LIFE – Page 3 – PurplePretoria

I was seated on our bed in the hotel room which you had decided to book even though we had gone through different options and I had chosen another place. We had been walking through the shops all day, stopping only to eat. I knew you would be leaving for a long time and so everything you did seemed like repentance. I sometimes wished that things could replace you, but all I really wanted was you.

You had wanted to show me how patient you could be and I had wanted to show you how considerate I am and how responsible I am with money, so you stood outside waiting for long while I walked around in circles and if you showed me two things, sometimes I chose just one and other times I chose neither.

Now I was inspecting, picking up and putting down items one by one. I picked up the ring box casually and as carefree as I could. I had planned to say something funny, something that would not show any partiality to love, rings or feelings. I started, but, suddenly you were on one knee. You took the box from my hand, opened it and held it out. I laughed, but your face was serious and cut my nervous laugh short.

“My name_ I love you. I always have. Always will. Will you be my wife again? Through loneliness, you laughed shakily. I grimaced and held my breath. I don’t quite remember what else came after that. I just wanted to remember what you knew, what you said, what you asked. “… and when you see it shining, let it remind you of my love for you.” I said yes; again, a little too quickly, again, in my own opinion.

I have remembered why I followed you. When we met I was looking for stability and you seemed to know the way. I allowed myself to be someone like you. You were unbound, crazy, mysterious, free and you were a mountain physically but also as a force. We secretly called you that, my high school friends and I. Yet, the same mystery and freedom scares me now and this past year and half, your mischievous eyes that can’t see, your lopsided tongue in cheek smile, and the school boy I met 15 years ago disappeared. The torrents that beat you down, the future with all its uncertainty before you, replaced you and I missed you, constantly.

You’ve been restless. You’ve been sad. You’ve been angry.

The tips of your fingers are warm when they touch mine as though they were a matching set of prints. My heart rests when it is next to yours. I hold onto you on the plane to anchor my fluttering heart. That time, when the waves almost swallowed us, I asked you one thing. “Don’t let go of my hand. If our boat capsizes and we find ourselves in the lake, don’t let go of me.” Next to you, I feel like I have lived. I have loved. I have nothing left to fear. Without you, I feel like, I have given too much. I want it all back.

The day after I put on my new ring we went back walking and I suggested that I wanted to ice skate. You kept whispering and grumbling about how I could break my leg but I insisted, so you kept whispering, “It’s your choice. You know how difficult it is to walk around an airport in a cast? But it’s your choice.” “You know how expensive it is to go to the hospital in a foreign country? But it’s your choice.” I responded with, “I told you not to go back mountain climbing without a doctor’s check up and you still did it anyway.” “That was different”, you said, sensing defeat. I looked at you firmly and said,

“I want to do it anyway.”

“Okay, it’s up to you.”

“Yes, it’s up to me.”

I had never skated a day in my life. As soon as the thin curved hook of metal touched the slippery surface of the ice, I knew I was in for it. I still had to show you that you had underestimated my strength and resilience though. I had also realised that it was not only you I was trying to convince, I was trying to prove to myself that I could handle myself hereafter.

The ice was wet-glass slippery and the audience surrounding the ice rink had a constricting racial element to it. In as far as the pyramid of the eco system goes, our race was at the bottom, so the middle superiors watched with anticipation. The man at the entrance had asked me twice if I knew that they had a disclaimer for any injuries, but there had been another one of us in the shoe dressing area who like us, is described solely by colour as if it is a paint palette, ranging from light to dark with connotations construing actual lightness for good and darkness for bad. He seemed happy and enthusiastic to help me, almost even confident about me. I held on to that little vote of confidence. I put the diastasis from carrying our children aside and pulled myself together, literally; holding my core muscles together for longer than I have in a while or ever. More complicated was that I was also wearing a semi-cropped top which I had worn with you in mind, so I gripped the plastic dolphin and learnt how to push myself forward and sweep the ice in an outward v shaped motion, mimicking the foot movements of fearless young children who were whizzing past me and the experienced ice dancers near me, spinning and waltzing with grace- all while maintaining my posture and sticking to my stance.

About marriage- You want to bamba? You wanna chill with the big boys? (Ameno Amapiano)

Do you remember how when we got engaged, you told me that love was like the mountain we were on. You said that sometimes we would be up at the top and sometimes, we would be in what you always referred to, with amusement, as the valley of the shadow of love?

He walked up to me in the open waiting room in his lab coat. He looked both apprehensive and relieved to have found me before I left. I could see that he was a man who usually kept to himself behind the glass screen peeping through glass microscopes.

“He will help you”, he said to me. “He helps the animals in the wilderness.. It will all go well.” On the day I had insisted someone else, other than the obviously flustered attendant on duty draw my blood, he had been kind. He had treated me as if he knew, as if he knew that I had come in a piñata of emotions. But he didn’t know. I nodded – because I saw how much it had taken for him to tell me. “Oh, I’m coming back. It’s not yet time,” I mumbled.

…

He is being reintroduced to me. They all are. He doesn’t know who I am ever since he heard the news. His intention, of course was good, very good, just like me- too good, too cowardly, too sensitive, too serious, too introverted. This morning, he does not know where to begin. His hesitation and awkwardness as he walks towards me lying in the hospital bed, catching my eye in a hiccup of a glance, feigning rejection because the nurse told them that I, we, needed at least fours before outside contact. One of us has just arrived and the other has just transitioned through a death and resurrection.

Transition was like being between four walls of pain with no where to turn. I tugged, pulled, hit. Then, I reached out to the one place in my memory which had saved me once, the shores of the Atlantic below Table Mountain.

“Do you know where you are? Do you know where you are?” the nurse had asked me frantically as she searched my eyes and shook me gently.

I stood in the sand and looked at the water, the ice cold blue water flowing endlessly and waited for relief but it was all a blurry picture. I went inward, to a place of nothingness; but every time I thought I would hide and get lost, the pain shook me back to life. There was nothing left. Screaming is for shallower pains.

I had just gazed at her, unblinking. I commanded my hijacked accomplice to give me the only physical pain relief I could get that I had managed to get free off YouTube. I commanded my body to make the last maneouvres I could. It was cold. The hypnobirthing instructor had advised not to have cold feet and I had wondered when, in our weather I would ever have cold feet. These days every time my feet get cold I remember that cold Monday morning. Only the earth knows what it feels like, tectonic movements creating fault lines in my hips, the bones in my back, once again, realigning.

9 hours later, the one who had shifted high and low, side to side, slurping, scratching, shoving his foot or hand against my ribs throughout the night started pushing out. On Åsa Holsteins’ podcast where the clear image of my birth’s soul had first taken form, they had said it sounded like an animal. For me, it sounded like a bellow. I had known that with every push, the mountain of emotion that had piled up inside of me would come out and nothing else would matter.

He was slapped onto my chest – bloody and corded to me; immediately he looked up and smiled. I knew then what I had found out before, when had been on a quiet descent to the bottom. Alone with a newborn in a chair, sore breasts, staring ahead at nothing in particular, I had momentarily looked down. His brother had stopped feeding, tilted his face towards me and smiled. It was a real smile, an intentional smile, just like this one. There was a real person in there, not just a baby; had known from then on, that I would be okay.

3cm dilated and the pain had started setting up its tools, my heart dared someone to bind me up. I wanted someone to try and hold me down, someone to try and hold me back. I just wanted one more person to tell me who to be, to tell me who I was and what I could not do. It has never been clearer to me, exactly what I wanted or rather what I did not want, more than it had those past nine months. I had never been more certain of exactly what I did not want as I did that night. Only once before, only that time, for another life decision. I just needed a tap on the shoulder. I was ready for a fight. I had been preparing for this for three years.

He hadn’t seen me for who I was, only for who he is- his anti thesis. A life of pleasing had left me watered down and contained- but this, this force within me… It begged to come out, draped itself over me and overwhelmed me. I knew then, that it would not come out through a surgical knife under fluorescent tubes. It would come out like an avalanche.

…

“Do you remember that moment when I looked at you and you believed me?”

“I do.”

When I had mouthed, over the doctor’s reprimand and wagging finger, over the nurse’s crossed arms and armored pose. “Help me. Don’t let me go through this nightmare again.“

It was all procedure. I had to do it or else.

“What are these?” I asked as the nurse shoved a number of papers in my face. I read it. She had not thought I would. My years of reading documents had come in handy. It was a consent to all necessary procedures.

“If you refuse to sign this, then you have to sign that you have refused to listen to medical advice and if anything happens to your baby…”

In the file, the doctor had listed a number of cautions and explanations that he had supposedly taken us through before our stubborn refusal.

“Nothing will happen,” I cut in as I signed the declaration of refusal to accept. It was 3:00 a.m. on the morning of my baby’s delivery and I was racing out of the specialist women’s hospital touted for its life saving procedures not sure of where we were going to next. I was only sure of one thing, that I have been sure of a few things in my life, and that nobody was going to hold me down again, not again and not this time.

…jasmine oil, spinning babies, sarah devall, bridget teyler, åsa holstein, forward leaning inversions, side lying release, hypnobirthing by anja, dr. anne akello, hip dips, acupressure massages in the night, crying out in despair- asking for a sign- meet me half way, meet me half way, a small cloud in the sky- give me a sign- visions of faith...

you will not labour in vain.

Category: LIFE

THE MOUNTAIN

TRANSITION