Shall I speak to you of my challenge? Getting up, shedding my retainer, sloping off to pee, impressing the laptop power button, closing the audio files of the night before, loading a morning soundtrack, swinging my cupboard open, and pulling out…a white tank top, khaki three-quarters, and blue pumps. Putting them on, and walking to the dining hall so dressed. As opposed to waking, adorning myself in a red-and-black printed Ghanaian pencil skirt, grey Duchess-Catherine inspired wedged pumps, a fuchsia coral necklace from Lome, and longlasting lippy.

In matric, at the Mickey Mouse awards, I was gifted with a pink and silver Barbie dress with neon green nails – shoe size: fingernail. These were my trophies of the vote for “Most Outrageous Fashion.” Two days into a Theatre Sports course, when I was complimented on my colourful fashion, I explained: that evening I was to be in attendance at the 18^th of an old love. He would be there (no duh) – with his new love. And my pinks and reds, fitted and flaired, eye- and lip-liner – these were me saying: “Look! I am confident and in control. Life, thou shalt not affect me!” Which is a big load of bullshitty hogwashy fishpaste-flavoured blah blah. It had affected me to such a degree that I had to prove to the world just how much it hadn’t.

I have always loved to dress, and that’s fine and dandy in itself. But I have just figured out what some of the psychology behind that has become – that I am deficient by normal standards. Wearing shorts and a T-shirt, I just don’t match up. I need the clothes to be unusual, my language to be sophisticated, my silhouette to be enhanced. Unusual, unique, special, original, “different” – I’ve heard that one. Weird, strange. And I took pride and sometimes pleasure in that fact. For I was not forgettable, I was making my mark. And because I was winning, perpetuating the façade, that I was separating myself from the “ordinary”.

Gawd, I was frightened by the word, and many others like it. Ordinary, average, fine, standard, usual, regular. I feared I failed those standards. Dash, the little boy in The Incredibles listens to his mom telling him that “Everybody is special.” He responds: “That’s the same as saying nobody is.”

Perhaps it is the ordinary differences that make us special. The extraordinary things are so often a result of things we can take no credit for – genetics, resources, and “sheer dumb luck” as Professor McGonagall says in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

Perhaps it is the ordinary idiosyncrasies that I have tried so desperately to hide that make up the term “weird and wonderful.” Like the fact that I don’t like marmalade, but I do like jam. And that some things innately satisfy me – such as the sight of the beautiful, simple watch my friend gifted me for my birthday. And my escapism-indulgence of People.com.

I struggle to share this, to write these things down, admit my ordinariness. Is that vain? I do hope not. It’s true, either way.

I used to think my body was evidence of the fact that I had failed. That people could look at me, and see the extra flesh overflowing from the neatly drawn red (always red!) lines society had drawn for it.

My need to be in control meant that I wore one black lace glove in exams. It was in my stationery bag, with my stapler and pen(S!) I’d get in there, and slip it on. A friend told me it was my Lucky Glove – it was just another way I was unusual. Nope. I could get so wrapped up in picking, pushing and tugging at my cuticles that I’d end up wasting minutes of time in exams. It would start when I got to a question that I was nervous about…and ten minutes later I’d look up from the leaf of skin that jutted out between the nail and finger-flesh on my third left finger. For the first set of exams in matric, I wore plasters on every finger. My mocks, I had discovered the “Glove Method”.

I could also get totally absorbed with picking my legs. Intriguingly, the hair would grow back in neat circles beneath the upper epidermis. I would take red pleasure in dragging a fingernail over the surface of the slightly matte skin within the circumference of the circle, piercing it and slowly tugging the hair fully through. Sometimes, they’d grow straight but not make it through to the air that was 1mm away. I’d pierce and tug that too. I have slowly but surely given this up, but it was a struggle let me tell you. It took me longer than it took to learn Edna Turnblad’s lines, songs and moves for Hairspray The Musical. That’s including wig-time.

The most recent affliction is that of the Split Ends. Like Mr. Miagi’s chopsticks catching the fly, I peer through my hair, one lock, one strand at a time. On average, the human head has 100 000 hairs on it. I’ve had one-on-one interactions with 30% of mine. Sitting with scissors in hand, perilously close to my eyes (thank heavens I wear glasses) I cut off the spliced ends. Hair goes white when it is weak, and I like to cut it off before that point. The best ones are when there are multiple branches of hair coming off one single strand. Now and then, the strand has tightly knotted itself, and these always snap off with ease.

I have this vision of forensic scientists going over my room as a crime scene, and being astounded by the amount of small hairs that coat the floor. That is, before I hoovered.

So maybe these ordinaries are what make me, and human beings everywhere, extra-ordinary.

And maybe, that’s how a slightly lonely first year university student makes herself feel better at night.

You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul’s own doing. ~Marie Stopes

Shall I speak of my blessings?

In a new town, a new bed, new pyjamas, with newly cleaned hair…Today is my 19th birthday. Yesterday I spoke to a granny of mine on Skype, and she told me that she was looking at a school picture of me from preschool. In it, I have a wide, and engaging grin, my eyes literally twinkle, golden locks flick in the wind, and I am wearing a pale blue summer dress with white daisies printed on it. Ah, the hilarity! The truth about that picture is that, on that day I insisted on dressing myself, but could not decide what to wear – thus took everything I owned and adorned my five-year-old body in it. Leggings, jerseys, spencers, tops, dresses, skirts and socks…all of it. It was only just before the pictures were snapped that my teacher convinced me to change into the dress that was one of the items I had selected for the day. The product of that process? A beautiful, carefree, infectiously endearing image. Even the trees seem to be smiling benignly down at me.

Paha! Were I to return to that little girl, I could tell her about all the bumps and lumps along the way, or…or I could tell her the following…

Dearest Nica.

One day you will turn 19 – amazing, huh? And on that day, you will have your own little room in a residence, with a window that is all yours to open and a kettle to boil. On that day, a kind and considerate friend will wake you with tea in bed, and present you with the present of a very-grown-up-indeed looking watch – and you’ll be able to tell the time on it!

Your little brother – yes, you are going to get a sibling, your very best of dreams – will send you a picture that he drew of you in a wonderful frame that you will place next to your bedside lamp so that it is the first thing you see in the morning. And at night, you will turn off the lamp and enjoy the dark. You won’t be scared of it anymore, there’ll be no wolves, and no Rasputen at all. You won’t even be scared of the moths that fly in or the spiders in the bathroom. You’ll live quite happily with one in your bathroom in Ghana – yes, you’re going to live in Ghana for a while!

There will be a clock beside your bed that sounds loudly just like the big old one at Ouma and Oupa’s house. It will have been given to you by a beautiful, wonderful girl who is your friend and thinks you’re terrific. And you will learn to appreciate afternoon naps. You will get a phone call from your little sister – YES, you get a SECOND SIBLING!! And you will have to be quick on the telephone because you are halfway through a supper at a friend’s place in town. A new friend who met you for the first time with your smushy-tear face, and still wants to be your friend. She will bake cupcakes for your birthday and make lovely pasta, and she will come and fetch you in her car, and bring you back in her car, and it will be just the two of you in the car, like proper grown-up people do. You will have a friend who brings sliced fruit, and bakes especially for your birthday picnic – it’s not just mommy!

Mommy, on the other hand, will send you parcels in the post because you actually live quite far away from her. In a whole different province – you! And you don’t cry about it too much. You really will get to be big like that. And mommy will send you pens and a sketchpad, because you’ll still love drawing so much – ‘specially “copying” stuff. And she will send you – this is a pretty crazy one – a frame that changes picture every few seconds!! Crazy, huh? And mommy will have put all these really nice pictures on it of you and Zakes (that’s your brother!) and her – she’s still really pretty, even though she does eventually cut her hair. Your hair will be really long, halfway down your back, like a princess’ hair.

And mommy will call a lot, because she still loves you SO much even though you live far away. And she always loves you. Mommys are just cool like that. And Dad will call…he’s got long hair too. And you’ll have grown-up stuff like a laptop and a cellphone that are all yours to use, and you’ll choose what time you go to bed, and what time you’re allowed to read until, and you will read REALLY thick books. And you will drink coffee, and have Cher CDs, and red lipstick. And boobs.

And you’ll have pierced ears, that are pierced a lot…like seven times!

And in the morning, when you wake up to be 19 properly, you will get up and dress yourself without any tears, and pack your bags and (probably!) not forget to pack anything without mommy’s help, and go have breakfast with friends, and put sunblock on and go to lectures which are classes where one person teaches a lot of people. And you’ll be pretty happy, most of the time.

And, isn’t that just worth looking forward to?

Goodnight my little 18-year-old

I leaned forward and took two drags of the cigarette. “Drag” is apt – I did it because perhaps if I did, if I put the rolled butt between my lip-stick-ed lips and took the disguise into my body, allowing the smoke to perforate me, then I’d find it easier to play this part. I let the Friend of a Friend place the wine bottle in my hand, and let the wet, bitter taste stain the innards of my mouth. Stain me, perforate me. I was trying, “I’m trying, d’ya’hear?!” I wanted to cry at the sky. Playing the part– because this is what I am “meant” to do on a Friday night, this is what I am “meant” to do to relax. Of course there are alternatives – I’d just been to a two-hour poetry reading at which a student’s poem offered to “play guitar on your ribcage,” his words, not mine.

But it is not enough, being home by 9.30 – it leaves time to think. And I’ve been thinking all week, thinking of feral children, shamanism, the possible necessity of a soul to survive death, and Hobbes’ theory that human’s default setting leads to a life that is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short.” Basically, as Jacob Black (or Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight series) would put it, centuries later: “Life sucks, and then you die.”

Fascinating, challenging and stressful; this week I wrote three pages on how I would apply Boutros-Ghali’s “Agenda for Peace” principles in Somalia between the withdrawal of Western aid in 1989 and the Black Hawk Down incident in 1992 to prevent a UN failure – never having had a lesson on Somalia at all. I spent 45 minutes watching a documentary on a little girl, known as Genie, whose father decided she was brain-damaged as a baby and kept her isolated in a locked room, mostly leashed to a potty-chair, for the first 13 years of her life.

Yup, it was a week that did install some tension into the flesh of my neck. Tonight I must write a critical summary on John Perry’s dialogue in which Gretchen Weirob is lying on a hospital cot, dying, and asks her friend Miller to offer her an argument for the possibility of survival after death. She defines survival as her numerical identity still existing following death.

So ja, my brain needs a break.

Tomorrow is my 19^th birthday, and I am nervous for the day. There’ll be no Mom to make me coffee, and brother who simply HAS to wake me early because his excitement just cannot wait. My Ma has sent parcels, and I know that they will enter my torso and press upon my heart – as symbols of my family’s hearthomelove. My friends will message, and family will phone. I know it, trust it, love it and appreciate it. But I will still sit in a room of strangers to chew on my cereal, and will even sit in beautiful botanical gardens with a collection of new and kind acquaintances whose company I enjoy, who may well become friends. And I think it will be delightful. But today, today I will walk alone to buy goodies for this brunch. And I will carry them alone up the hill. And tomorrow evening, I will go to a new friend’s new home for dinner, to eat and celebrate with people I do not know. And I think it will be highly enjoyable. But still, somehow, it is wistful somehow on this Saturday morning – the prospect of a birthday away.

I am blessed, to have people with whom to celebrate, and a bouncy black dress I bought at an antique market in Paris to wear, and funds I earned doing good, important work, to buy fruit, appletiser, croissants and cheese.

I am blessed to have a mom who bought, prepared and packed parcels days in advance.

And I am blessed to have made it (almost!) to 19, with a loud laugh, smooth wrists, and dancer’s waist.

 

I’ve been afraid before. I’ve sat in lonely places. And I wasn’t always lonely when I did. I sat in a brown coat, on a rock, in the evening, with sweaty feet in my shoes. I sat facing the Ghanaian traffic that rushed by. The air was hot, orange and muggy. And I was excited, unafraid. And now, I am in a bedroom, my legs curled beneath the duvet my mom bought for me when I came home from camp. Camp – a word that once seeded fear and dread in me. This week has felt somewhat like a never-ending camp.

 

 

Now, there’s a tall window that lets cool air into the room. The view is green. How I longed for green. The buildings are high and old. I’m clean – my hair fluffy with its latest wash. How I longed for clean.

 

 

My mother, mom, Ma meant safety once. Even as I was the girl who cried on camps, or staying over at my cousin’s home. Going away from home didn’t feel like leaving “home safe” behind, because Ma was with me there.

 

 

And then I left for Ghana. And then I came home. As my darling Ma reminded me today, it took over a month before I felt safe once again. Even whilst lying on her double bed with the silver lampshade she bought in Grahamstown when I was two – that has hung in her room since our first home. Her solar-powered crystal turns to catch the light. Her hands are bigger than mine, at least the fingers are longer and thicker. Her nails are always shorter – she nibbles at them sometimes. Less in later years. Her hands are always warm.

 

 

 Even then, I was still afraid – psychologically unsafe. I came home November 8^th. I felt safe December 15^th.

 

 

And so, now that I am here, in Grahamstown, at Rhodes, in res, with all my attempts at deep breaths, and miserable calls home and smses to be called because I used two months accumulated airtime in the first 48 hours, I have to ask where that safety is?

 

 

Is it in books? So far not. Is it in messages from friends and family? No, because just as they believe in me, I do not. Is it in sleep? So my body says so far – hide in the haven of sleep. Rest there, with the possibility of things being better in the morn.

 

 

 Perhaps, it is in me. Yes, this should be an obvious answer. But it is not.

 

 

It is in who I am. Who I am takes comfort in listening to Bill Bryson at night. Who I am relaxes to Lowell George. Who I am hears the sounds of people’s voices outside the window, through the door, and feels intimidates by their ability to be vivacious when I am feel vulnerable. Who I am is the one the mosquitoes always bite. Who I am reacts intensely to hypocrisy. Who I am picks at my nails, just ripped one so it bled, and pinches off split ends. Who I am feels compromised when told to do a sexy dance for boys. Who I am has left tearmarks on my glasses in the past two days – a lot.

 

 

 And Who I am is What I’ve got.

 

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I’ve been afraid before. I’ve sat in lonely places. And I wasn’t always lonely when I did. I sat in a brown coat, on a rock, in the evening, with sweaty feet inside my shoes. I sat facing the Ghanaian traffic that rushed by. The air was hot, orange and muggy. And I was excited, unafraid. And now, I am in a bedroom, my legs curled beneath the duvet my mom bought for me when I came home from camp. Camp – a word that seeded fear and dread in me.

Now, there’s a tall window that lets cool air into the room. The view is green. How I longed for green. The buildings are high and old. I’m clean – my hair fluffy with its latest wash. How I longed for clean.

My mother, mom, Ma meant safety once. Even as I was the girl who cried on camps, or staying over at my cousin’s home. Going away from home didn’t feel like leaving “home safe” behind, because Ma was with me there.

And then I left for Ghana. And then I came home. As my darling Ma reminded me today, it took over a month before I felt safe once again. Even whilst lying on her double bed with the silver lampshade she bought in Grahamstown when I was two – that has hung in her room since our first home. Her solar-powered crystal turns to catch the light. Her hands are bigger than mine, at least the fingers are longer and thicker. Her nails are always shorter – she nibbles at them sometimes. Less in later years. Her hands are always warm.

Even then, I was still afraid – psychologically unsafe. I came home November 8^th. I felt safe December 15^th.

And so, now that I am here, with all my attempts at deep breaths, and miserable calls home, I have to ask where that safety is?

Is it in books? So far not. Is it in messages from friends and family? No, because just as they believe in me, I do not. Is it in sleep? So my body says so far – hide in the haven of sleep. Rest there, with the possibility of things being better in the morn.

Perhaps, it is in me. Yes, this should be an obvious answer. But it is not.

It is in who I am. Who I am takes comfort in listening to Bill Bryson at night. Who I am relaxes to Lowell George. Who I am hears the sounds of people’s voices outside the window, through the door, and feels intimidates by their ability to be vivacious when I am not. Who I am is always the one the mosquitoes bite. Who I am reacts intensely to hypocrisy. Who I am picks at my nails, just ripped one so it bled, and pinches off split ends. Who I am feels compromised when told to do a sexy dance for boys. Who I am has left tearmarks on my glasses in the past two days – a lot.

And Who I am is What I’ve got.

I was born with a heart, bearing the dashed lines of a child’s activity book, and thick bold instructions: “CUT HERE.” That is not quite so masochistic, or self-pitying, as it sounds. I do not write of the dashing of a heart on large and jagged boulders, but rather the willful action of the lifting of a hinged lid – aimed at allowing the diamonds within to catch the sunlight. (Nice image, huh? – silently laughs at own sentimentalism)

This was how my heart was designed. It is not shaped as a woman’s breasts, the outer rims of which connect by line to each other, forming the neat triangle of her overt erogenous zones: i.e. her automatically sexy bits.The standard “heart” shape according to Hallmark. Turn it upside down, and what do you know?! Ballas. Sex-obsessed society. Tut tut.

No, mine is not so shaped. Were it so shaped, it is unlikely I would have successfully made the Great Trek from my mother’s womb.

But is does bear the dashed lines of an alternative Autoshape choice. And, I believe that, behind that flap is a torrent, gushing, rushing, soaring, roaring, pouring, and many other adjectives that rhyme, source of Love.

However, sometimes, I resist the urge to pour Love out into the world.

Why? Because I aim to hide my Much-and-Many-Ness. Much Emotion; Many Words; Much Intensity; Many Thoughts; Much Sensitivity; Many Imaginings; Much Insecurity…And Many, Much More.

The point is, I used to spend two hours watching a movie, and come out imagining Life Like That. Astute, refined – even a graze is displayed precisely on a heroine’s face, midst the torrents of blood and mish-mash of gunfire, to demonstrate the emotive elegant delicacy of her left cheekbone. The momentary darkness of the cinema corridor would grant me that grace. And then I would come out to the crunch of empty popcorn cartons, the economic inequality of a fifty year-old woman with her handful of ticket stubs, and step into the cloying bathroom air, being sure not to slip on the over-sheened tile floor, and sit my rump down on a squeaking plastic toilet seat to pee, after two hours of sipping blue slush-puppy that stained my tongue.

Last year, I faced the facts. I’m a human being, existing in a physical form that includes blood warbling and gas cleaving out of me, and figuring out how to pee when one is wearing a ballgown. I faced facts, and did not feel sorry for myself. (Good thing, considering everybody else has got to face the same bloody set of bodily functions.) I faced and accepted the possible reality of all sorts of fears. The ones I tried desperately not to think about as a kid, because I thought that’d make ‘em come true. Like my parents dying, or not being able to have kids. Being totally alone, not existing. That kind of thing. I remember lying on my bed when I was about 12, having realised that one day I wouldn’t exist to know that I didn’t exist. The mere thought of it left me in paroxysms of panic. And a few days that I spent walking around with the ever-present knowledge that one day I’d be alive when my mother was not. We went to the Circus, and Nandos, and I still couldn’t get the thought out of my head.

I am no longer afraid in that same way. Which is great. But now I have to get back to Living Life in a positive way, having dreams and fantasies, being excited and happy, knowing all that could happen. I.e. I have to recommit to my life.

Which possibly requires unstitching the flap in my heart to release all that Love, and definitely requires a whole lot of faith. I’ve played with the Faith question, or rather, it has played with me. I’ve mumbled, bumbled and tumbled my way through life, knowing I believed in something, not just sure what that something happened to be.

I’ve explored. A lot.

And no doubt will continue to do so.

But the message I am going to try to continue to take with me comes from the lips of Rufus M. Jones, a writer and a Quaker. In the year of his death, he said: “Live up to the light that thou hast and more will be granted.” Phew. Alright Rufus. Here goes.

“…the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” Rainer Maria Rilke

Each time I start to write a blog, it…ends. Deep, huh? Deep psychosis, perhaps.

So I will write it now.

When I was little – a word I apply to all ages before when I was small – I imagined what it would be like to be big…

I’d sit elegantly, with perfect nails, and clickity-clack my way through index cards – a librarian. I’d also be a dancer. I’d snap a smart black handbag closed. I’d be quick and luxurious, elegant and simple, honest and gentle. These were the paradoxes I planned whilst sitting on my pink-and-purple ladybird swing.

I imagined my seventeen. I imagined my nineteen. I imag(out)ed my 18. Simply put, I spent no time imagining it at all.

I am unsurprised. My year has turned out to be …necessary. In getting me from a to b. 17 to 19. Pinelands High to Accra…Rhodes.

I found lists helpful, when outside was the sweltering world. Sometimes it felt familiar. And sometimes, it felt like stepping into the crumblings of a cocoon, of a butterfly that belongs to an unknown genus…and world.

Notable Experience #1:

 

Climbing into a rusted-out old Ford bakkie, with an Adonis-lookalike for an eight-hour drive to his family’s mountain farm.

 

Notable Experience #2:

 

Pulling swollen ticks out of a goat’s udder, feeling the pincers release the gritty flesh.

 

Notable Experience #3:

 

The taste, and texture, of breakfast, after three hours of morning milking… soft slices of deciduous pear, the clinging gruffness of raw oats, and thick slickness of fresh milk.

 

What does one learn from a single week of such experiences?

Pah!

Rather…what did I learn?

Raw oats soothe life.

My mind can still.

I am no longer the little girl who hallucinated bugs.

I can herd, milk, churn, feed, and weed. I can.

 

Notable Experience #4:

 

Opening my right hip out in NIA class, in training, feeling a gashing gush, a gushing gash of agony.

 

Notable Experience #5:

 

Art-In-Life – seeing the wowness of a red rose in the studio, alive and growing, still, at rest.

 

Another week. A different type o’ training.

I trained to Teach, to Dance.

Women. A Coming of Age. I cried. Screamed. Shook. Roar-red. Played. Eased into the sense of my Girl-self. Wore pink…sequins (Phew…got that out of the way.)

Let Go of the young girl who wore black, and studs ens. (ensovoorts/ensemble)

Sloped around a golf course, following my father’s putts. And wept. Made myself the stereotype I writhed and chafed against: over-emotional, drama-queen, over-sensitive. Weakity weakity woo. Opened my mouth, let spill, was closed down in react. Went home to hold my sister, his little girl, my little girl, who was worrying about missing him when she went away…

Notable Experience #6:

 

Finally letting the doctor complete a sentence, with the word Antidepressant.

Notable Experience #7:

 

Holding myself up, feet kicking, torso glidingly still, in teal water, joking of “dads,” and later, sitting at the eetkamertafel in my uncle’s house, having him look me in the eye, and validate my observations and pains.

 

The shift that followed this. Life Went On. Better.

Notable Experience #8:

Lying wrapped in duvet(s) and poncho(s), at a fire in a cottage with A Dear Friend, eating Gran-baked apple crumble with Greek Jou-Gat. Hearing her cry: “Can God be outside of us, as well?”

 

Notable Experience #9:

 

Lying on her lap, looking at the flames, feeling the statement rise up, the burst of saying it…allowing it to be Real. “I am taking antidepressants.”

 

Notable Experience #10:

 

Reading The Secret Magdalene, by Ki Longfellow.

 

Baking and Puzzle-making were appointed Coping Mechanisms during my 18.

I read Eddie’s Bastard, a strange book to select…the term applies to myself.

Bought at the market in my dad’s hometown. I read it while lying on my Mom’s bed, eating the chocolate éclairs I baked (for her) – with Nutella, and Double Thick Cream.

Notable Experience #11:

 

I went into school. And was paid a compliment which I held to my soul, in order to bask in it. There had been thought of asking me to step into a role for the year’s musical.

I wrote to Ki Longfellow, and Michael Raleigh, writer of In the Castle of the Flynns.

 

Notable Experience #12:

 

Michael Raleigh Wrote Back. Within 24 hours. On the morning of the performance of the show of which I was co-creator. 

 

Notable Experience #13:

 

After a day…listening to Janice Galloway read, being enthralled for session on session, walking home in Franschhoek; the snapping of boots, swinging of Granny Peg’s coat, red royal smile, stepping up to the table of the Jamaican writer…to tell him how I enjoyed what he had said. Holding my own at the table with such writers as he and Company.

 

Notable Experience #14:

 

Attending a Priscilla Queen of the Desert themed event, seated in a backroom on the phone with the director, the skirts of my crimson ballgown Victorian-falling over my legs, arranging an audition for the following morning, as someone rolled a joint in the room next door.

 

I sang. I stepped into the role.

Notable Experience #15:

 

Singing my solo for the first time in front of the group cast – closing my eyes and deciding to belt it out. Turning around – to see my director beam.

 

Working, working, working, sweating, sweating, sweating…to find the accent of a Baltimorian woman whose great weight is a part of her great identity. The girl who felt better about herself when she hadn’t eaten, and still cannot order pasta, learning to say her lines with relish: “First, we’ll make a stop at the wiener stand.” The accent came with giving myself a double chin. “Is that chicken and waffles?” Wiggling my flesh, and the layers of fat-suit cushioning over it, onto the chair. Letting my “husband” cuddle my cottonwooled-waist.

 

Notable Experience #16:

 

Ripping off my overskirt in the final number of Hairspray, singing, “You can’t stop my happiness cause I like the way I am…So if you don’t like the way I look, well I just don’t give a damn!” To feel the audience’s hearts rise with my own.

 

Notable Experience #17:

 

Driving out of my dad’s town, in the dark dawn, stopping the car in the plughole of the valley, gleamed by a full ivory moon. With the support of A Dear Friend.

 

Ghana…

 

What did I learn?

 

I learnt of my mortality, that it is not grandiose and distant, but now. Insufficient time to say the word…before it takes me. Only mort. then. That feeling that came before, when I was mugged, or out at night and afraid. That lasted minutes and was banished by a hot cup of Milo…and my mommy picking me up. All the time.

 

Papaya and Mango Ecstasy smoothies cost 6 GHc, and make life thick with satisfaction.

 

Notable Experience #18:

 

Sitting in a Human Rights Office when the news came – first of Gaddafi’s possible Capture and Injury, and then of his Death. And, despite the almost 3000 km between the two countries. Perhaps it was simply the facing of it. Something was happening, and I was in an office, city, country, dealing with Somethings on the same continent. Not noting it, and turning away to go back to my “real life.” Perhaps.

 

Notable Experience #19:

 

Noting the difference between how I felt when his capture and death had yet to be confirmed. Blasé almost about his Possible death. And not bloody blaming the person who may have taken the shot. And then…twelve hours later. It had been confirmed and I had gone home. I was walking up the street, at night in Accra, and feeling…it’s just another death. Another snuffing out of life. And the possible reconciling of those two parts of me? An African, and a Westerner? Or just…Me. Perhaps. 

 

Notable Experience #20:

 

Sitting in a classroom of teenage girls, taking notes for the lesson report, and spontaneously being asked to stand and explain the situation in Libya. And being able to do so. Able to answer questions. Able to speak, as an African, belonging to a country that is more “Western” than Ghana Herself.

 

 

 

 

Notable Experience #21:

 

Driving, in a Hyundai i10, on smooth tarred roads, almost feeling the slats of the road fitting into our slots…as we slip our way through the itinerary someone designed for us in this sleepy mountain town. Closing my eyes, to see a different road, different mountain, dust…reminded, each time the car shudders, slips, pounds, viscerally taken back to slippery knuckles, shuddering lungs, pounding heart…

 

Notable Experience #21:

 

Swimming, limbing…my way out past the surfers and the spray. To a place where there is, in a clichéd way, nothing and no-one ‘tween the horizon and me. And, not in a clichéd way, feeling with the rise of the water beneath my feet, and the swell of it in, beyond the untouched fractures beneath body and arm, an awareness that I would be happy to go…on and out. My spirit strays further each time the water does swell, and… my self strays, mounting waves the moment fore they break. And sometime is taken, over, under, suffocated by spume, muscle resists, ‘til mind takes control.

 

Over all…

 

I like to wake in a bed with my five year old sister, who is always glad to open her eyes and discover me there. It is a luscious feeling, to be considered the continuation of an excessively pleasant dream.

 

I thoroughly enjoy ideological debates, aim to study Political Sciences and Philosophy, adored planning and conducting lessons on the mental health situation in Ghana (have statistics on file in mind) and human rights role models from around the world. The variety, intelligence, depth and irony in human thought enthrall me…as do photographs of red carpet gowns from Glamour.com, People, and Vogue.

 

I take a great deal of pleasure in coffee, particularly that which is made by my mother.

 

This year was “necessary for my development.” That included not kicking up a fuss about taking antidepressants – two years after they were first recommended to me. I dreamed I was back on a project last night. I woke up sweating, and couldn’t remember why I felt frantic inside. Nerve, body, psych-wracking. And necessary.

 

Many people in my acquaintance assumed, that I would go straight to university – do not pass begin, do not collect R200 – STRAIGHT. Along with the assumption that I was planning to go at all.

 

Now that my name is signed on and in at Rhodes University in Grahamstown for 2012, I could trot about saying this was what I had planned all along. I’d be telling a lie. It may even be what others had planned for me. As Einstein put it, “One had to cram all this stuff into one’s mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.”

I could claim to have read this ages back, having it settle in the bend of my spine, and thinking of myself as some kind of Einstein.

 

 Not a freaking chance.

 

I’m turning 19 in the February to come…I could quite easily tell the lie, that I had zoomed along, easily into a spot at university, snug in the fact and content of my studies.

 

Uh…No.

For the first six months of this year, I claimed to have lesions in my brain, and got a headache at the word, “exam.” I bristled at the term, “gap year.” And took my dad’s prongs of, “Have you decided what to do for the next thirty years of your life?” To head.

I planned to go to Ghana in March of this year. And pulled out in October of 2010.

It took six months for me to be ready. Six months of driving myself half-mad, with half-answers…and wondering, wondering, wondering. I questioned all, aLL, All, ALL.

And then finally, I went.

And I wouldn’t say it made me a better person. Or worse.

It just made me… me. Which was necessary.

 

Erica Jong said, “ Something terrible happens when one takes responsibility for one’s own life. No-one to blame.”

Perhaps this year was necessary to stop my feeling like a victim of my own life. That sounds namfy-pamfy, even just to type. My life didn’t and doesn’t “happen to me.”

I live it.

And that’s what I aim to do in 2012.

.

I want a hug from someone who does not love me. A hug into which I can pour each selfish need. Extraction of comfort. Via osmosis. Not given, shared, promised, enshrined. None of that. I want comfort. NOW. When I was younger, and I was crying, and my mom was there to comfort me, I’d intentionally think of all the things that made me want to cry. Because here was a ready-made comforter – and so for once, they did bear thinking about. Or when one of us boiled over in anger, I’d fling out resentments I had stockpiled. Because here was the chance to actually say what I felt, “When you said this!”.

And now…I want the hug that does not involve give or take. Or rather, I need to take advantage of those who take advantage of me. Those who hug well. And do not love me. How to paint a silver lining on that cloud? Have ‘em around whilst I am trying to cope with a stockpile of memories – of a sweated room, with air and skin like cheese forgotten in the sun; hearing shouted demands aimed at a child; and the oscillating point of nausea from the instant before the car hit the man. A warped partly-digested, regurgitation of Winnie The Pooh’s wisdom:

“”Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best — ” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.”

Once we hit – the sack of his solids crunching into the windscreen – it was real, had to be accepted, dealt with, and so – was.

But the moment before – when I went from thinking it would be a close call, to knowing that we would smash into his body.

That changed me. It alchemized a part of my heart to whisper “drip” into the echoing cavity of my torso.

And so I want a non-lover around. A body bigger and more solid than mine that I can grab onto and squeeze without empathy, with all that fear, when gravity reverses itself and the terror from my heart drips up my throat, to fill my heart, until I clench my chipped front tooth to the re-braced bottoms, simply to stopper the scream.

She looks to me, as part of me caves inwards – into itself. Outwardly, I am Cool and Glamorous Big Sister – home from her travels, someone I dreamed of being. I am wearing a Duchess of Cambridge style dress (I know, because I had it made based on an image of her) made edgy by the vividly patterned print.

I purchased the material in Lome, Togo. All those o’s give pleasure to one’s tongue. The dress was made by Marjorie in Accra, Ghana. So we are on to cross-border vowels and styles that provide pleasure. That’s the Big Sister my little sister looks to. I even play “Hairdresser” well. I am more than happy to have a rainbow nation of make-up splayed across my face, and bands, bows, clips, crowns, diamantes, ties and slides wedged in my hair.

AlthO (for my tongue’s pleasure). I pick at my skin, snag at my hair, tear at my fingers, scratch at a scab, swipe at my ear; not yet settled into the rocking motion of my mind. The plane set it a-gong and the reverberations of sound have yet to stop…vibrating, despite the chafe of rubber on tar.

I felt settled. And then a woman with a well-groomed ponytail, seven children and multiple pedigree bunnies, says a single word that catches me mid-rock, or in this case – nod. My smile is already squirm-suctioned into place, like cling-wrap on belly flesh, when the word registers and catches a well-wrinkled sector of my brain, which I had lulled for a weekend in the country with family, rears to life and bears its (Ghana-sharpened) teeth.

What registers is not the word – one I have never heard used in conversation. What registers is the last (and only time) I heard it referred to. My mom was telling me that when she first met someone I know, and who has known me my entire life, he used the word. This shocked me then.

It starts with “k” and isn’t knowledge. No-ledge could work as a description. There is certainly no middle ground.

I saw the people the woman worked with, or rather – I saw the people who worked under her. I don’t think she would say it to her employees. The rolling motion of the car sets my intestines awrestle. She said it to me. And… the lean of her body, the centering of her eyes, the pinch of the voice – it was being said to me because my skin is light (a whole lot less light since the Ghanaian sun, I might blinking well add.) She’s making me complicit. Slightly violated, I got out of there as fast as I could, politely. (Why am I still polite?)

I sat in the car and looked straight ahead, catching sight of the set of my lips in the mirror.

A part of me pummeled: it’s my task to take her to task. Is it?

She’s an adult with seven children and 35 years of marriage behind her. Irrelevant.

She’s selling fluffball bunnies to my five year old sister. Somewhat relevant.

She keeps referring to how my stepmother may need to contact her again. Some-watts relevant.

My expression of delayed outrage will be unnecessary, will exhaust and upset me, and will make no difference to this woman’s views. Relevant.

I don’t know if it should be, or if I did the right thing. Writing parts of this felt like defending myself, which means some parts of me felt I didn’t pass my test. Should one only act when one’s actions will have a positive effect? No. One should act when it is necessary to act, no matter the effect. So the ultimate question is, when is it necessary to act?

F(h)ere.

The truth is that I used to dream of being here. Here, here – seated on my bed, under me all the secrets and certificates of a teenage life. I wanted to be here, with my mother and brother nearby. I wanted to be here – not so that I could be active, or watch television, or phone a friend.

I wished to be here so that I could lie between my family members and feel the warmth of the two, squishing me, and fight with my brother over whose toenail scratched whom.

I wished to be here to see the green trees waving at me through the window, and the view of the level World Wonder One while I do the dishes.

I wished to be here to feel the pouring pressure of running, leaping, streaming, pounding water over the taut knuckles of my neck.

I wished to be here to eat butternut until my stomach is slushy with its orange stain, and drink slick slippery milk that is not bought in a tin.

I wanted all this. I did.

Besides these wearying urges that cropped up, when I was grubby, sweaty, and drowsy; these are needs to be given a single finger’s worth of clearance once home: shower, sleep, sip.

Beyond that, the need that I glimpsed – sometimes every day, sometimes only once in three weeks – was a need to be here, on my bed, and tuck my toes into my tummy, and cry.

Cry ugly deep big wrathful sobs. Saying what one cannot say, when one is away…

I can’t. I can’t do it. I can’t get up. I can’t chip my teeth opening the 500ml water sachet that is one sixth of the minimum quantity required to keep myself hydrated ensure one before you leave for work, and you must have taken the anti-malarial as well but eat before you do that line your stomach well so it doesn’t burn again and before you eat use hand-sanitizer on your hands to ensure there are no left-over rotting germs due to your lack of running water and the fact that your skin chafes apply ointment – don’t get infected! – watch your step on the way to breakfast you may step in the dog’s shite from Combat or Challenge who might try to wedge their small pointed teeth into your calf muscles exposed by the neat line of your pencil skirt make sure it doesn’t show too much knee but you’ll be proposed to anyway make sure that you have sunscreen on your nose oh and your wedding ring as it may allay some of the proposals although if it doesn’t be sure not to give your number out and decide carefully when giving your name oh and make sure you have your volunteer id in your purse and lock the gate properly and keep your keys out but ohdon’tfallintheopen drainanddonnotflinchtoohardatthesoundofthegirlbeingshoutedatandpretendnottonotice thatsheissittingoutsidebarefootcuttingorangesforyourdinnerbecauseyouneedtostayherforawhilelongerandyouareonyourowneventhoughyoucalledthechapandaskedhimaboutitbut

what

the

hell

donnotsayhellasthatiswhatthepastorwantedyoutobelieveindemonsandallyouallonyourownonasundayinachurchonasundaybecauseyouwereinvitedandwentwithanopenmindbutnowyouarecryinginthecentrenoteventhechurchandenduprunninghometoyourlonelyhousebecauseyouhavenoroommateandyoucannotbreatheandyoualmostgetrunoverbyatruckontheway is going on…beep…beep…beep…the machine ran out of battery power.

My brain did not.

So I wanted to be here. Lying on my bed. Curling myself into a tiny ball. Cracking open the tense f(h)ear of the reality:

just where I was at and how bonkers I must have been to commit to it, to do it, to have done it, to have… it over…

It is over now, and I’m lying on my bed. I can feel the ball – it sits right where my malaria pill once got stuck. My toes and tum are already ready.

But I cannot decide to crack it open – because I am not sure I want to think about it all

and I am not sure who could stop me once I let her start.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well?

I’m lying on my back. And I know that I am not in Ghana anymore. Not because I’m lying in a Hyundai i10, nor because I’m wearing a jersey, a scarf and nude stockings beneath the dress that Marjorie the dressmaker made with material from Makola that I bought – 25 cedi for 6 yards.

Not even because the only c(e)d(i) for miles is the one playing classical music in the car. I know I’m not in Ghana because my stomach is flat – no ghana-carb-bloat. And when I look up, I see the green tip-tops of a tall tree. So, no. I’ve left the Orange Dust Road. But, and here’s the kicker, this place is freaking me out. Being in a car in Ghana still felt like being in Ghana.

Here, it doesn’t feel like being in ZA. Being in a car is an insulated bug that has eaten one up, one sits half-digested in its thorax. Don’t get me wrong. I like being home. It was time to leave the Orange Dust Road. I like my house, and my room, and my garden, and even my road. Watching my little brother play cricket was good too…and going to the library with him to do a project. I’m the girl who came home and realised how much she had missed her…bookshelf. But the world feels closed here, more shut off. There was a rawness to Ghana, and an honesty. I said this while I was there, so this is no reflection in a gilded mirror.

I liked the fact that central Accra showed buildings falling down as well as the stadium where the Black Stars play. Driving through the areas on the way to the match, seated on a tro, it looked directly like a township back home. Except, truth be told, I wouldn’t be on a taxi in a township back home. And I certainly wouldn’t be near our stadium in CT. Our stadium is in Green Point. The nearest shack is…where? Besides this, in Ghana I forgot what I looked like – mirrors were either distorted or too small. There are polished surfaces everywhere here, and my eyes are drawn directly to them…why? I don’t know. My dad used to skel me out for looking in the mirror when he talked to me. I don’t think it’s vanity, but I don’t know what it is.

I say all this…

And yet the resident 14-year old girl in Osu was up before dawn to sweep the yard.

Well?