Dying Things

Almost all counselling advice tells us it is better to talk things over when you’ve a problem that is eating on your relationship. But there’s power and wisdom in silence, in biding your time, or walking away. If your partner is not on receptive mind there’s no use in talking. If you’ve said it a million times its time to take a permanent break. Spewing endless critiques or advice in a vain attempt to change your partner isn’t going to provide any lasting solution. Sometimes things disintegrate to death, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.


In general terms talking about your problems is a good idea, but you know your relation better to understand when talk has reached a point of no return; when it paralyzes instead of freeing. No use using stewing conversation to avoid action. A moment of quiet reflection at the right time nourishes and refreshes the spirit of communication. But then again there’s a point of no return when too much has been done and said, where there’s no point of anything but to part ways.

I say all this because it has finally dawned on me that the torturously relation of my fiancée and I has finally came to a bad end, at least for me whom she cuckolded several times. I should have ended the affair long time ago, when she became unfaithful to me, but there seem to be so much guilt, anger, hoped for reconciliation, remorse between the two of us that we easily deluded each other that we were made for each other. There’s th question of our two year old son also. To cut our losses seemed inconceivable, if not tragic. Like desperate gamblers, the greater the losses the more I doubled the bets hoping to strike a hand that’ll vanquish all. The lucky break never came.

In the end my girlfriend left me for another guy somewhere in Bloem. Needless to say, my male ego is shuttered, but I believe in freedom of choice even when people choose to be free of me. She recently wrote me an email, explaining her need when she left me to find herself, blah, blah; the usual stuff, peppered by some muddleheaded-hand me down Dalai Alami’s maxims. The gist of the message was that she had discovered that we were good together, and so was considering getting back again.

I was surprised by my anger at the suggestion, and so elected not to answer her.

Three days ago, the buzzer of my flat wrung. She was at the door. We went through the usual protocol of decency, pretending to have missed and never forgotten about each other in the year and half. She talked my ear off about how she loves Cape Town life—I was staying in East London when she left me—the sunlit, airy cultured cafés, young middle-class flourishing life, etc.
“There’s of course a whiff of narcissism, inward looking, self-sufficient, cut off from the rest mentality that can be cloying about it sometimes;” said trying to participate on her enthusiasm. She said something I don’t recall, perhaps because I was more interested in her hee-hee face as she said it.

I was determined not to ask her about her reasons for leaving me. I know how it’s like sometimes to be snatched out by faked sophistication; the libertine brazenness, sublime impertinence of scavenging hyenas out there; and the demands of anarchic glorification of licence most of us mistakenly call freedom in our naivety.
“Otherwise how have you been;” she asked.
“Not too good actually; but I got over it. Writing helped as always, giving expression to the abandonment I mean.” I wanted to go beyond manufactured sentiments and worn out truisms.

They say an ability to forgive is a gift of temperament.

She made an attempt to apologise about what went on between us before, talking too much and saying very little; too many false notes. In the end she decided to drop it, to both our relief.

The lies of those familiar to us are painfully naked.

“Perhaps I’m too shallow and less sophisticated, but you were enough for me,” I said, betraying my resolve. I figured my still wounded heart had more claim on the matter than my calculating mind.

She gave me a wide artless smile that bent into a crafty grin and laugh; her face exuberant with a moronic permanent expression of startled but hidden confusion. And then her face collapsed, gave me a collusive glance, eyes glowing with glaucous film. She then turned to leave. Only the turgid vein on her temple, like river Nile, conveyed any sense of vulnerability.

It pained me to see her so? Unresolved and desperate.I went to the balcony to catch a last look.

The elements of autumn flooded my heart as the wind scrapped the dead autumn leaves of my past on the pavement. There was a fiery tint behind the mountain scars where the sun was sinking like a ship, to use Bob Dylan’s words. Actually the sun was expiring with streaks of blood on fiery clouds.

Goodbye my love. Perhaps in another life. Said my heavy heart as she disappeared around the corner. Tears tip-towed on my cheeks.

Soft things die slowly in my heart, but when they do they are dead. As Elizabeth Barret Browning put it:

We walked too straight for fortune’s end,
We loved too true to keep a friend;
At last we’re tired, my heart and I


At last we are tired and hurt, my heart and I.

Perhaps she came back too soon, when the scars still itched.

I went to seat where her heat and scent still whiffed in the air, and discovered, to my amazement, that I had grown comfortable on the empty room. Her photo was still on the wall, starring at me with unfocused dissatisfaction. I stood between the ocean and the open wound for a while, and then I took it down.