Vuyokazi Ngemntu kicks off our new series on writing loss and grief. A graduate student from South Africa, her essay mourns the loss of love and the gradual embrace of self love. It is a fresh, poignant and bitter sweet exploration of heart ache and healing -Editor

 

Yet another lover has shattered your happy-ever-after. Suspended in shock, you wallow in the murky waters of incredulity, never quite sure what to wear to your own pity party. What happens now?

Your best friend will come over, banging on your door and hollering your name between bouts of ‘I know you’re in there and I’m not leaving until you open this door!’ Only then will you see her seventeen missed calls. You won’t notice her pinched nostrils at the whiff of decay that assails them when you oblige her demands. You’ll squint your eyes when she pulls the curtains apart. Watch her get to work on that penicillin laboratory you call a kitchen sink, 90’s RNB hits whispering soothesayings to your melancholy.

“A movie will watch the two of you until Uber Eats arrives.”

She’ll wrap her arms around you when her inquiry into your well-being causes your spine to collapse. Sensing your discomfort, she will sit beside you quietly, covered in your musty duvet. A movie will watch the two of you until Uber Eats arrives. You will take a few pizza bites for her sake and find that it struggles to push past the permanent lump in your throat. Too numb to protest, you’ll get into the bath she runs you and sit there sobbing while she changes your linen. Naturally, she will delineate the ways in which your ex is a worthless turd who’s not worth crying over. After all, she has already created a profile for you on Tinder, another on Plenty of Fish.

Wine, she will insist, is the best elixir, as the two of you gulp down two bottles of the cab sav she pulled out of her bag earlier.

Two weeks from now, you’ll wake up and your selfie game will have improved by 500%. You’ll go to the barber and insist on a high-top fade, then to the hairdresser to bleach it and dye it ash blonde. Your ho’ phase begins, tentatively at first but working to a gradual escalation. The sell-by date on this one varies.

The kiss with a colleague will be awkward. (Should you change departments now?)

Everyone will compliment you on your incredible weight loss and you’ll mumble curt thank you’s and forget to wonder if they thought any less of you when you weren’t shaped like an infinity sign. You’ll make new friends, live for live music and socialise as much as possible. Create new, amazing playlists. Hang out with the cool kids. Exchange numbers with a hottie who never calls. Call first, always. Block their number. Ignore calls from a Tinder match who mistook waking up together to mean being together.

The new hobby you pick up will eventually bore you. Your new friends will only make sense under the glare of the night lights of your favourite club. You’ll never share your most treasured childhood memories. The Mac Ruby Woo stains on last night’s wine glass will stare at you like an indictment. You’ll catch a glimpse of the girl in your bathroom mirror and wonder if the two of you have met before. Her sad eyes will make you look away quickly -it’s rude to stare at strangers!

“Your vibrator hasn’t been used in a minute. Make. Yourself. Come. Welcome home, your body says.”

One day, when you realise you can’t hear your thoughts, you’ll withdraw from it all. Purposefully leave messages from your best friend about weekend events or gallery openings blue ticked. You intended to reply but lacked the energy. The emptiness will scream loudly. The silence will unsettle you. Maybe yoga. But being too tired to stick to that morning routine, maybe not.

Insomnia says hello. Your writing feels incoherent. There are more sentences crossed out than the few remaining phrases wandering aimlessly across the page, mad men haunting the night. You release their ghosts by tearing up the page. Your stomach rebukes you by grumbling.

Snot and tears fall into your 2 a.m cereal bowl. Your bed is cold and unforgiving when you finally return to it. You sleep on your former lover’s side. Their absence is unbearably loud, you curl into the fetal position.

It’s not your lover you really miss, but the feeling of loving and being loved. The fulfillment of it all. A warm body to curl up against at the end of a tiring day at work. A heartbeat yours has learnt to mirror. The crook of that specific arm to place your head in. Maybe the heat of their breath against your collarbone. You’re not sure but you miss seeing their face break into a smile when they open their eyes in the morning and the first thing they see is you. Making grocery lists together. Mouthing the letters of their name and purring them out in those midnight sessions, your shivering legs a necklace they wear well.

You’ll shun visitors. The high-top fade will grow back. You’ll chop everything off. The chill at the nape will remind you that you’re alive. You’ll walk around the grocery store with your headphones on, a smile on your face and a bounce in your step. No, this is not where you bump into a stranger and fall madly in love. That’s Hollywood fairytale. Grocery stores are for not noticing the elderly woman who smiles at you, having caught a glimpse of the freedom which evaded her at your age. She will see herself as she should’ve been and live vicariously in that passing glance.

You’ll come home to cook the only meal you’ve enjoyed in months. Your jasmine basmati and butter chicken. Remember where you hid the last stub of that potent spliff? In the next two hours, Charlie Chaplin will be funnier. The ice-cream tub, emptier. You’ll play your ‘Me-time’ playlist and dance in your kitchen, alone, and enjoy it. Fela’s ‘Lady’ will dictate the gyrations of your wasp-like waistline and send your nyash a-rumbling!

The dishes will be left in the sink undone. The uninhabited space in your bed will not threaten to swallow you. Your pillow will wonder if you’ve forgotten to soak it with tears that night. And the next. And the next. And the next one too.

You’ll unfurl your limbs gently, a sunflower’s petal slowly opening. The first sun ray to hit your face will inject you with its glow and the two of you will be identical from this moment on. Yawn. The rancid morning breath will make you giggle and the mouse hiding behind your closet will think you’re crazy.

This time you’ll say ‘Hello’ to the girl in the mirror. She’ll smile back. The two of you will form a pact to conquer the day. But first, your cup of morning coffee. Your senses are invigorated by the aroma, and you will thank yourself for this mercy.

Back in the bathroom, your bubble bath awaits. The rose and ylang-ylang incense fills your heart with sweetness. You’ll commit to staying in that tub the way all your past lovers should’ve committed to you. You’ll be as wrinkled as those ‘wanna grow old together’ promises, though not as broken, when you emerge. Dripping.

The embrace of your white towel, with its lavender fabric softener fragrance, is home. Your fingers trace their way around familiar territory and find their names imprinted on the sacred grounds they traverse. Your hands nod and confirm “We have been here before” in a strange language your fingers understand intuitively. The shea butter mothers your skin, entrapping the moisture and goodness the last few months almost stole from you.

Jump on the bed, for the hell of it.

Fall on your back into another of those happy childhood memories and smile wryly.

Reach out and retrieve the batteries from your drawer. Your vibrator hasn’t been used in a minute. Make. Yourself. Come. Welcome home, your body says. Each time you want to stop, pleasure grips you firmly and soothes your inhibitions, reminding you that it belongs to you alone. You wince when your clit feels like the site of a butterfly dance. The throbbing. A sweet agony. A burst of bliss unleashes itself in your centre. Breathy moans. Your determined arm. A shriek. That tingling sensation, travelling up your entire body. Muscle spasms. The shivers. Eyes dilated. A volcano threatens to explode between your legs and does. The first trickles of lava anoint your sheets. Sweet mother of… ohmyfuckinggod… yes. Hoarse, throaty whispers. Rhythmic hip sways. Toes curling. Rapid breathing. Sweaty palms. A sweet, intimately familiar scent permeating the morning air. You say your own name.

Molten lava gushes forth from you, scorching your melancholy to ashes. Your ribcage is the only phoenix that rises at the inbreath.

The tears are of both happiness and release. Rain speaks of new flowers growing.

 

 

***Vuyokazi Ngemntu [She/They] is a writer-performer whose praxis uses poetry, song, storytelling and ritual to navigate ancestral trauma, confront inequality and inspire healing. Ngemntu is currently a final year Creative Writing Master’s candidate at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. Catch her on Facebook: Vuyokazi Ngemntu (Vuyokazi Ngemntu) and Instagram:@ngemntuvuyokazi