower head set at the angle she likes which you obviously like too, to the extent that you move around constantly to homes with ample guest rooms-but these particular aspects about the layout of your home(s) moves with you. But hey every family has its own dynamic right?

I will point out though that almost half a year into this relationship my family was well aware that I was very happy, they knew that it had to do with my having met someone I considered special and we all know joy like that cannot be contained. Anyone who mattered to me knew exactly what time it was as far as the source of this added exultation within me. Although no real direction as to the course of my association with Nemesis was laid bare I was secure enough with my perception of him to not be secretive about who and what he was to me.

Sadly as deep as we were to that point in the dalliance we had it was morbidly apparent that I was to be kept in a certain position in so far as his friends, colleagues, strangers and especially his family were concerned. Don’t even go as far as social media and the dictates of that fickle arena. Not only was it implied and at times voiced succinctly; it was well and truly clear that despite any joy we brought and shared with one another I was to be kept solidly a secret, for reasons only he knew. In what at the time seemed very romantic and discreet there were places we would not go due to the nature of our interracial set up.

It was fast beginning to feel like I had been sucked into something I genuinely wanted to be in, with someone I genuinely had deep feelings for but who still had far too many hang-ups within himself to ever be able to fully address them within himself much less show and actually remedy the same. Stuff that had absolutely nothing to do with me but directly affected me more than I ever got comfortable with. Or it could be a reason as simple as he was not ready to go to any ‘next’ stage with me and had reservations about me and my intentions in being with him, therefore having familial opinion his in particular added to the fray would not suit whatever his purpose was. One doesn’t exactly want to be in a position where they push another person and would rather wait until they push themselves, hoping they push themselves…

Another revelation is that Nemesis has been married and divorced more times than either of us cares to delve into, him more than me. He has also never had children, but that is a subject for another day. Obviously before, during and after those events in his life there would be failed relationships, flings etc. Everybody has a past; the degrees of floweriness of our pasts are what differ. So justifiably he has trust issues and is a cynic of note. A misanthrope if you will go as far as to analyse it psychologically. He is by nature very critical of any and everything. If you see a perfect blue sky he will point out the clouds as if to minimise the impact of any moment’s beauty.

 I don’t  know what made him this way, neither do I care- all I would like is to at least be given the benefit of the doubt and the room to make my own mistakes within our relationship before I get  silently prejudged and punished on the merit of other people’s failings.

 Just as he point blank refused to pay for the hurts inflicted on me by my past and the choices I made in it when that subject reared its ugly head in our interactions. The thing with him is that it is not laid bare, not spoken as he keeps mum on those kinds of issues or glosses over them without them ever being addressed, much less put to rest. He tends to err on the side of the negative outcome and will shroud it by pronouncing it to be his brand of realism.

It took a lot of time for me to see,come to terms with and eventually accept how he expresses himself and also to reserve his right to not express himself as this is all part of what made him who he is. He may project an air of control and other worldly calm when just beneath the surface bubble demons I can never handle and that he won’t open up to because he knows he can’t handle them either. It was one of those things that I could either put him to task about or hammer on until it reduced both of us to both our pained empty shells or it was something about him I accepted no matter how begrudgingly and got a move on with him and paid it no further mind. He obviously had his reasons for conducting himself the way that he did and as unnatural as it felt to me he was under no obligation to further complicate his anguish by making it mine too by sharing it. I respect that.

And I will hug him through those things that I don’t understand, not because I am lacking in any way or compensating a void within me that I need him to fill but because maybe my being there will help him see himself as I see him. Maybe it will help him realise that loneliness is a companion he has chosen whose company he not only detests but continuously indulges as if her fiendish ways bring calm to his soul.

Love loves with no but…and love loves LOVE.

Follow me on Twitter ~ @mazituwe