20s - another letter to Krugaza

As you know, I read a few books and a large percentage of those between the ages of 9-19. I feel it is safe to say that I finished the sf/fantasy stacks of the local libraries and made significant inroads into the lit stacks too. If the music we listen to in our teens and early twenties is the framework for our most powerful memories then I can say that the reading I did would chuckle condescendingly at the music.

Books were the background, setting and frame for everything in my life. I was also a chaplain’s daughter with all the attending Calvinistic mores and expectations. I was a bouncy ball of potential, innocence and impatient lemme-gooo-already joy.

At 19 I found the world and by 22 my life caught up with Reality in a barreling-train-screeching-brakes way. You see, my decision making was based on what I read in books and the fundamental belief that I was meant to live a large life, that I was a heroine and that anything that happened to me was part of the story that would all work out in the end. I would have a few adventures and come out of it no longer laughably naïve and instead elegant, well-traveled and sexy in a way that would bring men to their knees and have zero people think it is ok to call me sweetie. Ahahahahahahahahahahaha *wipes tears*

I suggest you buckle up. In that 2/3 year ride I:

• had sex with four score and 7 men (see the below***);

• lived in a tiny flat in Sunnyside just short of squalor with no idea that I had to actually wash my clothes or clean;

• was in 2 at fault car crashes and one not at fault bike accident;

• had a cry-for-help attempt with my friend Bambi’s service pistol, very dramatic, bathwater everywhere;

• dramatically (blood on the bathroom stall walls) actually tried suicide because I didn’t know how to organize a party for work which is why I refuse to go to Loftus and dislike knives;

• fled to Durban to stay with my stripper cousins, where I subsequently waitressed in said strip club and very nearly had sex with my cousin’s common law husband;

• met a broken but brilliant boy with whom I house sat (squatted) for 3 weeks, was kicked out of there, kicked out of my aunt’s house, spent exactly one night homeless on a rooftop near his house once while reading Dune by cellphone light;

• got broken up with and went home where I ignored my growing belly while living with my parents in Garsfontein and smoking my brother’s weed;

• permed my hair, the resulting bleached crow's nest being so visually arresting that people still noticed that I was pregnant but avoided talking to me about it because I was possibly carrying the antichrist;
  

• tried to get an abortion at 7 months when even I could no longer deny that I was pregnant, my brother’s best friend went with me and then his mom called my mother;

• went to my dad's church's halfway house for unwed (and wayward) girls during Christmas and gave the baby up when he was born early January**

• pretty much immediately fell into another relationship, this time an verbally abusive one.

Yes, that seems about right for 22 or maybe 23. Anyway. All of the above was to jackhammer home the point that life does not work out the way we story sodden dorks think it should/will. It is in no way linear. Or circular or anything we would like to pin its bucking ass to. When I was turning 30 I wrote a blog post lamenting how my life was not what I thought it would be. Ahahahahahaahah, some more.

I am 40-something and I am on marriage #4. I’ve been dead broke and rich a few times, had 4 pregnancies and only one kid. I don’t know what will happen next and hope with everything that I am that I won’t fuck up too much more.

You are proper fucked and aren’t tipping into depression; you are black-tar depressed. But for the love of words realize that there is NOTHING wrong with where you are right now. So what if you are living and working where you used to? You are a lecturer, published author and taker of bleak monochromatic pictures.

You might not have a lot of respect for yourself right now but anyone who has ever met you fully realizes how excellent you are and that you have shite taste in women. You rival Julius for stab wounds and have joined a club of men who have had everything taken from them by vindictive bitches.

Can you seriously tell me that you are exactly who you were when you were 22? Or 40?

Where did you think you’d be now? What are these chapters that you thought would be written?

***Ok, so more like two score but still. Also, overwhelmingly the encounters weren’t stellar and one or two perhaps less voluntary than I would have liked. About a score were married or in long term relationships. One was an Egyptian, wait, make that 2. The one was a diplomat with 2 wives and camel teeth who took me to Sun City and bought me a Sting CD, the other was an accountant who had only one wife and who gave me wads of cash (about R5k over about 6 months) that I find out later he embezzled from the travel agency where we worked. He was fired and I quit. I think I hit 7 nationalities? I had a list at some point. Turns out just being available for fucking does not an enchantress make.

**Two genuinely amazing saffers who lives/ed in the Netherlands. My kid doesn’t know. I figure I’d tell him if the young man decides he wants to know who we are in about a year or two. Procrastination ftw.