I stay at home and never leave the house if I can help it. I go into bipolar recovery and relapse never to return. He lands in a wheelchair, and it takes him years to recover and begin to walk again. My father falls ill, and I see to his needs. I begin to write poetry and I become a recluse. But over the next couple of years, this is exactly what happens to me. I am not completely scared out of my mind of what challenges I am going to have to face next. I am not self-medicating with tranquilisers yet. I am not terrified of sleeping alone at night yet. I have done things that I am not proud of for the first time in my life and I wonder where it could have gone so badly wrong for me. The film school, the production company, the romance with a drug dealer, the shelter in Hillbrow, the Salvation Army and my Johannesburg family that wrote me off completely and did not come to see me at the mental hospital. I never took all my clothes off and nor was I aware that there was a peeping tom until one of the older women brought it to my attention. During the week he would stare at the women washing in the bath naked from the top up and waist down or using the broken toilet. I lived for that time like a sardine in a tin can. On a Sunday we could all shower one at a time. I washed in a small basin and brushed my teeth with Colgate toothpaste every morning. This door led me into another world where everyone around me was black. I pretended not to hear him and turned my head quickly. A young African boy had passed me in the street and had called me, “Mlungu”. “Mlungu” is a word that will stay with me for a very long time. The women have all faded away into my memory. I had seen many things that have never left me there. It was built during the gold rush and has seen better days. Now the door to my grandparents’ cottage was closed to me forever. I could not bring myself to swallow them. I did not want to eat the sandwiches because I did not like their texture in my mouth. That as a child it had never been my intention. I did not know that I would hurt my grandmother’s feelings. I remember now how he enjoyed eating peppermint crisp chocolate bars. She had left the room thankfully and was busy seeing to my grandfather’s hot tea and lunch. I bit into the congealed fruit and buttered bread and gagged and put the sandwich down on my plate. It would be unconditional love and acceptance that I would search for my entire life from other women and men in my family and never receive. I did not know that she had prepared the jam herself on her stove. Now as an adult I could not get enough of figs. My tongue had not developed a taste for the tart sweetness of fig jam yet. I wrapped my legs around the sturdy kitchen chair and looked at the sandwiches my grandmother had lovingly prepared for me. It had been something he had seen in the war himself I am sure of that now. That each body meant someone to a father, mother, child, sister, daughter, and son. That it was in fact a horror movie for some. I did not understand what I was watching. I remembered the silence of my grandfather as we watched CNN and the war in Bosnia Herzegovina coming to an end as mass graves were being discovered daily. I remembered my grandmother’s speckled hands. It hovers now in my memory like a dolphin shooting through blue air or a whale suspended in a spray of water. There was something almost disembodied about it. To me, it was a rare and comforting smell. The house smelled like sugar biscuits, fried onions, and cabbage bredie.
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