The page frees me in a sense, in a way I can’t describe. I write and that’s my life. I am a mother and a wife and a lover and a poet and I feel that is also just a part of my life. Sometimes the two meet and sometimes they don’t. Sphere upon sphere upon another sphere. Poetry is a god to me. When I write I am a woman on her own. Reality is out of the picture and it doesn’t seem to count for anything really. It’s never enough for me. I stand and watch the busyness of life, observing nature and most of all human nature and I slowly empty out. It’s a useful exercise kind of like transcendental meditation. I know nothing about it. It’s just something I read as a girl in a book long ago when I was at college and at the time it was just too much for me to handle. The thought of going out of myself made me go numb and cold. It gave me the shivers. If I was alone I would go mad with grief and rage and I would be that girl again.

I think I’ve been supportive. I’ve been encouraging. All I see is constellations in words and it is driving me sweetly out of my mind. I am the rabbit in Wonderland and there I go down that hole. There are people out there who have peace around them all the time. Why can’t I be one of those people? Life is a cruel trick. I want to escape from my reality. Women don’t set out to alienate men. It’s not their lot in life. Men and women are supposed to get along so they can walk down that sunny road, settle down and marry and have those kids and start the modern family. Sylvia and Ted are just complex, endlessly searching particles bumping into each other for clarity like oil and water, like acid rain. Now we, the both of this ‘us’ that he keeps on talking about have this one thing in common and that is poetry and the goal was for us to work together but now it is working against us. I never dreamed that this would be kismet.

Last night I was electric. I told him where to get off and come hell or high water I am going to stick to it. So sticking to my guns, that’s me. I put the universe under observation. To be a wonder, I sometimes long for that. To sparkle, to vibrate, to feel that there’s enough in the world, to bask in the revelation that there’s an abundance healing the world of all its iniquities through ritual, that there’s healing across family bloodlines. I long to be so innocent and pure and that I would have no knowledge of the raw energy of blood and guts in writing poetry. I go inside. Inside the deepness, the thoroughfare of the sense and sensibility of every female poet and what do I find there wherever I look. Boxes that are locked and keys that need to be found, a heart that needs to be connected to the material, the physical part of the universe to view even the light and dark battling it out.

Poetry has become my life work, my death of self, a force to be reckoned with steely-eyed determination, my love, my creative impulse and passion. It is the fruit of my spirit and the way of my soul. I have found the world, worlds really that exist in my consciousness, that state I can only reach when I am very still and quiet. The state I could reach when I was young. You only have that kind of inclination when you are young and you don’t live in a constant state of denial of fear and the ego and insecurity. So I have found consciousness, that clear and fluid stream of thought that tends to linger. The heavenly creation of a dream does not. And when you wake up in the morning there is action and vision and doing your ablutions, brushing the curls out of your hair, there’s a sense of orderliness in the routine. There is always something human. I must have courage now. This is not my first hurt.

I see myself as a poet and a female writer second. There’s no contest. All of life is feeding ghosts that came before and after, running on your own personal velocity, the flow of poetic motion, a writer saying, ‘I need an ending to this’ blasting through his or her dream. Inside the mind/vision of a poet means going into the black and that there are always two possibilities within reach, life or death, feeding the gods of beasts or feeling ghosts near your fingertips, depression or feeling that you’re more normal, stable than the next person. I think I have found my ending. Once you are there you’re running, running with scissors (and didn’t even know it). For writers all of life is childhood continued. As a writer, now is the time of my life. Sylvia write every day, that is the purest sum of parts of a writer. Don’t edit. Don’t censor yourself. Before you show ‘the work’ to anyone else, journal with intent.

Loss is a hard fall. You’re standing and then the world becomes something of a hallucination. Writing no longer is a task for me. Feeling broken is a splendiferous stain. Held up to the world it is my main inspiration. It packs it in, crosses thresholds, divides, and flaunts, what it isn’t is anonymous. In my writing I don’t have to don a mask and mask my pain. I don’t have to filter my moods and then I turn to my reflection and say, ‘Bravo, Sylvia. You’ve done the impossible. Bravo.’ Perhaps it is true. I am behaving like a spoilt, coddled child. But if I take him back what does that say about me, all my principles, the family values I cherish. People talk and what if they do. It is none of my business what they think of me, of us, of this wounded relationship. Poets do not know how to live. We only know how to die.

Daily I get glimpses of the portrait of a writer. It feels kind of surreal to me (more like a dream) especially the consciousness of the writer and the ‘thought-magic’ that we wield and that we harbour in our communities. In front of the writer lies a battlefield. The portrait’s skin and its flesh and bone and blood are made up of history and poverty, the divide between everything that came before, the divide that lies between the powerful and the vulnerable and a rich diversity. It houses the thought and the community I have spoken of before. At heart we, the writer are creative beings. The poet is the mystic being finding everything around him bearable and unbearable. Always reckoning those two forces of nature, those two cycles, seasons in the circle of life. I write because it’s my life. Writers write because it is their saving grace. I write because I don’t know what to do with the raw energy I have of blood and guts.

I regard the world as delicious images crowding my mind, jostling for position and a fairy tale filled with angels and demons. There’s always entrapment by ghosts. Oh, how they want to belong, those kindred spirits and what they wouldn’t give to feel alive again. They vanish and appear at will and call our name in the wee hours of the morning scaring us half to death, they taste like air, smoke, honey, blood and they thirst for land. What they wouldn’t give to walk and talk, speak truths and be tourists?

Today has been the colour of rain. A pale, washed-out colour and a dreary mood was hanging in the air but then Frieda smiled at me and then everything was alright in the world again. I am like a wounded animal, a hungry bear in the wild and there are days when I feel as if I am a woman on a mission. A mission to find love and I can’t rest until I have rekindled it in the ones I have lost. Poetry is my voice, my light, my sport.

I must be obedient and forgiving. Isn’t that what a wife is supposed to be? He had the audacity to stand there and lecture me as if I was a bad person, a bad mother. Have I been a bad wife? I don’t know. Have I neglected my children and been too self-absorbed? Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. I don’t find enough time in the day anymore to write like I used to. I remember how my husband used to help with little Frieda and especially Nicholas when I wanted some time to myself. But most importantly when I wanted to write. When I first met Ted all I wanted to do was make him happy. To see him smile, read his poetry and what an effort he made by reading mine and giving me helpful advice just lifted my spirits. It felt like a dream being near him, listening to him and now I have lost that dream and I must dream another. I have lost him to another woman. Is she better than I am? Is she a lady? Is she the perfect woman?

I want to be a poet. I want to a modern poet and I want to be the best modern poet out there. I just have to find a way out of this near-madness, this state of melancholy, the pathetic little me syndrome, the pain, and the sorrow that I feel comes upon me. I have to reach for the formidable and become that. I have to reach for the celestial. Depression is the sickness of our time. I see it all around me. In the sick, men who are stressed out by their jobs, women who have babies get depressed, people who leave home for brighter, greener pastures. Then there are those who retire, who get old, on the faces of immigrants and even the young people who go to university, people who get homesick for the loved ones they left behind. Ah, the pain of the mind the doctor would say to me. All you need is rest. You have a young family and they must keep you running up and down at all hours of the day. I’ve never stopped believing in that.

Maybe it is all in my mind, the pain of the mind. I went to the doctor. I was feeling out of sorts. Not the way I usually felt and all he said was that the children and their energy must wear me out. So I was put into a situation where I had to agree. It is just this belief that I am something special because I have this talent. ‘Don’t gush. It’s only poetry and most people find poetry obscure. Who reads it?’ My mother said. ‘Don’t be in awe of yourself. Don’t take yourself so seriously that you forget to see that God is in the details and all around you. Always remember that I love you for who you are. I don’t think he is the right kind of man for you.’ I have time now to reflect when I am on my own and he comes and watches the children for me and keeps an eye on them while I can get some work done. The writing of poetry does not come with instructions. Scientists dispel myths. Poets have to reckon with truth.

There’s something sensual about writing and the order and the routine in it. I wish it could last forever but it doesn’t. It’s temporary like the sun-age on the surface of a ripe cloudburst. I feel as if I’m an alcoholic, hippie or a druggie while I experience the sensation of the morning quiet. I take it all in. My consciousness becomes a dream factory that I am still trying to find all the answers to. It must be very cold where he is tonight, wherever he is. I don’t care where he is and who his with. If I did it might mean that I still love him, that I covet feeling his the warmth of him beside me at night? He makes my heart and nerves still and soft. He fills my head with accusations and lies and every time that we come into contact now, I feel like a chip of glass. I must keep my chin up and my head held high but these days I’m prone to panic. What one earth will guide me to the courage I was once accustomed to having?

When I enter the body of poetry a sense of fulfilment and satisfaction washes over me. There are explosions of tiny waves behind my eyes. My soul has made it thus far. I have to end the poverty in my mind but I find a cold comfort in the not knowing of things. If depression happened in nature what would we call it then? Would it be organic in origin? In a marriage when it ends whom is to blame for its demise. Who is the culprit? On the approaching betrayal in any relationship I have this to say. Lock down your heart dear and look away. It means that there may be something incomplete in the moving against the current of love. It means to love and die simultaneously. I think there’s a theory behind light. When my body feels full of that stuff, the light, and the hidden energies in my aura I feel as if I have got free tickets to the centre of winter.

The argument was about nothing really. I really cannot remember who started it first. It was between a girl, barely out of adolescence and her married boyfriend. Perhaps I told him that I did not think that my mother really loved or accepted the choices I made in my life and that I thought he could be supportive of me. Was he really listening? Girls need their mothers more than they need their fathers. Girls need devoted parents. All I could feel was emotional. He was cold and non-committal. I knew my place and he knew his. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs was, ‘Listen to me, please!’ I already knew it would be ignored.

‘We’re not making love anymore?’
‘So what? We can do other things. We are not in the primitive ages anymore. We can talk. You know what I want. I want a married life.’
‘That’s why I have a wife. I can talk to her.’
‘This is not a relationship?’
‘I know this is not a relationship.’
‘All this talk is making me depressed.’
‘Go home. Go home to your family, lady. Go home to your mother and your father.’
‘Why do you want to hurt me?’
‘This is the end of whatever dream you had.’
‘Of course I can see that. I can see it when you look at me. Please don’t talk to me like this?’
‘You want me to tell you that I need you. I don’t need you. You don’t need me as much as you think you do.’
‘I’m in pain. Can’t you see that?’
‘Yes, you’re in pain. You are giving me a headache. Go away. Leave me alone and stop calling me. What if my wife picked up? What then? This is not love. When people treat each other this way. This, this is not love.’
‘When you were young did you ever map your life out? Of who you were going to get married to? Your wife? Your life? Your children?’
‘You’ll grow up and then one day you’ll wake up and I’ll be the last thing you remember. The last thing on your mind. You will not have to put me on your itinerary. You won’t have to make as if you cook and clean on my account.’
‘We always fight. I realise that now.’
‘Good. Then leave.’
‘Please?’
‘Go. Just go. In the end you’ll see it is better that way.’
‘Talk to me. Humour me. Tell me a story about a lost, frightened girl who comes to the big city with a myriad of dreams. In the end, none of her dreams comes true. She sleeps with men in hotels. She is hurt. Flesh is flesh. What happens to a lady and a man? Do they meet and always fall in love? What happens then is that nothing good comes from it? The man leaves and she does not have any self-worth.’
‘You don’t deserve this. The way I have treated you. Go out into the world. Make something of yourself. You are young. You are attractive. That is the dream world, the high art of the female outsider. I need to know that you are going to be fine about this.’
‘You need to know that you are fine with the fact that you are ending my world as I know it.’
‘Do you want to smoke?’
‘I don’t smoke. You know that.’
‘You need to relax. So this is the first time then for you.’
‘Men have left me before. This is not the first time. You were not the first. You are going to make me cry. Maybe it is best if you don’t say anything anymore.’
‘Have a cigarette with me anyway.’
‘Cigarettes make me cough. They taste terrible.’
‘You never complained before. Now you are complaining.’
‘Things were different before. By that, I mean I was going to see you again. I was happy that I was going to see you again. I would have done anything in the world for you, you know. I know how to love someone. Someone even like you. Someone powerful and insecure and full doubts and insecurities.’
‘So you have discovered a man’s secret at last. That we are much more vulnerable than a woman.’
‘And no doubt I will keep discovering it over and over again. I really do not mind if you smoke that last cigarette now. Let me just find my shoes and the rest of my clothes. I’ll go now.’

The world is not my home. Everything in this world seems to be a test or temporary. Fading out as the sunset at the end of the day or illuminating human flaws, truths that are eternal for us. We are indulgent creatures. We need trust. We need loyalty. We need kindness. We need family even though children can be selfish brats sometimes and husbands and wives and friends. We flirt. We flit. We make nests and then when they are empty there is a depression that never leaves us and that is why children come home for the holidays. The unseen is eternal. Ghost stories. Christmas. Fish. I have left childhood behind. They were gifts of great spiritual maturity.

The psychiatrist teaches me how to let go, surrender if you will but how does a person let go of the only world (childhood) that she (I) have ever known. All is gold. We speak about the feelings of being emotionally bankrupt. Unable to deal with the voices in unison in society that are blocking mine out. She says I also have to be heard. People have to listen to me too. Gone are the passages of contentment in books. I have no time to waste on something that I feel does not exist for me or for those who live in spiritual poverty. I have to learn how to love, how to marry but my parents were not good examples of this. I have to own this space, she says.

I am a dreamer. I am a dreamer who has goals, as I am sure Virginia Woolf had goals with the relationships she had, with her writing, with her diaries and letters, with her marriage. Perhaps I desire the same things she did. In her lifetime. In her world. Who made up the rules anyway? I had a bad past and then I think of Alice in her terrifying trippy wonderland. Woolf knew of gender betrayal, constructing sympathy for her characters in her novels. Her hair as fine as Whitman’s blades of grass. Woolf’s words come in waves. They cut me deep. Their serious depth, desolate isolation, rejection and suicidal despair is there for the world to see, to read.

As an adolescent, Woolf was already an intellectual. As an adolescent, I was already an intellectual. There was no psychoanalyst for her violent madness. Her outbursts. Sometimes I think I cannot walk down that road again. It is not a sunny road. It is not the road to Oz. There is a landmark exhilaration when dawn comes as if to say light beckons now, awake! With the light comes the awareness of a new day, vitality and energy for the nerves in your brain cells. Night comes with the same minutia. It is only now that the sun has faded away. The moon and the tapestry of stars is out.

Lovers embrace in dark bedrooms across the world but I am in mourning because I cannot be with that one man who changed my world, who changed my world with one caress. A precarious touch and instantly there was a change in my suffering and my head, my biology was wired differently. The lonely cannot exist. Spiritually they die. The identity is decaying as they speak, walk, and think, constructing sentences, a string of verbal and non-verbal communication. So what if I am a virgin again. Virgins thinks of sensuality and sexuality just as much as other people do but differently.

Sensuality becomes noble. Sexuality becomes an electric waiting game. Why are there all these games in this life, in this world? Sexuality is not something that is alien to the virgin. She reads about it. Sometimes when she reads about it, she will think of her infertility, her breasts, her shoulders, the nape of her neck. The physical parts of her body that are the most sensitive to touch. Sometimes when she reads about it, she will blush. The weather is comic. First, there is sun, and then it is as if rain clouds are gathering and then the sun comes out again. I think of the dark room. I think of the lovers and how I will never be a part of that world again.

It hurts too much to think, to breathe over what I have lost. What is a man? What is an older man? Grey hair at his temples. Wisdom beyond his years. Influence within his reach. Power. Powerful. Kings of their empires. Trophy wives at their sides or their best friends. Children. Children. Children. The children I will never have. What is love? Instead, I have research, my writing, and those are things that I am passionate about. I am a feminist but I am also a daughter who still a child. Wanting attention. Wanting approval. Wanting gifts. I need a change of suffering. World did you hear me? I need a change of suffering.

It is time women begin to listen to each other. It is time we all called each other feminists. It is a new word for me. Feminist. What does it mean? It has its own beauty. It has its own identity. The tragedy of the relationship that faltered is that it was both romantic and playful as it neared its end. The mood was spiritual and pensive. He was the land and I was the sea. My hands and feet were made of clay. Easily melted away by water. While his empires were made of (guess), steel girders planted into the ground, held down by gravity. He destroyed me. With every measure of success that he acquires he lives on now in relative wealth. I live with my parents.

From here on out it, life is an unknown destination. From here on out life is unpredictable. I am 35 going on 40. Silence is wonderful when all you hear is birdsong. Backyards have their own wisdom. Trees seem to fill that precious hour. Pour into your humanity. This, this is my tribe. Nature. Time is precious. So is life. They are sacred. I am an arrangement of combinations of particles, matter, opportunities, challenges, threads, cells and platelets that communicate with each other. Just as Virginia Woolf lined her pockets with stones and stepped into the River Ouse.

Just as she communicates to me from the world or the region that she is in now, the beautiful drowning visitor I communicate with the profound and the concrete. The lake’s surface is built like concrete. Perfect for skating but the skin, the fabric of what she was wearing, her shiny forehead is down there somewhere. Winter in the end. It is always winter in the end that rises up to meet me. In my dreams, there is a remote area in Greenland. Like the end of winter, we do not always remember childhood. It gives itself to us in dreams after the innocence; the light goes out in the world of a child.

How we appear in our parents eyes, in the end does it matter? It only really matters if we are happy individuals who become happy adults instead of functioning in dysfunctional households. Women keep on meeting different men all the time, up close and personal. Women want intimacy. Men want sex. I loved that book. Instead, I gave it to him. A boy. A man. I cannot remember which posture his shoulders and his height was brought to my attention. Thinking that it would heal some part of me. The broken parts of me. Parts I had misplaced so deep that I hoped nobody could find them. I needed music and he was my source of everything.

Romanticism, pleasure, pain, intimacies and finding desolate landscape after desolate landscape but the truths that I found in the book was not the same for him as it was for me so I had to give up on him. He could not be my Leonard Woolf. It took me a long time to work him out of my system.

‘Have you ever seen a man naked? You don’t have any reason to be afraid. I am not going to hurt you.’ He makes a ceremony out of everything. Lighting the candles, pouring the wine and giving me a glass of wine that I pretend to drink in tiny sips. Incense and scented candles are burning. I can even smell the scent of roses. Does every female writer ever have an experience of lesbian passion? Echoes in a wasteland. Images from a wilderness. The female writer is an intuitive. She is a catalyst.

I lay on the bed in sweltering Durban thinking, if only he knew. Would it matter? Would it make a difference? I knew why he wanted to see me. It was not for conversation. He meant to educate me. I had come such a long way. From Johannesburg to Durban for this. For this charade to play itself out. That I was innocent. That I was so delicate my bones could break. I would be staying a week in his flat. I knew we would not leave to see the sights. Durban had beaches and restaurants that served up spicy Indian cuisine. Of course, he was going to hurt me.

Of course, he was going to break my heart but there had been a line filled with monsters, beasts, and men, wolves, older men before him who had pressured me into doing something I did not want to do. Who had in the end made it out to be my idea? Then there was one man who wanted to photograph me, another who wanted to call me by another name. Probably the name of a lover who had left him or the other way around. I feel his mouth against mine, that slight pressure. His breath is warm. His mouth, his lips are dry. What was his name again? He did something important. He was on television. He made a lot of money. He was engaged. He had a son. So young. Youth wasted. I have always wanted the qualities of a young mother.

‘Take your clothes off but do it slowly.’ He said authoritatively.
‘Why?’ I asked shyly.
‘You haven’t done this before so I want it to be special for you. I want you to feel safe, comfortable. Aren’t you happy with me? With everything that I’ve done for you today?’ he whined. Yes, I could hear a whine in his voice. He was so close. We were too far into this game and so I had to go ahead with it. I had to go ahead with this snowball effect. He had paid for everything. Paid me to come here. Met me at the bus. Carried my suitcases.

We ate leftovers. Cold pizza. Yes, he had paid for this sexual transaction well in advance. I thought to myself. What was I supposed to say to that? He did take me to the beach. I was not hungry. I did not want anything to eat. I could see he was crestfallen by this. I knew instinctively that I had to make it up to him somehow but how, but why? I felt foolish for coming. He thought he knew my reasons for coming. That I was in love with him. He was the fool and not me. I could have laughed aloud but he had gone to all this trouble of making me feel safe and comfortable. Now I am home, 35, and over a decade later.

What brings me bliss is cooking? It is therapeutic. Life is made up of moments. Some happy. Some unpleasant that sound like Verdi, Chopin and Tchaikovsky. There is something special about behaving as if it is the end of the virgin’s world. You become a woman. What does that mean exactly? I am seeing a new psychiatrist after my last nervous breakdown. The new pills seem to be helping me cope. It is funny how a psychiatric patient does not need or want sex. You seem to lose that impulse, and that sex drive. Where does it go? What happens to it? Is it numbed? There is shark-infested waters out there. There is evil and danger.

They are called men. The thirst for relationships has left me. Once again, I am an empty vessel.

‘Mum, how are you?’ I felt the coins in my jean jacket. I wanted home. I wanted mum.
‘Fine. Why are you calling? Is something wrong?’ I could hear the whine in her voice.
‘No. Nothing.’ I replied. I hummed.
‘Your friend. Your girlfriend. Is she nice? Where are the both of you staying? Are you getting a lot of sun?’ She seemed to perk up a bit.
‘Everything is fine.’ Why was I lying? Why did I run away from home again? Was it because of the complex and complicated relationship I had with my sad, elegant, longsuffering mother?

Why did I do this to her? My father had left us. He was there physically but he had left us to our own devices. Two women on their own. A single parent had to be both mother and father. I could blame the anorexia on him. The distant father who wanted a social life and a wife who could be an active participant in that world. He wanted someone who would attend functions on his arm, smiling and nodding her head, looking out for him. Two women on their own. My mother did not really understand mental illness. Then one day unexpectedly he returned. After a hospital stay.

We were father and daughter, hostile tributes aside that had to count for something. With my mother away in Johannesburg, my father and I confide in each other now. Frank talk exposing illness.

Everything else was forgotten. I look at my books. No one will ever know where it really came from. No one will know the man who really inspired me to the wuthering heights, who helped my gift along. One day as I have said before I will never have youth on my side. Youth is wasted on the young. Will this make me bitter or crazy down the line? I am already crazy. I am already too thin. The skin and bone of an anorexic woman have many ghost stories to tell. Skinny legs. The flesh of a bird. I feel it in my bones. I feel the lonely life of crazy in my bones. It was planted there somehow like a sonnet, keys to a post-apartheid future.

Psychoanalysis is filled with statements. Wrecks with gut symmetries. Frail beauty. Here humanity becomes relentless as they once did at the discovery of treasure after treasure in the wilderness of the rural countryside in another life. Writers are dreamers. Dreamers who plunge into all the universal symbolism has to offer. Expressions of suffering, heritage and knowledge.
Is writing a book like childbirth, a Darwinian experience, a sensorial experiment, an engagement? The problems with symbolism is that it gives us a sense of our own mortality. A sense of false hope. In a dream, we might come upon a cauldron of water. What does this mean?

The only thing that fits that kind of dream-reality in our existence is the warm sea, destination anywhere of the shoreline, the swimming pool or to go bathing in a river, wading into that weight of water. Once upon a time, we too were fish. Once upon a time, we too were intuitive children. Mushrooms are beautiful delicate things. The melons for this time of year are beautiful too. Food is too glorious for words. Food is like sex. We need it for our survival. If we do not have children to follow in our footsteps who will write history over repeatedly.

Light comes in waves. They come in their own time. Their own medium of survival therapy. Their own ceremony in the shadows. The real world, reality, sanity, normal is a trap. Light is made up of the angelic. It is made up of the otherworldliness against the common particles of this world. I have gone so high. I have crashed romantically trying to live with the decisions I have made. Atonement can be beautiful like videotape. There is no room for lies only a lighthouse, only fulfillment, only videotape. A man can have sexual fulfillment. For a woman fulfilment is mingled in her blood, if she can see her unborn children in her lover’s eyes.

Had Virginia Woolf known love? Real love with Vita Sackville-West? What did she think of marriage? I write for women and I write for men. I am a feminist and a humanist but the question is can I be both. I have also known lesbian passion but it was never quite enough. It was driftwood. It was cats and dogs. It was a constellation. It was the red shred of a balloon in the hand of a screaming child. It was paste. It was a vital breathing lesson. It was gold and bright and illumined my world for a fraction. It was the investigation of a distillate. I feel a disembodiment when I talk about that time, feeling her fingers in mine, brushing her hair out of her face.

I feel that there are apparitions inside my head. They come with their own prepared speeches, airs and graces. These damned adventurers. Did Virginia Woolf write enough, too much, or too little? Would she have liked to have children, a child, and a son? What is so dead wrong with married life for me? Would I not grow if I had companionship, if I had love, if I had someone to take care of me? Someone to lean on. Sometimes I feel so cold. My nerves tingling in my hands as if in this universe there are other worlds out there that are magical, stranger than fiction, haiku, Mr Muirhead, famous people. Now I am older but am I wiser?

Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. They all have their own stories to tell. What the hell? I kissed a girl, have slept with men. Have known love as Woolf’s Orlando in my dreams and reality. There is this other feeling. I cling to things. To beautiful things. It is the feeling you get inside you heart as you find the words inside your head when you sing along to your favourite song on the radio. Who was she? Who was Virginia Woolf? Will the real Virginia Woolf please stand up? Will everyone who is anyone please stand up and give Virginia Woolf a standing ovation for making it so far, thus far? Was her life complete or incomplete?

The sea. Trough. Crest. Trough. Crest. The waves emit their own frequency. I have the season ticket for the swimming pool. There is two hardboiled eggs for everyone for breakfast. Toast galore. A wasteland of breakfasts in middle class homes. The accomplished man that I see in front of me does not care for me anymore in any way. I am the least of his worries. Now I must survive. My mother is no longer at the height of her awareness as a bride. She no longer has those virginal mental faculties within reach, that ego of an adolescent girl now that she has brought children into the world. I must swim. I must regain something that I have lost.

I must recover. I must evolve for a revolution from within to take place.

Stupidly we make our way to the church.

There has been a death in the family. The chicken soup has been made. We are all distracted. In the kitchen on the counter top, the vinegar holds up in its robes of motherhood the pickles, the onions and the olives extraordinarily. We need the exploration of food to make it through the day. We need routine like we need to find prayer in today’s goals and dreams. My mother’s belly burned me like that when she carried me in her womb. Her belly was a jewel. Diamond? Pale? In it, I found nurture and moonlight, expressions of night, rest and placenta. While I slept, I was patched with a surge of vulnerable taproots that cannot be traced anymore.

Pockets are waking. Things of illusion, beautiful things of imagination like celestial light, the tapestry of stars and the stem work of relief. Like health, that most elusive thing we are all fighting to protect each other. Speech is ice. Then there are those mornings when it pours down cats and dogs. When I feel myself falling into morning. When I feel as if there is ice in my lungs. Leftover potato salad has never tasted so good. It came straight out of the fridge onto my lap. This is the aftermath. My feast of vertigo. My lunch of closure. I am eating it with a fork.

It comes with flashbacks of relationships that are now just as dead to me as my aunt who is buried six feet under, pushing up daisies. It was both alcoholism and diabetes. She stopped breathing in her hospital bed. She was wasting away in front of her family. I think of the boys I never smoked with. I think of the men I never kissed. This is how I live now. I remember. In the palace of that fluid world of the distinguished older man who was made of substance, experience and influence, I was the one who found herself living by the skin of her teeth. I have a psychiatrist’s appointment this week.

What will she have to say, that beautiful, headstrong Afrikaner that I have absolutely nothing in common with? As a poet, I am on a journey. It is killing me. I am alone and it is killing me. I will myself not to cry those tears of self-pity. During the appointment, will we talk about my estranged family or my poetry, my addictions, my emotional instability or how I am coping under all of these circumstances? I do not need therapy. I do not need the anti-depressants that will deliver me from sin and damnation. I just want to inspire people. I want to make a difference. I want to save people. Are things like that not laudable?

Are they not worthy of praise? I stopped drinking before it really became a problem. The breakthrough came when I saw what it did to my aunt and the relationships she had with her sons. They lost all respect for her. They loved her, how could that of all things change but it made them sad as if they were losing the best part of themselves. When history finally becomes a dream, the wuthering heights of darkness is lost, something is communicated to the world at large through the scent of rosebushes and the fragrances of bacon frying in its own grease and fat.

‘I want to take you to a place that you feel comfortable.’ How I live and breathe for those words every six months from my psychiatrist. Going to the lab every six months. Sitting in that chair and prepping myself for when the nurse prods my skin and the needle goes in. I do not want to be a part of this anymore I want to scream but I cannot do that because too many people depend upon me. Back to the kitchen with me. What is on the menu tonight? Memory and desire from childhood. Chicken with thyme and potatoes. Mum’s version. I do the preparation. Cutting and peeling. Mapping out supper.

In two or three hours we will all take our places at the kitchen table and they, what is left of my family will eat what I have prepared. I will grace and my father will tuck in. As I said before I do not need the anti-depressants that will deliver me from sin and damnation. Why death? Why life? Why the impulse to pick up a book, lose interest in it and then to put it down again and forget about it? Why the sex drive, the impulse to pay for intimacy, the maintenance of the woman who provides the sexual transaction? Why reconciliation? Why oral traditions and indigenous knowledge systems? Why the intellectually superior types?

Why is the woman still inferior to man when it comes to writing, spirituality, philosophy and painting? Whispering madness. It will only be a man who will find themselves alone on a mountain. Now I speak to the one person in the world who came closest to understanding me. My future adult self says that I miss you as if the world misses a hurricane or a tsunami. I want my revenge on every dark-haired boy. Perhaps then, I will understand love. The proof of sin is in the doing and then in asking for forgiveness. I go to the beach. I take my shoes off and walk towards the water. The wind is up. I sit down, cross my feet. I roll up my jeans to my knees.

I watch the children with their buckets and spades and I think of the children I will never have. I watch the surfers, the couples sitting on towels who flirt with each other. I watch the young girls in bikinis who sunbathe. Infertility can do that to you. Make you give up all hope. From madness to now, more and again that can do it to you too. I am an armchair traveller reading geniuses. I think it is the only safe merchandise I have in my house that cannot hurt me. I have never been a part of a couple since my early twenties. There are too many delusions, illusions, paradigms shifting, phoenixes finding the exit out and ghost stories.

These days I depend too much on my intuition at the grocery store. What would my father like? What would my father love? I think of my childhood as I stir, cook, peel, remove the scrapings, the eggshells and make space for the perishables going to the compost heap and the other stuff that is going in the dirt bags, the wasteland. I remember how competitive my siblings and I were at the swings. In the yard, there is blue skies and sunshine. There are dogs chasing birds. My dad scratches both of them between their ears. I can hear the speaker from a tent church on the other side of the world. I have to plant something. Something green. A green feast.

We already have trees. We have flowers. We have rosebushes. Life searches for life. I am lost but I cannot run away from home anymore. I am no longer that teenage runaway. Running up streets and down streets. Making a home in libraries in Johannesburg and Swaziland. One a city. One a country. What do people do? They celebrate life. They participate in activities. Some meaningful and some not. In the mornings, I go and check to see if my dad is quite literally still alive. He has so many aches and pains. If he snores then I know he is okay. If he turns around in bed, I know he is okay.

Sometimes, just sometimes my heart beats faster and faster. Sometimes I feel very afraid for absolutely no reason at all.

‘Coffee, dad?’ I pull the blanket that was hiding his face away from it. His eyes are open.
‘Morning. How are you? How did you sleep? Yes, please bring me some. Thanks. I need some so I can wake up properly.’ Before I answer him, I hand him the steaming hot cup of coffee. I know in twenty minutes it will still be standing next to the bed cold.
‘How did you sleep, dad?’
‘Not so good.’
‘Do you want to talk about it, dad?’
‘I dreamt about Jan Hollingshead again. The good times we had together. The fact that I loved her. I loved her a great deal. Not the way a man loves a woman but in a much more spiritual sense. You know?’
‘Yes I know dad. I know what you mean.’ It came to me how naturally, human nature is flawed.

We have the same conversations. We drink lots of lukewarm tea. We talk about our doctors, about our counselling sessions, about the flashbacks we have sometimes, our nervous breakdowns, our hospitalisations. What people used to call institutionalisations in the old days.
Mostly we speak in monosyllables or say nothing at all. My mother has disappeared to Johannesburg to visit my sister. There is a thrill to the day. All we seem to eat these days is chicken. Chicken sandwiches with wilted lettuce. Dry chicken with broccoli and potato bake. Roast chicken with the juices running dry. Takeaway chicken. Chicken curry. Chicken stew.

Chicken soup with noodles. This chicken was a chronic metaphor for mental illness in the wards of Elizabeth Donkin, Hunterscraig, Tara, Valkenburg and Garden City Clinic. All the wards that my father had been in for his illness and how I had followed him, in his footsteps. I watched the waves. A young couple’s embrace. I did not wish I could be part of that game (too many snakes, too many ladders, and not many exit routes, too many destinations leading to anywhere and nowhere fast). The girl had a loveliness to her. Her youth was on her side and I was losing mine.

I knew that embrace was not real. It was only temporary like the happiness a fairy tale gave you before you had to put the book away. There was a sadness to the day. There was also a knowledge from it that I had to take away from it. It was almost as if the vibrations of the day was armed with a tragic heaviness, and it inspired loneliness within me. The seas grandeur was not as grandiose as the universe’s. All of this knowledge terrified me. I knew the girl would lose her looks as I had lost my appeal to older men. Now I was just old and my intelligence did not just seem to terrify me, it terrified the men too.

Mothers do not tell you that with intuition comes reading other people’s minds. Nothing would ever inspire me to put on a bathing costume again to go swimming in the sea in front of all these clowns who were jazzed up like lizards with the golden embrace and the texture of the warmth of the sunshine. Call it self-pity then if you want or lack of confidence for a better word. My physical body had seemed to take on a life of its own now. It was surer of itself. I was no longer a stupid girl wanting a man’s attention, willing to do anything for it, not seeing through their fake postures as they waited for me in bed to emerge from the bathroom in hotels.

I knew some had wives, some had girlfriends, some had children or a child on the way, some had bonds, some had overdrafts, some had mortgages (which meant absolutely nothing to me no matter how hard I tried to remember) and I was putting myself in a bad way. Just because he was divorced did not mean he was going to marry me. In my twenties, I was not intelligent or wise. I was just a sponge. Soaking up information happily or trembling as he folded me into his arms whispering sweet nothings into my ear. I never smoked with him. The man who I thought was the one who was going to rescue me.

Save me from a fate worse than death in the big celestial light city. I watched him smoke. I drowned as he smoked. As he flirted with other girls. In his game, I was a pawn. Easy to get rid of. I never had that killer instinct his other women, his other girls had. At night these men, these older men would make incredible gestures, they would go to all this trouble to see that I was comfortable and I in all innocence mistook that to mean that now we were in a relationship. Now we were truly in love but now I realise they were like stars to me. All of these men could see my future self.

As I look at my infirm father and he turns to look at me and smile with fatherly concern written on his face, I wonder do all of those men I slept with still remember me and smile at their daughters with fatherly concern written on their faces. It is a face I recognise like rain pouring down.

My sister has the paper tiger empress down to an art.

I have embraced the physical art of suffering. I have surrendered to the primitive, the ancestral, the universal, and the totem. I am the clever experiment. Driftwood in my hands. Exposure to a wilderness in my head. Darkness invisible is the land that borders on God. I long for the roar of the sea, zoo pretty, lush with its stone voice. In the sea, my body becomes creative.

Every impulse is recognised. Like a footstep on cobblestones or gravel. To me the sea is sacred. It has always been a sacred mystery to me since childhood. Salt cells in my hair. Light shining through me like a lighthouse. I am little but I am also tall. I am brown but I am also poetry. Waves in motion. The sun in motion.

There I am breathing in salt and light until my feet no longer tread land. I begin to forget female writing, becoming Virginia Woolf, how lonely the house is now without the sounds of my mother moving around the rooms. There is just empty space. Where there is empty space there is also faith and loyalties, religion, a church, prayer, and spirituality.

My father and I have built those foundations. There are powerful forces in mothers. Although they have never experienced their children’s pain, they feel it. As if, they have gone through it themselves. I felt something shift inside of me. For the first time truth is illuminated. Everything begins to blossom around me. I took my pills this morning and dressed.

I waited for the world to show up. I waited for grief too, and anxiety to show up and make waves. I was patient. Too kind for words. I had to be in order to survive. I had an idea of a river of dust, of privacy, of shelter, isolation, personal space and unquiet bleeding. A woman’s unseen bleeding. There were parts of me that understood that life was precious.

There were also parts of me that understood that life was wild and free. It inspired people, not only writers. It made you feel electric and it was an insane trip. A rollercoaster ride. I am damaged. There I said it. I brought it to life in this world like Frankenstein. Other people, worldly or spiritual are damaged too. Other people like me are also mentally ill.

Other people are also beautiful shadows swinging from the chandeliers. Other people also have visions of being neglected, and abandoned. I have put all my thirst and my longing onto a page. I have to erase it somehow. The lonely hunter within me hints at diminishing its powerful hold over me.

‘You are my disabled sister.’ She said on the telephone. Her voice was cool. It did not matter to me. Her voice was always winter. An asylum. This was how I lived now. With disability. It was not a tragic affair. I had built up my intuition, the psychic pathways to my third eye. My sister was my Hiroshima. Fat Boy. Little Man. We were no longer playing at Little Women.

I have always believed though that I had the qualities of a young mother. I remember sticky fruit in the hands of children, soup and bread, apartheid South Africa when I could not play on the swings or else my father would be arrested. To me there was always a ballad in everything. I remember how we made a Noah’s ark, and Jonah’s whale out of a fruit tree. A mulberry tree.
It stained the clothes on the line as it stains my heart now. Trees chaperone the garden now. My sister works in a bank. My mother busies herself with spiritual meetings, and her garden. She does not see me. I am invisible to both. Politics can crush you especially the politics in family life. Humanity will survive. Humanity will continue to dream, have those visions.

I believe in suffering, longing and thirst. It is a product of my childhood. I believe other children, and other adults are products of their childhood too. I have believed in it since childhood. The wounding of my heart started early for me. The early loss of innocence separated me from other girls and boys all through my early life. Those formative years.

So for a long while in my life there was spiritual poverty. I had a great father though who gave me everything. Books and culture. He shared his passions with me and I told him the secrets of my soul. Girls need mothers like fish need to live and breathe in the ocean. Daughters need their fathers too.

When people abandon you, when people neglect you, you end up in a bad way, in an anguished and terrible shape. You will either become phenomenal. A phenomenal success or a failure. You will either just completely waste away as an adult or contribute nothing to the world. You will never learn to love or you will change the world. You will learn to save yourself.

You will learn what family, being part of the world at large and humanity really means. I had been deprived my whole life of this beautiful and elegant woman who was also an elegant and beautiful monster. Abuse shattered me. Night and day, was a voyage into dark but it taught me how to become ambitious? It taught me to become a modern girl.

It taught me how to spread my wings out and fly. It taught me to harvest tunnel vision, set goals for myself, dream, and to reach for the sun, that brilliant, brilliant light, the moon and my dark side. A child has lovely bones. When they say their first words or discover something novel, they enchant.

I wanted her to dedicate her life to me but she had work, two other children and a manic-depressive for a husband. She had the emotions of a wife. Chef, lover, teacher, mentor, tennis player, sister. She was a wife in apartheid South Africa and continued to be a wife and a mother in post-apartheid South Africa. She planted rosebushes. She lived. She loved with grace, mercy.

She baked but it was never for me. The modern human, be it the child prodigy, the gifted, the genius, the writer, the poet, the artist as the Outsider, all have suffered for their art. Their intelligence is elegant. For women the illusion is this, that we are the sum of our experiences, that we live in order to die, that to make sense of the world we must be educated.

Empowered and uplifted by the opposite sex, and the sexual transaction. The divine wonder that illuminates the world around us knits our brain cells and us together. Man creates. Through his creation he dominates. In our dreams comes the journey, the invisible monsters, and the fork in the road, the music, and the footsteps in the dark, imagination, what we worship.

The imaginary waves, the hallucination, the surreal, reality, the painted blurred lines, and the mental drum. The truth that exists for me is not the same that exists for you. Inside of Africa and outside of Africa. What does it mean to be human? What does the word humanity mean and how does it transform us, our view of the world, our thinking, our perspective on illness?

I can see the glare of the light now. At the end of the day, my father puts me back together again. It is his voice that I hear and that of my ‘second mother’. Magda Dumont. I have been deprived, homeless, lived in a shelter with other women who have also been deprived, homeless and have gone on living from shelter to shelter. I have been a wreck. I have been ‘shipwrecked’.

I have been to the lighthouse and back. I have been dashed against those rocks. I have been a ghost, told those ghost stories and come back furiously to life after being comaed. The veil of illness has begun to branch out into my body, that mental switch. Humanity has a body of fire, so does Africa, and the phoenix.

The flame of mental illness and disability licks that mental switch. To love is give something of your spirit, your soul away. Why did you not love me mummy? The physical me has been counselled, but what clinical psychologists seem to understand really well is textbook knowledge but not the day-to-day lifestyle of mental illness or suicidal depression.

The potential that humanity has for forgiveness is the same potential we have for being kind beings. It should not be alien to us, but for some it is alien. As much as I am baffled by, the expectations that society places on a woman by the world that she lives in, the pressure that they put on women not to call themselves feminists, or to even play that role.

To get no kind of certain pleasure out of life is difficult. Humanity is not perfect. It seems as if all the negatives have a perfect timing. They seem to weigh in over the decisions that God has in mind for us mostly leaving us building up the furious, those brick walls inside of us. Sorrow is nothing. War studies, battling stress, overcoming the limits of man and womankind.

Studying, observing love is pure. All love is meant to be pure. When I read, read anything from books to opinion, to essays, to short stories it is funny that I do not feel that isolation from my mother, the woman who struggled to bring me into this world, who waited five years for a baby, who went from doctor to doctor seeking a cure for infertility.

To realise that you are not accepted for whom you are, to gain no approval from loved ones because of illness has grief written all over it. I have a message. It is simple. Live with a force of human nature even though you are broken. Live as if that is your greatest intention. Your obsession. Your knowledge is powerful. Invent yourself again. Reinvent earth. Its textures.

The universe is there for the taking. In the end, as it has always nurtured humanity, the broken, it will and can nurture you. Your knowledge of prayer and your knowledge of fear. You cannot have one without the other. I have not found a cure for illness yet or disability. The closest that I have come to it is this. Laughter and being a daughter. Being caring. Being a poet and a writer.

I am carving out a place in the world for me, a future to live, a gifting, and in kind, I must serve to deserve others. It is a desert out there made out of ancient dust. The sun has baked that earth for centuries. Cacti has made it their home out there. The ground is not fertile not even for germs but when the rains come as they must come; memory and desire are washed away.

I will remember birthdays, Christmases, Easters, telephone calls made collect, Tara, Hunterscraig, relapse and recovery into oblivion with my hair splitting at the ends, running out of shampoo, and other women’s necessary things if you know what I mean. I was trying to live. I promise. I was trying to live. My brain pulp. It was in need of medicine. Yes, pharmaceuticals.

Can you feel it hanging in the air? Nerves. Nerve. It is there like language and mother tongue.

I breathe in the shape of aloes, that green feast. I breathe in lessons of despair and isolation. Am I not Antigone’s representative? Her disciple?

Dance with me as I write these words now. I will cha-cha it out of my system. I remember the lightness of youth so pure, so pure in girls and boys, but not me. In the heat of adolescence, I was left standing, carrion, and carrion, viewed the world from a foetal position, and cooked those meat and potatoes until there was nothing left of the meat but a dry hiss, a grandmother’s kiss. I remember that house. My grandmother’s kitchen. Sitting at her kitchen table and eating wisdom. Not getting enough of what my father grew up on. I remember solitude as if I remember the playing fields of an adolescent. I dream to the beat of haiku. Her hands smelled of camphor. This memory is precious to me. Grandmothers are always precious in the eyes of their grandchildren.

This world dazzles me. The world of the father and the daughter. It has a rich tapestry. God is woven into the details, and so is the gene pool of creativity. The outside world is disturbing to me. If I grab a hold of it, it will surely mean the death of me. This journal is my handbook. This notebook is worth its weight in gold. I am going for glory. I need new shoes. Shoes that do not pinch my feet. It is summer. I will need sandals. I need love like I need an appendectomy scar. What is it, what is love if you have never received it? What is wrong with me? Sorrow wounds me. Can you of all people understand that? Can you get to grips with that?

There is an art to experiencing life. You take the sweetness of it all. You take the sweetness of the wasteland, the history wilderness, the shape and landscape of it all. You drink it in. It is ritual. At the heart of it, that is what experience is. A ritual. A rite of passage. I am not finished with earth yet, with the material, with the observations of possessions, with the elegant stories that I keep on brushing up against. People have hurt me. The world has hurt me but still I go on living. Not dancing but living in a way that is against other people’s ideas of what it means to be alive. To be authentic is a savage way of life. I prefer stories to the wild measures of love.

Do you pray? I pray. Do you meditate? I meditate. Do you believe in yourself? I believe in myself. It must be why I am still here. The house is big. The television is in one room. Other rooms are filled with books. There are three studies. There is an office space. I had a childhood. Now I have another childhood. A grown up wonderland except instead of a rabbit I have ghost stories. I voyage up and down the house. I sail, brush against the cool walls, open my hands to receive what cool opportunities the world has for me in the form of canned fruit, the pomegranate and other fruit trees. It is a palace out there for the taking, but there is also blood.

I am not buying into that though. My history is beautiful. It is amongst the most beautiful things that I won in the end, and that I possess. There is pain there on that painted pilgrimage, suffering too. I have hid medicine there. It has a muscle called rejuvenation. People have called me by many names. In the end, what are tears good for? It has fed this eagle. I have fallen into the darkness of society. I have also seen the light. It is brilliant if you wait long enough for the afternoon sun, and when it hits your eyes it will hurt. You will be reminded, of everything that you have lost but also gained in the run for guarded illumination.

Soil erosion reminds me of something being loosed into the wild nature of things. Solitude is wasted on the young. They do not want to think or spend their time with books. Things of that kind of nature bores them, those machines would prefer being smashed out of their heads on a Saturday night with the warmth, the pressure of the body of the opposite sex against them. No love story there. If I had grown up like that no doubt I would be an alcoholic in recovery by now. My mother is leaving us. My father, daddy, and I am to take care of him while she splits.

She will come back. Back to her garden, her house, her ‘other’ life (meaning spiritual). My sister lives in the big city. A Johannesburg kind of big city. Her bones are not kind. Her mind, tone of her voice, her attitude. She sits on a throne at a bank. She runs marathons. She treats her dogs as if they were her children. She has buried me, cut the heads off the daisies to show me that she is what this world desires. She is what this world calls woman, beautiful, independent, and career-minded. I am disabled and with disability comes illness, isolation, despair and hardship. She is dangerous. I never had those wings. Never lived in an otherworldly place. People tell me stories. They think I am a ghost. They think I feel nothing when they smirk.

These people do not remember that once I too was a young woman. A young woman with sun in her hair. Once upon a time, a man took me in his arms. Perhaps there was a union there. I am not a woman to her. My sister is no church Christian. She thinks she is cultured and educated. She has won over my mother, that glittering prize. I am wise. In this picture, I am the shaman. I sing the blues. Inside something is scattered though. Must be my heart. There is ice growing, growing in my lungs (yes, there are days when it is difficult to breathe and to realise that I am not wanted, that I have wasted my life loving and wanting difficult people.

People who have watered gardens and watched them grow. Like water in wild places, unaccustomed to being swam in by young children with growing limbs, pleasure, excitement, elated galore, I remember my mother feeding me soup in childhood. I remember how obediently I opened up my mouth and how I received that nourishing warmth. I remember how beautiful her hands were and her wedding ring and how that morning she had braided my hair. Twisting it into a plait as if she was kneading bread before we both watched it tentatively rise after putting yeast in. I stood next to her on tiptoe. She stood clicking her heels on the tiled floor in the kitchen.

‘Magic see.’ she would say.

‘Magic.’ I would say after her.

Afterwards I lost the magic. Somewhere I lost the magic. She writes. I am lonely. The world is full of people but somehow I have lost my head, and my way home and I am on a downward spiral. I am afraid I can no longer lie and walk with my chin up. The world does not feel as if it is full of possibilities for me anymore. I have met all the people I have wanted to. All my dreams have come true. Nobody truly loves genius. If they tell you that they do, they are in fact lying to you. Does humanity appreciate genius? No. Do they respect or admire it? No, I really do not think so.

They want it for themselves especially those who watch true leaders from a distance. I am sad. She writes. Whom is she writing to reach her? The Magi. I have no one to talk to me, to find me interesting, elegant and intelligent but I have the world at my feet. I am my father’s brilliant chef, his nurse, his confidante, his companion, and his daughter. The house. This house. It smells like chicken. To me houses smell of kitchens, that or burnt pots, rubbish food or chicken. The innocence left behind of a childhood kitchen is almost enough to move me to tears. Did chicken smell the same in apartheid South Africa, the wuthering heights of apartheid South Africa and now post-apartheid South Africa?

I am reminded that I am my father’s daughter. That I am not built for that. To be every spoonful of a delicate dessert in the mouths of the liberals. The best I can hope for is a ghost story, becoming Woolf. Days pass and it just my father and I pottering around the house. Rooms empty. I explore them as if I am a child again with glee. I take an online test. At the end of answering a list of questions, it tells me that I am an eagle. I am experiencing childhood all over again. As if, I am playing with my dolls again or rummy with my adoring boy cousins all much older than I am. Always in high spirits. Those good-looking healthy specimens.

Rain clouds my mind. She says to her father. His eyes are closed. He is sleeping but she has no one else to talk to her. This is how she passes her almost-comaed days. How do I write? Am I a good writer? I am a terrible writer. A liar, a failure, a front, a faker, a poser, and an actor. Give it to me straight world. I am what I am because I am a product of my own miserable life, my actions, and the choices that I have made and had to live with. I am not here to get along with people. In all my years, I have never got along with people.

I am the lone wolf, the loner, the Outsider. Earth is beautiful but to me it is one helluva of a hallucination. Surreal, imaginative, the real somewhat diminished, humanity evaporated at every turn. My father and I used to go for long walks. She writes. We walked around the church, next to the highway until we reached the local garage. My father would go inside and use the rest room while I waited for him. The cashiers would watch us grimly. I would turn my head and look away if I caught their gaze. I would look at the specials; look at the pretty packaging and think of how my mother disowned me because I was not ‘a proper woman’.

Too much, like your father. She would say. I think she would say it in an angry way and in a way, she was much more angry with herself than at me I would ponder. There had never been any success in the relationships I had with people. With the opposite sex in particular. Women, girls never held me in high esteem. Everything I know, my education started at my father’s knee. I never had the caring, overly protective, nurturer of a mother. I am dying inside but I do not say anything. If I did, it would pretty much be over for me. It would mean tickets. She writes sucking on the end of her pen. Pleased with the dark smudge on the page. Wet ink.

Almost as if, it was a kind of symbol for her mood. Her thick slice of bread with butter. My mother will not take pictures with me. There is a lump in her throat now. There are butterflies in her stomach. My mother. My mother. My mother. She writes in quick succession. The woman who gave me life disregards me now as if I do not live. As if, I do not exist. All around me now, the scent of tragic innocence, an air of disgrace, circles of values and principles, perspectives and views of the world. I dance madly to the beat of my own African drum. A drum of my own making. I am a feminist. Are you proud of me mummy? Tea please, daddy.

Winter trees wet with the cold. Watch nature’s bride. Watch the leaves merry dance on the ground, in the air, swimming, swimming mournfully in gutters. Heaven can wait. Paradise too but she thinks to herself that they mean the same thing. She writes in her journal. Everybody says she is wise. She is the writer. She is the poet. She is the fundi, the woman of letters, and the woman who reads books but who also unfortunately cannot create life, placenta, a baby’s patella, and mitochondria. There are other women in the family who can do this. Family, women who are not afraid of the world who live in America.

The land of milk and honey, rick and thick. Other women can do this in the family. Bring life into the world. Indian women who live in crime-ridden Johannesburg, women who live in New Zealand, Swaziland. Ice makes a journal. Broth. Daddy’s infirm body curled up under blankets like a cat. Mum is gone. It is just her way. My sister the extraordinary machine is gone. It is just her way.

There is no love story for me, no perks, just a wasteland of steaks and grease, just endless days that seem to stretch out into a blue nothing. You can feel it good on some days. Peace. Peace of mind. On other days, it feels hard to live just getting by on the basics. Foodstuffs and nothing else. If it were not for the pharmaceuticals, I would drink. I would be a coward; I would be the worst possible mother in the world. I would not feed my children. I would abandon those kids I created. I promise you this. So thank the stars that I cannot conceive. Infertility is written into my chromosomes.

Woven like a tapestry. Information on overload. You see outsiders can break you. They can break your spirit but your family are the worst. They can stab you in the back, walk away, do heinous things behind your back and you will still have to allow them to come back into your life. Truth is stranger than fiction. They can sabotage you and destroy you.

They will laugh and smile in your face while you cower in fear in front of them. Vulnerable as a deer in the headlights of an oncoming car, knowing that the life is soon going to be crushed out of it. Before I came home, I needed to know that I was not alone. It was just another winter for me. An uninvited winter. A blood knot. I can hear the shrill malice in my mother’s voice. Her voice is tap dancing on my bones. My skull. Her nervous, anxious energy becomes my nervous and anxious energy. I wanted to be sheltered with my whole heart but perhaps I never gave enough of myself as a child. She writes down a conversation.

A conversation that she has in her head and it goes mostly something like this. Always the same conversation because for three weeks now there has only been two inhabitants in the house. A father and a daughter. An old man and a watchful-eyed daughter, ever-present. You think you can do this to me. You think you can do this to me because I am not like your other daughter. You think you can do this to me because I am an affront to everything that your wife stands for. Does she love you daddy as I do? Tell me that. Do you have any other potbellied, elegant solutions for our life together?

Do you know how much it hurts me when you chose them over me? Your wife and your other daughter who cannot even bring herself to call me, to talk to me a little, to forgive me over some slight, some petty issue, a thing that is now past tense? Them and me. Always in this, little, little fight club. Are they your entourage? For a long time now, I have guessed that I am not good enough because I am mentally ill. You can heal broken bones. Cancer goes into remission but what about the song and dance of clinical depression. What about the ammunition that a hypomania carries? Help me to help you. Help me to help myself.

Broken, wasted, searching, and living with a kind of useless mentality that I have yet to come to grips with completely. I know this, that close-knit families pollute my fractured mind, identity and ego. This knowledge makes me more productive. It is like porridge to me. Manna. Family and friendship means nothing to me like land and lasagna, ownership and oats, property and taking the piss out of people, if you decide to treat me badly or to nurture me that is human nature. It means nothing to me. I kept showing up but unfortunately, nobody else did. In my case, blood was not thicker than water. I want perfection. Every writer wants perfection. I want family but have been disinherited like that Monaco princess. Every writer wants a home, wants a family.

Every poet wants to bring the chaos and disorder in the world, that maelstrom to a complete halt. Everybody wants to bang their drum, have their cake, and eat it too. Is the rain as lonely as I am? Including the people who live on those prairies where Native Americans once lived alongside totems and shamanic wisdom. Everything in life is a gift including your enemies, your parents, your siblings, your estranged family, and the black sheep in the family. Are mountains lonely? The valleys, the instructions to the mouth of the river of where it all began, of home, of the family wilderness.

Her roses are invincible, the middle child in the photograph (is it because I am not pretty, is it because of the disability, the unworldly illness). I am not brave enough to dance alone. To be that queen, the queen of the revolution from within, to stop the echo of the ego from vibrating from within. There is the unbearable lightness. Dream with me.

And so I come to the lady in the water, the sinner (but in the end aren’t we all sinners). Virginia Woolf in the flesh, that death of the drowning visitor. Her brain cells turned into the cemented atonement of dead moths. Deaths that can be accounted for. Physical bodies that can’t be spirited away, mended only souls torn from the material. Absolutely nothing escaped Virginia. The glory of love (she had that white wedding, the gift of love, she knew it, she knew of it, defended it graciously, she was no failure. I am that failure). Nothing escaped her passionate seeing eyes, her liberty, her meditations on nature, her platelets, mitochondria and bilateral symmetry no more. Only the grit, the brick walls, the mysterious interiors of the mansions of her work remained. Left behind. Granite. Diaries left behind for apprentices. Her intuition, breath and vitality has left this damned for an eternity to hell corpse. What does she have to do with the parenting skills of my distant manic depressive father and my elegant and cold mother, my cool mental illness that needed a room of its own to coexist with my brother’s cigarette smoke, his fatherhood, and his triumph where I had failed and then I voyaged inwards. River Ouse captivated me. I am a woman who writes. Virginia Woolf was a woman who was a wife, a lover and woman who wrote. My ordinary madness became a thing of beauty to me. Me an empty vessel who found bright stars in women, in their husbands and children, in flowers in a vase, in the fabric of the universe at night. I am Orlando. I am Lady Lazarus. I have lived vicariously through Hiroshima, Jean Rhys the demimonde and artist’s model and the feminist Sylvia Plath’s cutting-edged authentic words signalling warning, communicating threads of wisdom, and protest poetry. I needed to understand the London scene, Ted Hughes, Assia Wevill, and the child from that union, Shura. I’m afraid of modernism because it’s not modernism that is taking over the world. It’s writing. The interpretations of an inner life, innerness, marriage, creativity and madness.

Vita and Virginia sitting in a tree. K-i-s-s-i-n-g. Don’t ‘look’ at me. Look at ‘me’. Our intimacy is something special. Something golden. Your skin is a fabric I could drown in. I can do without religion but I cannot do without you. You have given me the highest form of art, and that is inspiration. How can I ever repay you? Come to me you elegant creature with all of the hopes that you have for yourself. Your goals have become mine. Your dreams my own. Beautiful, elegant Vita. My Orlando. When I read your work I am filled with a clarity of vision, astute perfection, and I feel as if I am your sole possession to have, to have, to have. Can I borrow some of your inhibitory nature, your anticipatory nostalgia, your poetic descriptions, your sky, and the sky in your eyes, your flowers, the flowers that you meditate upon in your garden, your compass that navigates you across the passages of London and Europe? And I want to share something else with you if you will let me. I have come to care very deeply about you. Understand this. Understand that I don’t want to own you, claim you for my own as I am sure others have wanted to do in the past, and I do not want to possess you, and enter your world as a lover and leave as an interloper. When we are together like this, you reading my words (because there are parts of me that want to be completely honest with you about how safe I feel with the charming and seductive you). When we sit together there is still a veil of privacy, an idea of privacy on my part. I am sure the same goes for you too. You’ve become my obsession and I can think of no one else’s company that I want to be in. When I’m with you I can feel electricity. I find your poetry, your humility, your abandonment, your inhibitory current stunning, Vita. You are the second love of my life. You are all the dimensions of my world. I find you clever, so artistic, your work is electric, so imaginative and Vita.
I’ve always been curious of married life. I thought I would be surround by the walls of a prison and then I married, became a wife but did not have those children and I discovered how far from the truth that was. Marriage frees you in a sense in so many wonderful and illuminating ways. I wanted Leonard. I wanted love but not necessarily a husband because I didn’t think that love came with having a husband. Love comes with having a likeminded companion. You, Vita, are that likeminded companion. You come with love, with passion.

Observe the adjustments in my personality carefully whenever I am with you, study, and evaluate my dying in your arms. Learn my half-truths and white lies as I do yours Vita. I only have to hear your voice and I thrive. I achieve a new intelligence, a new acting, a new materialism, and a new language in that dry season. It should be as obvious to you now as it is to me that I am utterly besotted, smitten by you. I am in love with you. Let’s set up house together. Get away together if that’s impossible. And when I am without you I am a winter guest in a cold storm. I want to tell you that there is something luxurious and soothing about your skin. My Vita. I am at your mercy. Your perfume fills my head. And when I begin to live vicariously through you, self-consciously or consciously my sadness has a complex wavelength. Brutal accomplishments threading my humanity. I have longed for them my whole life. The gratitude I have for you being a part of my life has become educational. They did not think of the extraordinary consequences of the gift of their relationship. They did not think. Period. They lived for love like other women did for being regarded as sex objects, parties, men, the London scene and flowers. Instead they are transformed.

The lovers whisper to themselves. They don’t want to part. The grass was a dream. And they were both brides rushing to the end of adolescence, the English summer weather, its immediacy of sustaining both women’s ideas of silence in the complexity of detachment. Here in the countryside, shielded by multitudes of simplistic chores, sharing the routine of waking up to their literary work, neither woman could untangle herself from their ‘marriage’. These elegant English heroines, English novelists whose writings were hypnotic were oblivious to reality, the outside world, and men were rendered insignificant, invisible. Men became others and humanity, the female of the species existed in a time and space that became known as the unknown future.

After the dust, the sexual disclosure, the impulsivity of the lesbian love affair between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West no sentence could shame the both of them, their writing process, their divine prowess. Woolf gave Sackville-West authority over her physical body, and in return Sackville-West did the same. Gaps, flashbacks, embarrassing regret should come with the territory of an affair that comes to an end. The silence is textured with what is not being said, the acute longing, and the despair of loneliness, of a seductive theory identifying the beginning of this lifelong romance, the mutual admiration committee between these two gifted English women.

I know what it is to suffer. To live with the face of enduring love shining upon my frozen countenance, love realigning my psychological frame, my sexual pace. Your power stifles me, a thing. And a woman alone.

At first it’s a glance framing reality, a sensual anticipation and so the landscape’s feast becomes symbolic of what will come after this inconvenient love.

Photographs survive. Historical events, knowledge, actors but not manic depressives, the mentally ill, people who have an absence of order in their lives. The living do not survive.
In our world morals are made of shrinking ice. Our love is fingered apocalyptic bliss. The detailed built foundations of the sublime. To hurt someone else is an inconvenience. To be hurt in return embroiders negative patterns in your thoughts for an unseen lifetime, it cheapens secrets, weaving, slaughtering the golden, the sensual image of the physical body.

There is nothing that can be a replacement for the latter.

Virginia Woolf. Was she still that molested child? Hurt, confused, yet her mind still cool and pure, cleansed of any illness, elements of fantasy, climate change, global warning, world poverty, trafficking did not coexist in her field of vision yet. She delayed the information. The bridges to the onslaught of mental illness. All she wanted was freedom. And this she found with Vita Sackville-West.
And as an adult did she not want children, a whole screaming tribe of them of her own, a child so that she could mend all the wrongs of the past.

Already she had a plan while writing in her diary Virginia, ‘I know I’ll never love this way again.’ And then the River Ouse was upon her like a lake. And there it was. She wanted to die. She wanted to waste away. Find a wilderness of her own making. She wanted to beg to the gods. The unwritten freedom which had been her church, and like a religion to her had left her angelic perspective. The dead end the shortcut to a hellish parade, the seducer. The hook of injustice was in her heart. She lived (it was but a pale gesture) but in death she lives extraordinarily.