Toxic– very harmful or unpleasant in a pervasive or insidious way–
commonly used in modern culture in relation to a hurtful, uncomfortable unresolved web of miscommunication, mistrust or disappointment. / this term may perhaps be used incorrectly at times [in the same way as the word ‘OCD’ (obsessive compulsive disorder) for every excessively neat person]
***
Is this how it’s supposed to feel? Contained. As if as soon as I step up onto that doormat I box up some part of me. To let me loose, I dance carefree at the balcony, jumping up and down as if I was at an American hippie concert.
It’s cold again. We are sitting at that table, at the cake and coffee lounge because we didn’t make a reservation at the prestigious Sunday brunch. We three are late by a few minutes because I had a change of mind for my dress. I thought that, maybe I should reserve the maternity dresses for when I’m actually pregnant. He spread his hand out, greeted one of us. For myself, barely an eye’s contact. So, I had already done something wrong.
The atmosphere was tense. The second one of us was moving out [in protest] this weekend. She told me that she would do it well, in a civilised manner. Not like you that time, this she did not say. I nodded. Don’t I always? It was strange. She had got the help, all the understanding and now she had also received the worst branding for it, in the current cacophony of castigation.
I knew what it felt like to be in her shoes, walking across the corridor door, almost bursting into flames as they burst into laughter. I had heard caught some of the words they wanted me to catch. I boiled, I fried, I cried.
I had loved her all of my life, with a fearful intensity and dependence that I lived in constant trepidation of losing her. “You were like my bestfriend! I told you I had gone for counselling and you said nothing! You didn’t even ask me what it was about,” I cried. She replied coolly, “Those are your problems.” She deflated my heart, it never quite opened up the same way again.
There had been whispers again the first time I walked down the stairs. Sometimes I woke up and called, just like I had called in the hospital, but no one picked. My neck and shoulders could not carry my head long enough to let me walk. I was almost always alone until he came back so I spent hours in the house, acquainting myself with the maid. Like any other cold war, I made an alliance with her and she became the symbol of my disdain. “She’s not her maid. She needs to get her own maid.“
“The case of Lesh Lights, you know it?”
“Yes,” I say quickly, ransacking my brain for details, finding only one loose excel sheet of receipts and invoice payments.
“This is them, our clients. But they cheated us.”
“They cheated us?,” I exclaimed.
He looks stonily back at me, leaves his mouth open for a second in indecision, as if he would rather not say what he wanted to say.
I sigh. I feel too much.
***
I’m six months pregnant and I’m sitting on our bed. He’s in the shower and baby moves. I decide to sit with him and introduce myself.
Hi. My name is,…” I say. “That’s what your father calls me,” I continue. “But my family calls me differently.”
“I’m your mother.”
“Okay,” I pause. What can I tell you about me?…Okay, what do you want to know about life?”
“Well,” I answer. “It’s…” I change my mind again. “There are so many things you can do. You can swim, maybe you will like that. You can ride bicycles. I don’t know.”
***
Is this how it’s supposed to feel? Good morning is a question that may be treated, constructively, as unheard or heard. And the density in the air is like a balloon that is about to pop, my very presence a cause of insecurity that would prompt the trickery that I imagine is only reserved for the Secretary’s office of a six term President.
Then I, drunk with confusion, had arisen, clad in a red riding hood and dared to question the way of things.
“You are so … weak … Sensitive.” “And why don’t you know? Why don’t you know! Why don’t you know!!,” became the growl and snarl of the jaws of the grey wolf that visits in the spaces when I am not dancing.
***
We are sitting at that table, at the cake and coffee lounge.
“Give the child more cake. Why shouldn’t he have more cake?” she smiles with a strain. She’s beautiful, dark and youthful as if her soul never aged; the mask of a low-blow warrior.
“No, its too much, he’s had five.”
“I’m going to give him more. Why shouldn’t he have more? “she insists.
“-Does Dona still post her cake business anymore? I don’t see her statuses anymore,” the ‘steel’-water pacifist cuts in.
I turn and whisper to the teenage boy I met when I was 17. “I didn’t know that he reads statuses, does that mean he actually sees what I write?”
He stares stiffly at me and looks up at the table. We are on one end of the table and we are whispering and someone is leaving in protest, in a civil manner this weekend. The celebration of this precious day has come at such an odd time and yet we still sit here, all together.
“Waiter, my whisky,” he calls to the waiter rushing by.
PurplePretoria 