There were grey colored monkeys tumbling in the dusty gravel roads. A landscape one would die for at any given day. A sight one could wake up to for centuries too without getting tired of gazing. As I silently stared into the lush fields I knew the course of my life was about to take an unexpected and dramatic turn. From the busy city were one’s neighbors were distant strangers, you smiled at with your teeth. To a small village comparable to a large extended family where everybody knew each other. Were one had to smile with one’s heart. I came with stories of the outside world: liberating my new found peers of the endless possibilities that lied beyond the horizon.
The death of my dearest Fortunate – the only love I ever knew – continued to occasionally swell tears in my eyes now and then. I consoled myself with the idea that she was too beautiful and angelic for this God-forsaken world. But I’m glad destiny is never blinded by night stains, moldy stains of the night. It brought me here to realize that there was another world which existed hand in hand with the civilized world I had left behind.
There were opaque similarities between me and a rough stone being chiseled and hammered into shape, by a true artist; little did I know that it would be the very environment that would mend me into the last romantic dreamer.
Here was where I met Helen, a person who would poison me to chain my soul to the pits of hell. But today, here was where I met Juliet; and where Juliet met me. Small houses, shops, streets and very few cars. Life was slower here. You could breathe and think unlike in the city where stars had died in the sky: where you could barely listen to yourself contemplate. I had a strong conviction that God had stopped manufacturing beauty or bliss with Fortunate. But something unexpected and unthinkable happened: time. In its slow progress it surprisingly brought comfort. The funniest thing about time is that it has the ability to turn a stone into a diamond, beauty into dust. The more days passed the more the memory seemed to haze and lighten. The pain never faded, it just became bearable.
Someone once told me that everything we learn we already knew. We are simply revising and taking ownership of our knowledge. I cannot disagree with him – the statement is simply irrefutable and seems wise. But I do agree with the essence of it. I believe I’ve always been a writer – a romantic at heart. But it was my silver Juliet who made me feel it in the deep feelings of my dreams.
I remember sitting in my newly enrolled school, my thoughts comparable to slow echo which followed sound: an echo which was still left behind in the city of Johannesburg: a city I now loathed. A girl then pierced through the varied bodies in uniform to waken my almost trance state.
“You’re that new kid right?” she asked.
“Are you really from the city of gold?” She further questioned before I could reply.
“I assure you, the city is filled with a lot of varied things but gold is not among them, not anymore.” She paused awhile.
“Do you have a name Mr.?”
“Romeo,” She bottled a laugh when I said this,
“Was it something I said?” Before she could explain, everyone gathered around at the assembly point.
“I guess that’s my queue. Oh, I’m Juliet.” She walked away, and then looked back to catch a smile on my face. That was the first time I had genuinely smiled in a long time.
She was a singer; her silky voice touched us all, me more than the rest. As she looked straight into my eyes the entire time perhaps I had been wrong, not all beauty had died, some of it still lived in her voice.
The two years that followed we grew extremely close to each other. She was cultured to my deepest thoughts and some of the darkness that lingered in my eyes. She was the truest of all living friends. There was once a man, perhaps a scientist, before feeding his dogs he would ring a bell. At first the dogs may have found it humorous or at most silly. As time went by, each time he would ring the bell, saliva would spontaneously be produced in the dogs’ mouths to show that they understood that the ringing signaled food. This was Juliet and I. With every ring of the bell, we thought of each other as we spent every spare time we could scrounge together, speaking about nothing and everything, sometimes both.
The thought that Juliet could be more than a friend never crossed my mind in those two years –until on one unexpected day –she informed me that she was seeing someone. I saw him stroking her hair as they talked to each other. “She hated that” I thought “Your doing it wrong”… Wait was I jealous, was this what romantic jealousy felt like? I pretended that I was alright; that the pieces which my body was composed of were still intact. But the truth was only known by my four-cornered heart. Parts of my soul died every time I saw his rough hands caress her tender skin; or his death-swathed breath poisoning the air she breathed.
Pride, the hallmark of my clan, but I had to wholly swallow it if I had any chances of winning her heart. I had grown to know her well: her laugh, her cry even her silent pauses between thoughts. The boundary which separated friends as us was a feeble foil which could blaze at the sight of my heart. How could I have possibly known that all those passing years Juliet held the words, “I am in love with you,” just between her lips though never attaining enough zeal to pass through her lips?
There I was, the master, planning a romantic scene that would linger through the ages and motivate future time travelers to return to that moment in time to witness it. The boy did not deserve such closeness to those above. At least I would look the creator in eye to tell him, “You had your fun with my heart, she’s coming with me!” In the wake of the yellow dawn, there we stood, not far from the other still not too close to the other. We both could feel that something had happened. Something had changed. Before the romantic scene could commence, before words could fall out of my mouth.
“I know,” she said, hushing my lips,
“I know.”The rest was left for historians to document.
Wise men dry their tears in the rain. In the years that came I dried all her tears and shared all her laughs. We would bask in the soft sun in the company of rivers and trees hours on end that flying birds would count. There was my silver Juliet singing to my ear through the wind. We had a joyous life.
But a gulf was present between us like the oceans that separated drifting continents. My beautiful lover had the simplest of dreams. We will have a small white house with a similar colored fence not far from where we live. Two kids, cats and dogs. Once she had started to illustrate, even I could not stop her from planning our future. I’d smile to listen sometimes I too would incorporate her dream into mine.
But it was never to be me. I had ambitious dreams. I yearned for time to bow at my presence and live the life of those who lived. “An extraordinary life fitted an extraordinary man,” I thought. Although this began innocently, as if it could never scratch our bubble of happiness, it grew in our hearts like cancer of the heart.
She knew that my stay was only temporary; that a time would come when I had to leave. We both hated the clock that progressed ever so swiftly – with years moving at days’ pace. “Why be hasty?” I solemnly remember that previous night with the morning sun separating us – her clenched arms refusing to let go, but I had to leave. I had stories and novels for the world outside. Yet my Juliet could not bear a day apart as her arms grew tighter around me, like a python squeezing my lungs; her tears falling on my skin and sorrowful words rushing to my ear convincing me to stay.
It was only after I made a promise, a promise that I failed to keep. That she tightly shut her eyes in the hopes of halting her tears. She tried in futility, as I wiped her tears I promised that I shall return in a small sum of time. “Promise…?” as she feverishly whimpered
“…on my last breath!” I then headed for the first time to the city of dreams – Pretoria City, where I later met with Fiona.
I called her each passing day; for hours we spoke. But the fast moving life was not made for lover’s separated by empty space. It changed me, the city darkened my eyes. I called less and less till finally I stop
ped. To set her free I told her I had met another and that I was never coming back. I became a one eyed monster, a cold hearted creature fulfilling the prophecy of Romeo and Juliet.
After that they said she never sang again, I believe that was the day her music died. She has a son now. He has my eyes; they all say when I visit, “Junior has romantic eyes”. When I met him with his mother, I saw my reflection in his. She desperately tried to speak yet her tears on the other hand failed to stay at bay.
Chapter 7
My last
Girlfriend