ALMOST A BRIDE (Open On Annie)

25

It’s strange how when you finally open yourself up to things, they come. Last year I’d been completely closed. I’d shut down, run away, drawn the blinds and hidden. I’d spent my days sewing hems and dreaming of sewing Trev’s penis to the wall with the sewing machine. I’d sat eating ice-cream stalking him and Tess on Facebook and had been paralyzed with fear, insecurity and embarrassment.

But the second I opened myself up- the second I decided to try and turn my life around and rebuild, a series of fortuitous events happened. Small at first, insignificant really, and then momentum started to build.

The first event happened only a few hours after leaving Mauritius in the Duty Free shopping area of O.R Tambo International Airport in South Africa. I had felt sick the entire flight, because I knew that with each minute that passed, the gap between Chris and I was getting bigger and bigger.

When we finally arrived in Johannesburg,  I immediately starting looking for some tax free chocolate to take the edge off the painful Chris sorrow, when I walked into a clothing shop. I was lured by the shinny things in the window.  Shinny things have always had that effect on me. I’m like a Magpie bird in that way- who steals shinny things to build its nest. I sauntered inside and stared enviously at a gorgeous pair of earrings that I could ill afford when I was tapped on the shoulder.

“Nice bag.” I turned and came face to face with a stylish African woman with a big retro Afro. I was not looking my best however, as my mouth was currently crammed full of chocolate. 

“Where did you get it?” She asked.

“I made it.” I was trying hard to swallow, but the chocolate contained peanut butter and was sticking to my pallet.

“Really." She looked it up and down, “I think tourists would love it, it has such a unique African flavor to it. It’s like Indian meets Zulu meets Cape Malay…”

Mmmm, I certainly wasn’t going to admit it out loud, but that wasn’t the intentional at all. In fact, the only reason it looked like that was because I’d made it out of all the off cuts and discarded items I could find at Patel’s.

“You know, it really does merge cultures so well, and captures our unique diversity as South Africans.” She put her hand on her hip and her fabulous, chunky wooden bangles clanked together.

I decided to play along, why not? “Mmmm, that’s what I was going for. I really wanted to give it a ‘rainbow nation’ feel. Really capture the essence of what it means to be a South African living in modern South Africa. It’s a visual representation of our multi-lingual, bi-racial, environment, and how that impacts us”…. BULLSHIT!

But the lady nodded. She lapped it up. She smiled with her full lip-glossed lips and asked to look at it.

She inspected the thing as if it were something foreign, and exotic,“ You know, I can really see that. The cultural binaries created in the layout of the fabric.”

“Mmmm, I really thought hard about positioning. One needed to accentuate the other,” BULLSHIT!

“You know,” She said ‘You Know’ a lot, “I’d really like to try and sell a few here. I can’t promise anything extraordinary, but maybe we can start with 10, see how it goes.”

“Absolutely,” And we shook on it.

“I’m Thembi by the way.”

“Annie.”

I went home that day feeling just a little bit better. I had the tiniest spring in my step. I think it had been a bigger blow than I had admitted, being fired and turned on by the industry that I held in such high regard. I had only ever wanted to do fashion, and had lost all confidence in any of my abilities over the last year. This- although not big- was a little bit of affirmation.

I stood in my house looking around, it was disguising.  There were still boxes that hadn’t been unpacked from a year ago. No shelves had been hung, so books and dvd’s were pilled up in the corners of the room. The shower was unused and currently acting as a storage facility. And it just all looked so damn depressing.

When I’d been with Trev, I’d taken great pride in my surroundings, everything was neat and clean and beautifully decorated. It was time to pull my pretties out of their dusty boxes and start turning this place into something vaguely decent. Sure, there was nothing I could do about the half -naked man outside just yet, but at least I could counterbalance the hideous view outside with something pretty on the inside

But starting was extremely overwhelming, staring into the face of a years worth of clutter and disorganization. I didn’t know where to start, so I started with the DVD’s that were strewn across the floor at my feet.

Until I picked it up….

Bradley Cooper stared back at me from the cover with those deep, dreamy blue eyes and I started crying. I was waling in fact, and threw myself down on the couch clutching the DVD. The familiar misery spot.

“Fuck No Annie!” I suspect I shouted that too loudly, because I heard the dog bark in response.

No, I had spent a whole year on that couch crying, and I was not going to repeat it. So I got up- still wailing- and continued to unpack boxes. I cried the whole time: it was almost comical. I wailed as I threw out the old things that I no longer needed, I sobbed as I started pulling out some pictures that I wanted to hang on the walls, and I moaned painfully as I went about trying to put up a shelf.

But at least I was doing something constructive- not wallowing on that couch. I swung around and glared at the thing. It was a beige three- seater, big, comfortable and perfect for lying on and crying.

I leapt at it with fury, I was going to get rid of it immediately. Sell it and buy myself a chair, one that I couldn’t lie on. I would sit upright, come hell or high water! But it proved challenging pulling the thing out of my lounge, it weighted a ton, and by the time I’d managed to drag it onto my tiny patio, I was finished. Drenched in sweat and out of breath.

I stumbled into my bedroom peeling off my clothes and climbed into bed. And then I noticed the ring on my finger. I looked at it for a second and allowed myself to think back to the moment when Chris had slipped it on. How real it had all felt and how amazing he’d looked in the setting sun. Our fake wedding had been beautiful, one of the best days of my life.

I took it off slowly and looked at it one last time before I opened my drawer and slipped it in.

Maybe I would wear it for real one day.

Just in case, I would keep it safe.