We met one night, unaware of time and preoccupied with life and queues. The fuel queue. The queues of everything else we were waiting for in our lives. Unhappy and unknown.
You shook my hand and touched my soul the first time we talked, fighting the wind that almost pulled out my cigarette together with my teeth. That’s what you needed, light. Light for your cigarette and light for your soul but it was my soul that was searching for more.
You told me God works in mysterious ways, sometimes he happens at queues. I unpacked the reasons why I had lost faith in him. Together, but mostly me, we had lost faith in everything. We had lost faith in our dreams, in the government. In time. In healing. In getting fuel at a black market price.
I had some boxed wine, and no one to share it with. We laughed about it, invitations to leisure we could no longer afford. The wine was deep red, sensual, smooth and dry, like kisses of lovers in apology. We faded into pleasant spaces and places, not remembering when last I had been able to say something. Anything.
A reminder of how love and loss are compatible as silence.
I have a soft spot for tough times, I said from my stomach, pouring out thick-red wine into a plastic cup. When things get tough, they swallow me in. Whole. I get lost.
Zimbabwe, she’s dying slowly, and we just sit and stare. She’s dying slowly, and they act like they just don’t care. Have you slept in a fuel queue before? To wake up and see the dawn in the back of your car, just for some fuel?
Yes, yes, yes! There’s no language for the dying, only the living and the dead. Nehanda must turn in her grave, matter of fact – – they might as well rape Zimbabwe on her grave. Damn!
I didn’t even know what car you drove, or where it was or what its insides looked like. Or if you kept it neat and tidy, or did it smell like cheap hotels and cigarettes just like mine? Would it tell me more about you than I already knew? Sins, secrets and all?
God happens in mysterious ways, you said. So sure. So certain. So sudden, like the way your lips crushed into mine.
Watching the stories leave my mind, the wine and sorrow dancing gently to the whispers haunting, we fell in silence. Your kiss hung to my lips, like a gamble, like a game, like a lullaby. Birth. You touched me, as if to comfort me. Your hands ran against my skin like a blind poet tracing for similarities in a poem of a story he had yet to write.
We looked at the stars, our constellations. Something about you felt different, I’d never felt so at home. For once, I couldn’t hear the wrangling voices in my head, I couldn’t hear the cries of people over freedom and redemption and skyrocketing prices. I couldn’t hear God and how he happens in mysterious ways – I could feel him, inside my body, inside spaces of how it used to be to feel loved and I wanted to love him fiercely.
When people ask me, I always tell them, that’s how I knew home is wherever your demons go mute. We don’t meet them like you anymore, soul and all. Human. Being. The feeling of your palm on mine was a better silencer than any antidepressants I had ever taken.
You know I can’t afford them now? It wasn’t a question. Not really. I wanted to tell you. To strip my soul right before your eyes. I wanted you to pour your being into my wine so I could swallow you in.
When we switched on the radio, we listened to my hearty collection. Nina Simone, Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and you knew all the words to Etta James’ At Last.
We knew you had cast a spell on me.
We kissed in my car under the stars until they became shy and dispersed. Your eyes were bright against the dark, like amber, they were on fire. The winds blew rumours, heard I was catching a feel. REAL. It was just me and you. A stranger. A glow in the midst of darkness, not even the burdening load-shedding that had my battery at flat but my own lonesome dark obscurity.
My therapist has always wanted me to write more happy stories, but happiness has only rolled off my tongue as fluently as melancholy. I say I found loveonce, it new the lyrics to my favourite songs. Yet, it was just a face with no name or address and I never figured out why it left as I slept.
I tried to sit down yesterday and write a story about the before. But after hours of searching my brain, I realized that I don’t remember my body as anything other than the deserted, minefield it currently is. Unloved. Tainted.
I wish I could identify the careful moment when the switch was turned. I wish to go back to the day before I woke up in my car, unhappy, with an unromantic hangover threatening to kill me and still, no fuel.
You were gone.
You were gone without as much as a name or anything for me to trace you back to my arms were I think you belonged.
Sometimes I wish I could rewrite history and completely erase the first time I met you. Most times I just hope that whenever my feet decide to finally do the deadly dance at the bridge’s edge, that your voice is the one I hear shouting “Don’t Jump.”
I guess it’s true what you said. God happens in mysterious ways. YOUR God showed me a love I could never have. Love came once you see, as a stranger I met on the way.
Forget. Forget. Forget.
Forget me— forget you.