More Wine in the Barrel

Waiting at the entrance of the morgue, I held on to a pile of letters in my hands and stars of recollections in my head. My chin sank under a black hat as I sat in silence. I could hear footsteps fading towards the end of the hallway. The other nurses had completed their shifts and were leaving the facility. I still had a couple of minutes to spare for self-reflection. A lot of things had gone wrong during the last PTCA procedure in the operation theatre, which made me think about how cruel life had been. I could hear the voices in the back of my head, infused in my cranial circulation. I wanted to clutch at something. A feeling I had carelessly shunned for a long time. I feared its magnitude yet desired the turbulence it left afterwards. It took my strength away and locked me under a yoke in a graveyard. My teeth gnash, shearing against each other tightly. I listened to the crackles, my eyes closed. I waited for a sign while cherishing my resentment as tenderly as a rose garden.

The faulty lamp at the corner was making buzzing sounds for a while now and the echoes bombarding the walls made this particular night scarier. The lights flashed on my face, my lips were quivering and my eyelids flapped in distress. My eyes gleamed with angst. My fingers were clubbed and my legs felt numb. I was neither tired nor satisfied. I was not a victim of one dawn turning into a dusk. As a matter of fact, I was guilty. Of love and all those other things that are sure to make a heart break. I tried not to lick my dry lips, but I could feel pain sizzling through the cracks.

I took a deep breath and slowly let it out. I wanted to believe there was something better ahead of me. Something to make me vulnerable and strong once again. Something worth fighting for.

I had not seen Rosa in more than seven years. In that short period, my world had stopped and the devil herself was sneezing on top of it. Well, bless you! The far north of it was tilted, it was hanging on a thin thread down south. Someone had suddenly dimmed the lights and shut the doors. It was only a matter of hours, or maybe seconds, before I slipped and the curtains closed. Forever. I was convinced that tomorrow was not only a passing wind, or a bus I’d die to catch, but also a destination I might never reach. Mornings were new beginnings to newer struggles. The mark of loss stretched deep inside my bones. Everything I held close ever since always disappeared like a mirage on the periphery of a desert. My past hadn’t received the go-ahead to bury its dead, and my vague future watched from a distance as I wandered around in circles with skeletons of my existence. I was certain time wasn’t going to heal any of my wounds and death wouldn’t hurt as much.

“Don’t be scared.” Rosa said, tucking me in bed, ” Am doing this for love.”
She left home that night unannounced and ran away with her boyfriend. Cameron was one strange bearded man with a nose ring. He played bass guitar for a local band called “Yase Wi Kua” which was slang for “we live to die”. Everything was weird about this group of six, including the fact that they were all bald, homeless and never performed in public events. Ron was right at the center of this stoners’ sect. He had piercings on his tongue and ears. The phoenix tattoo on his back, I reckon, is what stole Rosa’s heart. Anyone would argue that she was just a girl following her heart. But no. She wasn’t just any girl. She was my sister, and so she was my blood. Just as embers flow in me, she ought to have been fire in flesh. She was not. She was only 18, gullible and innocent. He was 25, manipulative and psycho. The Pharisee in my mother would describe him as “a blind lost soul with little access to light and chopsticks”. I was careful not to add anything on such a heavy line of poetry that had become a burden and an anthem in our household. She would never let them be together.
Why would a teenager do so much for something she knew so little about? The thought of cheap love dividing a family was so lame. During those early years, I’d constantly ponder on this, how so wrong it was and stuff, forgetting I was barely 10.

And like any other young flower, snowflakes would tear me apart and the sun would tarnish my fragrance as I journeyed along destiny paths. I was not immune to life!
I had only felt it twice. Once in the cemetery where I witnessed Grace, the love of my life, marry my best friend. The other, at a church in Soweto as Olaf, my brother, presided over my daughter’s funeral. I could take my heart to a tailor right now and have it fixed, but removing my tents from the past I constantly visit is out of question. I have tried. I have failed. On my knees, in tears of a praying Hannah, I lay my pleas bare to the heavens every single night. Trusting one day, my wait will bring me a renewal of strength.
For so long now, my insides have burnt in a raging fire of having to live with voids I can never fill up. No matter how much I sacrifice, this has remained to be the same old script with the same old villain, myself. Digging deep has only left me with dirtier hands. These ashes have greatly plagued my future. I’ve seen it rise from afar. It comes in white and red, like a potassium pill on a cold-water surface, it douses as it ignites. A flickering flame withstanding the tests of time, not on my chest but inside my head. Most of my memories have been shrunken; small pieces that hang like bats on the back of my mind, are the ones I grasp so dearly. I still remember how cold winter evenings were warmed up by Maria’s presence. She was an angel, and I miss her every single day. All the things she was, growing up, and who she became, made me proud as a dad. Her passion for art marveled me. I felt so blessed fathering such a gifted soul. The best experience of being a single father was coming home from the hospital to her, all cuddled up with her cats on the couch. She would sense my arrival, sprint to me and spring into a huge hug. She always knew I got her gifts inside my bag or under my coat. Other days, this would be a surprise whenever I woke her up. We rarely talked about her mother’s absence, though I felt she’d keep on asking questions and I’d have to tell her the sour story. On my bad days, she’d grab her violin and play it in the lounge. I listened to her all that time as I wrote poems, a gift I discovered within me in my high school days.

No other place I’d call home besides nights like those. The sound on the strings she rocked deluged with emotions. It brought me peace on a parallel plane to what had grown inside of me for three decades. The years I closed my eyes hoping I wasn’t opening them to my ability to breathe, yet I remained stuck in a movie theatre that only played the putrid parts of my life repeatedly.

‘The deepest heartbreak poem would leave an audience soaked in tears, logic and rhetoric, unable to contend the overwhelming silence that strikes at the end of the last word. Like a watchman would wait for morning, they would wait for climaxes, casting their hearts in the profound depths obscured by the palpating pain. It would be poetry how vivid it snatches their imaginations out of reality into a sinister sea. Sometimes, in the dead of night, it would crawl behind them, lick the back of their ear lobes and hiss, a whisper so loud almost tearing their throats apart. Each single line would be carelessly placed, one after the other, hitting misery subsequently, with its fingers, tips on, and on.’ ~ I once wrote.

Lost on this side of the backstage, I listen to the tragic story of my life. I am almost certain that this monologue won’t eat me alive. Or if it does, it would have saved me big time. I’ve fought in wars, rang death occasionally, seen love crush me, and peekaboo, I’ve slept with a hooker! The common denominator of these sacred aspects of my life being not what they took away from me, rather, what they brought. A vase full of wilted wildflowers with spikes and thorns. They shifted through the layers of sand under my feet, gradually pulled me down and plunged a hole in my chest. From it, exudate and guilt flowed, into it, coldness and agony. Regrets and remorse peeped from a distance as I counted the curses I was blessed with.
My malicious mind keeps reminding me how failure has stained my mind. I giggle sometimes as I stare at the broken glass I press between my palms; this frail statue grimaced by disgust, my heart racing and a ghost smiling behind me. ‘Turn around,’ she would say. ‘Turn around and put yourself in a casket.’ I was tempted to but didn’t. Instead, I peered right into her eyes and shrugged, ‘You never broke me, Agnes.’ Even when I knew it was a lie, I said it with conviction to nurse my bruises. Wounds inflicted by isolation, indecisiveness and perceived failure. A plethora of illusions masking these tedious acts as the burden of emptiness gets trapped within me, falling in depression episodes and diminished death debris on a slippery cliff, holding on to a tiny string above abyss valley.

“The sun will shine again, you will sing again,” Olaf said, “You will love again!” His voice held a hint of wariness. The congregation barely said its Amen when I heard a muffled voice that sprouted right behind me, “So shall it set.” I felt stiffness in my neck as a warm mist deluged in my imbalanced brain. The silence that came at the end of his sermon was overwhelming. I paused to wallow in thought. I closed my eyes, bowed my head, letting my chin press against my beards over my chest. Then I opened and everything was before me again like a movie in Charlie Chaplin’s times, black and white. Agnes sat beside me and I could feel her glare piercing through the other corner of my skull like a needle. I pretended to be deeply lost in the pages of the holy book. My fingers ran through the verses as my eyes followed in unison. The words became vague with the passing second, but still Agnes wouldn’t get her eyes off me. She grabbed my right hand and pulled me close to her then whispered in a coarse disturbing tone, “Love is a weakness.”