The Two Of Us

Chapter 09

        "She's fallin' in love now,
             losin' control now,
   fightin' the truth, tryin' to hide
      but I think it's alright girl"
         —Russ - Losin' Control

NOKUKHANYA MTHEMBU

Keeping a secret is more difficult than the word itself, especially from the people you love. She's one strong woman. She had to change from being open to being selfish. She had to care less about what would happen if the truth comes out or what would happen for the truth to come out. She had to focus of the brighter side, the fruitier side of it all. Secrets are not lies anyway, they're just untold truths. That's why she's pretended not to care when her mother, like an alarm clock, kept reminding her that the child will need to her biological father to perform their family ritual for her, for the past seventeen years. She knew it was true and that it might mess the child's life but it was too risky and she was not ready to take that. Or to make that sacrifice to be precise.
She also had to pretend not to know the main cause of the seizures that kept coming and adding to Ukhona's Christmas-groceries long list of problems. She had brushed Ukhona off when she insisted that they seek help from the traditional doctors because the western are failing dismally to come up with the main cause of the episodes. "I don't believe in those people, I am a Christian Ukhona and you know that," she'd say. She had to do it no matter how painful it was to see her daughter suffer from the consequences of her decisions. She's not heartless but protective.

It's funny how timing can be coincidencial. Today she woke up with a dream she now considers, normal and usual. A dream of a baby girl she's trying protect from the blazing fire. She know exactly what it means, "Izinkulumo zabaphansi". Her mother would tell her that the ancestors want the child home. It might be true but she couldn't care less.

Some would say she's a hypocrite. She doesn't act what she feels. She does the opposite instead. They may be right but sometimes being a hypocrite builds you and makes you stronger. The more you lie to yourself about what you feel the more you heal. Well, that's not true. She still remembers that four years she spent at University of Zululand. She had left a month-old infant back home with a plus one of a broken heart. She didn't want to see him but she still wish to bumb into him, just to see his face maybe for the last time. She didn't know that Mpangeni and Richard's Bay could be big as South Africa when you are looking for someone who has blocked you. Over the years she ended deciding and concluded that she does not want to cross paths with him. She told herself Ukhona's protection was more important that her teenage boyfriend. So she had to trade the love she had for him for hate to seem strong and be a good mother to her child. So she will not break down when Ukhona starts asking about her father but rather get angry and pretend not to care, like it's not a big deal.

She had to close her loving heart, lock away her emotional weak self  but that didn't end well either. It is the reason why she is still single at the age of thirty-four. She was scared to give her all in a relationship, she'd hold back and push the guy away when she think she's feeling too much. By the time she realised that, the bus to "will you marry me" had drove off at the station. She could only see the dust from a distance. She still look beautiful and even younger because of her slim body but the guys her age are all married unless she's ready to settle down with a fifty-year-old man who has just lost his wife.

She was not naturally born like this nor did she choose to be like
this but pain changes people. People always change after getting their hearts broken. She's one of them. No matter how hard she tried things just couldn't be the same and she knows they will never be. Her heart just couldn't feel the same, couldn't beat the same as that of her sixteen-year-old self. When she was happily in love with a someone's son and  promised her heaven and earth. The whole universe. Now that she think of it, Ukhona means the world to her. He couldn't be more poetic!