Times change, I was once a broken-hearted boy gazing at the distant space where I left a broken heart. A boy who once froze, and partially died, while staring at the sight of a corpse of his beloved. That boy was now a man: a famous writer in a famous city. But still with boyish dreams, my few romantic ideals of true love still lingered to adulthood. And I held the belief that Helen would be the cure.
Helen, where can I possibly start? Perhaps I should launch this train of thought from the earliest beginnings. But the beginning is so entwined with the end to confuse even the most incisive of minds as to which is which, and which is that. To begin with, the idea that we could ever be more than two disparate beings would have made a stubborn cat to laugh out loud, so to speak. She was my classmate and I happened to date her best friend whom the critics at the back of the classroom considered the most attractive girl in our school. It was deeper than that; I cared for the person lying beneath all the looks; but this story is not about her. This story is about Helen.
Besides the latter obvious hindrances, she was the skinniest person I had ever rested my eyes on. As it always happens to the best of us in life, Helen had to relocate. She left home to Pretoria: a city I was to be acquainted with in future years.
I would be telling a lie if I said the thought of her lived or at least visited my mind while she was away, while my face rested calmly in the soft hands of my Juliet, except perhaps for occasional remembrances of old times passed. Seven long years had elapsed until by immaculate design, destiny or chance, our paths crossed to touch. Not in Pretoria but at the place that we first met. At first I could barely recognize her. Her eyes and lips and body, especially her body, had changed. She spoke in a manner which enticed the ear to listen eagerly – her words slithering through one ear and being entrapped in the other.
We had a good laugh, after she told me who she was. We reminisced about how I used to tease her. Perhaps we could blame it on the exuberance of fun in the ambient air but after a few hours of conversation, she paused awhile, and said,
“You know, the funniest thing was that when you had made fun of me I would go home and cry myself to sleep each night. I was a foolish girl in love with you; in love with a dream.”
I suddenly felt the winter chill crawling on my spine like a hideous eight legged spider.
“You had a crush on me?” That was all I could manage to say.
“No, not a crush; I was madly in love with you. But what could I have done? You called me sticky bones”. We both laughed to sigh.
“And worse than that, you belonged to my best friend… and I know she loved you.” I stared, a writer silenced by his own archived words.
“All the practiced smiles I would carry, it just became unbearable to keep at them. That’s the reason I left.”
With her hand now in mine
“What about now?” I asked. She denied it. Yet the smile that was building at the corners of her mouth gave her away. We sat there without a word watching the falling stars.
What I liked most about Helen was that she had this pure innocence that resided in her; the kind that still believed in true love, fairytales and things. She was the kind who would love you when you’re collecting the scraps of your pride and dignity on the floor; when all about you have turned their backs and shut their sculptured ears. And she did; every day for two years, she did. We had planned our future. Moreover, I believed that Helen and I would grow old together; that I would hold her ancient and tired hands, kiss her wrinkled forehead and love her then soft-beating heart.
But how could I have been uninformed that even solid brown earth, a thing so unswerving would crumble mammoth buildings to the ground, or ignite to spew wild and hellish lava? I was in love with Helen or at the very least in love with the idea of her. When you’ve been dating someone for two years, who loved you for more than a decade, one tends to forget the most basic of things. Was I in love or was it an idea that was implanted in my head and evolved over shifting time to become truth carved in stone?
It was the day before Easter when I met Lerato’s acquaintance. A temperate night: the wind was moving slow and the heat was fair. Lerato was lost to my Sunnyside streets, being only a visitor herself it was only natural. She had been traversing the night in futility not finding her destination, before we met, that is. “This place is like a maze.” She said. “I just passed here a second ago”. I promised I’d help her find north but little did I know that I was to help her find much more than that.
She was a professional model. My God, she looked the part! Light and soft brown eyes, thin bones but bulky were it mattered and that classic Afro made her look like those archived pictures in the museum. Along the way, we spoke of ideals we held close to our hearts and those we held afar. “Maybe I should have your numbers,” she said, when we were about to part, “in case I get lost again.” Her eye stealing spirit triggered me to make wrong decisions, like giving her my numbers.
My surveying eye, eyed her for a moment as she slowly walked away. And somehow I knew that lady destiny was not done with us. Two days later I received her call as drops of water were making their journey from the heavens in the strange moonlight rain.
“Don’t you want to see your afro queen?” she asked while laughing. I did. For some reason I wanted to see her with towering intensity. As I had been thinking about her ever since.
“How about tomorrow when the sky has cleared?” I asked.
“What if it rains tomorrow, and every other day after that, will you never see me?”
The idea of never seeing her, although I knew only her given name, tortured me. We met in the falling rain. She was exuberant in the night rain.
It was on that precise moment that I felt my heart turning. For two years nothing took more ownership of my red-beating heart than Helen. But I felt it in my chest spiraling and shifting ever so slowly and ever so diminutively to the Lerato in the rain – the beauty in the rain. Something about her challenged all my years with Helen, our house made of nothing but bricks of future; was challenged. How I thought or the internal direction my heart chose to peek – was durably threatened.
Before the clock was against us, as usual, we would be far from the heavens and closer to the ground. But I remember our lips meeting closer to heaven and further from the ground. We sang to dance to laugh in the rain.
“Do you feel it?” she asked, while I remained mesmerized at her perfectly aligned features. And I felt it, like the very touch of her wet face. I felt it.
“What is it?”
“The sole greatest word in the English dictionary: passion.” She was right, none like any I’ve ever felt before.
I compare the phenomena to a scenario where on meeting a stranger, a sense of eternal hatred emerges from whence hate came. Thus if I can hate a stranger without reason, then perhaps it was possible that I could love someone I had just met. My theory was that I loved her before I even met her. Meeting her was only another event that followed.
In the following days, Lerato and I were inseparable as twins or herds of sheep. With her the laws of eternal time were betrayed by passion in the passing wind. I would live countless centuries only to feel that youth still embraced our kind. Lerato and I had caught the Shakespearean love of obsession: an outburst of passion. It was now ghostly certain that I was in love with two women, and to make matters worse, two women were in love with me.
Helen paid me a visit after the day of the rain – when my eyes were fastened to the ground with shame after catching the sight of her. For some bizarre reason she pondered about life – the things I hoped for: my eternal dreams. I kept rambling on and on about success and the direction that my life was taking, thereafter I unknowingly directed the following question upon her, “What about you sweet love, what do you want out of life?”
“What I want, or more precisely what I need,” she smiled innocently as she always did “what I pray for each night… is for you to love me” she took my hand, placed it on her slow-movin
g chest while looking at me with adorable delectable eyes, “… to have your heart.” A tear swelled up in my eye, she missed it, followed by thoughts of remorse. I narrated a tale; I always spoke of tales, so a tale I told.
There once lived a man in the old times of Cecily. We all know how most people can go their entire lives without finding true love, but how fortunate was he for finding not one, but two loves. The tragedy – the deep curse – was how he loved them both at the same time. To the majority of ears this might not be as dire, and not even deserve to be told in a tale. But to him, the bearer of the cross of his two doves, it was hell. His heart torn between two women, wanting only smiles on their faces. He became sick when he realized what pleased the other destroyed the smile of the other. After many years the poor man from Cecily went sick and mad like the lunar moon which dances when you look away. Till finally he wrote letters to his two loves, to come to his chambers at noon… when noon came the two eyed each other for the first as they looked at his self sliced heart divided in two – one for each, at his blood filled bed.
“I wished not to follow the poor man’s fate”, I thought, while reciting the story to Helen. She should have known something was wrong as I only communicated my deepest thoughts through tales. Perhaps she chose not to see it. Whatever the case, the cross of the two loves weighed heavily on my back.
Telling Lerato the Cecily story, she said, “He should have closed his eyes and kissed them both; the one he envisioned would be the one he truly loved.” It was admirable advice; any advice was good advice. So I kissed them both: my beloved Helen and my exuberant Lerato. Although I was still a man filled with confusion, one thing was certain. Whoever I envisioned and chose would be my last girlfriend, my very last girlfriend.
I had to make a decision. In the boat of Helen there was one that would follow you to the fires of hell: with her hand in mine saying, “Let them come, let them devils come!” The other being the Titanic: filled with ample fruits of exultance in its journey; but perhaps also decease in the end. Two boats – one secured with solid panels which would deliver me to the shore. But was deliverance more important than a significant journey? These questions ran through my mind.
We met a rather odd lady; the type you could not describe yet could sense that something strange was lurking within her soul. She was lost though eagerly interested in our relationship than finding her way. “Take care of him.” she said to Lerato before she disappeared.
“I thought you didn’t recognize me.” Lerato said.
“How could I have forgotten you?” Like a cat I began to be curious as to where they knew each other from.
Lerato explained how she met the odd lady on the very day we first encountered. Strange it is that were it not for her we would not have met. She “high-jacked” Lerato and roamed with her in the streets; as if a surprise party was being assimilated for her and she was buying the currency of time. Later, after glancing at the time she abruptly said,
“You can go now, I’ll be OK. Oh, if I were you I’d use that street”. Pointing at the street Lerato and I first met. Could Lerato and I have met lady fate? She believed in God and destiny, so she was convinced that it was divine intervention. Even I – a non-believer – was convinced that the invisible forces of the universe had brought us together. However, I had a decision to make.
It became evident what love meant, because one person loving another unconditionally and limitlessly does not constitute love. Love is when both hearts feel as the other does. We all love in different ways in different times. Love is when a perfect harmony of affection is shared by two individuals.
My fears were confirmed when my lips touched those of Helen, Lerato’s picture formed in my mind. It was a revelation to the thoughts at the back of my mind. At that precise moment, I knew that Lerato was to be my last girlfriend. I assure you, there was neither a painless nor serene way to tell her – someone who has loved me for a little more than a decade – of how my heart loved another. She broke into a violent storm of tears as if being stabbed with blunt steak knives through the chest. “There is no other possible future without you.” She said. Though it tore the inner bits of my soul I pretended to be cold as if bringing tears to her eyes was not enough.
I justified the pain that lived between us as a temporary inconvenience. It was better then being with her and bringing wail and suffering to her for all the days we live.
I was at peace with Lerato. I’d be the person who remains when all cameras shut down and everyone is away. We understood each other. I had never found such effortless bliss in all my days. I asked her about what she had planned for the future because I would love to watch her grow old with me. We got engaged at the rooftop of my building, not far from those ever present stars.
How wrong I was to believe our dark days were far behind, somewhere in the rear-view mirror, while we drove off to the land of happily ever after. What was to be our happiest day was just around the corner, the day I would make her a romantic’s wife. The basic laws of relativity did not apply to how fast news travelled to Helen’s ears, hearing how another now lives her dream.
Her visit was unexpected, begging me to denounce my love for Lerato. Something was very wrong with her; the Helen I knew had taken a vacation, replaced by a dark angel with cold eyes. “You don’t love her. Tell her… you don’t love her!” Handing the phone to me, “It’s OK I forgive you… call and tell her there is only one woman for you.” She was right; there was only one woman for me, but not in the way that she had expected. She grew as fierce as a tiger fighting for her cub when I refused to do as she had asked. I was oblivious to the kitchen knife she held next to her spine. It was not until she pointed it right at me with lethal intentions that I began to notice it.
Somehow I was quick and I overpowered her to seize the knife, constricting her hands. What I saw in Helen’s eye and face could make Jesus return earlier than expected; in fear for the world. “It is not just blades that can kill you, lover boy.” She laughed derisively, teeth and jaws exposed; looking at the glass of wine she gave me a while back.
“Helen, what have you done?” Staring alertly at the half-empty glass of wine that left my hand a few moments earlier. Her grip was getting weaker as her eyes could no longer stay fixed upon mine.
“We belong together, just like the song. There’s no Lerato where we’re going; just us.” My strength was now fading, like clouds and I could no longer hold her upright. She was smaller; I believe that is why she had blacked out first. There we were laying on the floor, like old iron – our bodies rusting away.
“Helen wake up, sweet love. Please wake up!” She remained silent and lifeless on the floor. My vision was becoming blurry with each passing of a second. I held her hand, kissed her lips and told her how foolish I have been, how sorry I was.
It was as I had not envisioned it. But the day had come, the day when the last romantic would die, were all love about to turn to hate? In all my years I have lived without regret, loved when love showed her brow; my romantic dreams were now coming to an end without ever finding the one we live to find. At least I had left my pieces in the list of hearts that I have known. The world will remember me through these quantities of my unseen burning love. Let them remember how fiercely I loved; how romantically I lived – how I was a romantic to the very end.
Providentially, that was the precise moment when Lerato came in, welcomed by two dying lovers on the floor: hand to hand and lip to lip. I would neither have held a grudge nor became a haunting ghost if she would have left us there. But I am still glad that she chose to help us instead.
The emptiness was an intuitive sign that she was gone when I woke up in my hospital bed. My Lerato in the rain was gone with the rain. Like the man of Cecily, death followed, but not death of the body but the death of my lonely heart.
Chapter 8
Us, Romantics