Moscow in Autumn
By: The Kalahari Review
Tags: Nonfiction, African Literature, South Africa, Abigail George

Moscow in Autumn

Beautiful scenery glowing in a cemetery. Everything is a poor substitute for life but perhaps I am looking in the wrong place. My sister, you looked difficult. All or nothing. My alchemic resonant. The baby of the family. Everything smells like rain. Her eyes. Parachutes. Parachutes in winter. Teeth all in one place. I say this with love. Pithy honest hair discerning absolutely nothing under a spotlight. I watch everyone. Their rituals. Epic people. Scholars of trivia arriving with breathing lessons. Armed with them. Always arriving with flowers. Arriving with proteas. Mirth. Left thinking of Sunday lunches on dining room tables. The butterflied lamb, the mint sauce, the potatoes, and gravy of intermittent life. Testing the sun’s full house. The fuller house of truth. It felt like truth. The black and blue river turning green under moonlight. Water for company. Glee in grass. The roots somehow there. Like a paperweight. Before. With cool detachment. Running up stairs. After. Fetching water in a bucket in the graveyard where the dead sleep. The light a freezing blue. June, my birthday month. June, the middle of winter in post-apartheid South Africa. Snow’s winter talk. A paradise all in white. The invitation. Yes, my sister was the difficult one. I was the one who was easy to please. She was the marathon runner. She was the baby of the family. We kept secrets from her, like the fact that my father had a mild stroke.

Mum, the kitchen genie. Shark teeth. Knocking on the old world with a great appetite. Fire of the ancients. Unbuttoned starlight. Heaven’s tongue. Paradise’s mother tongue. Naming her incandescent light. Naming sunlight. Exposure. The open window sings. The dark leaf settles. I study their cartilage. On the evening kitchen table. Precious celery stems. Down my throat a land of thirst. Put new experiences in boxes. This parched summer. Silent comrades. For poets that I love. There is a restless infringing. The soup’s salute. Hair. Tangled fringe benefit. Shoreline stops there. The lampshade. Monster season of lightning. Thunderstorm. Floral mouth. Mum feeds the spirited baby. He is a poem. Hot climate. Fork makes excavation. Oven is on grill. Mascara. Fish fingers and hot tea in an absent-minded storm on the plate. Chill in the air. A birthday sunset. Lonely rain. Hours land in a flurry. Falling into rain. Portraits in smoke and mirrors. Thumbprint of adolescence in a fleeting whirlpool of memory. Swaziland. Blue peacock feathers. Habitat’s mission statement. Nature grows on trees. Inside the icehouse. Understanding self. Consciousness. Skating on the lake.

A minority comes to me in dreams. In the shape of angels. Before September, I was storing up penguins. Cats. Women can wear many hats. Myth. Legend. Symbol. Destiny twitching. A passing contradiction. I step into light. I worship lonely. Flesh smelling of ancestors. The human stain stayed. The groomed dusty road. Scabs mock. Abandonment day. I call them wounds. Stripes. Pure writing rituals. Thank goodness for rituals. Plath. Thank goodness for graves to remind us that we are still alive. Tea and crumbs. Paying my respects. Angels with long necks. Stone wings. They are made of mist. A cold, wet, and pale sun. Winter guest, I have received my orders. Years have passed me by. Stars. The Milky Way. I ate leftovers of fat ghosts. Smelling of chicken. The juices in the pan running dry. Mother’s milk. The blood spot incarnate. Flux. Moonlight. Unclassifiable gem. Phantasmal antic. Sticky abdomen. Eating its way through larvae. Call the ambulance. Daddy is not moving. I can hardly breathe. I am that glass butterfly. It is wearing grass slippers. The cut to my heart was ample. I stuff velocity onto maps. Let it mouth empty formulas. Let it get personal. Leaves have circuits too. Make like a fist or an astrophysicist. This soft knot a gift. You never explored the scrubbed clean flesh of a child. The purity and intuition of shrinking bones. Your skill has no road. You are a dodo bird. I cannot take my eyes off you. I like your kind of despair. Anoint me. They still have a lustre. Prayers. Veins and all. Shells treasured. Driftwood was a keepsake. Dream after black dream. It was my own fault. My open river. Sea. Ocean. Shoreline. My scrapbook. Being toward death. Ushering in a new kind of neighbourhood. White moths and butterflies. Flame for supper. Cogs and wheels turning gingerly. Inside their grooves.

The ballad. Up. Down. Up. The sky is full of grief’s biology. Intricately locked down. Her moods go. I can see her mute soul. Stellar. It goes forth star-spangled articulately. In an eternal dream childhood world. Doing abdominal crunches. She flirts with everyone. She wants everyone to notice her. Her funeral kisses are desperate. Magic is a killer. My skin will survive our father. The child I dream of having. Metaphor. The beauty of the child never changes. There is no scarcity of love. Melted boundaries. If I put my head on a pillow. The moonlight is a prize. Desire is a garment. Weeds sprout in the yard. They do ballet. Pirouettes. War is everywhere. I cannot live without a kitchen. He wounded me. I found myself. I know what the word history means. In my hometown. This empress. Self-portrait in a fog. Sanity is an elaborate costume. Hold my hand. I am fragile. Discern the long winter. Broken places. I do not want to go there. Sanity. Let us go there instead.

I walk through empty rooms. I stood in the music room. Looking at the piano. The piano I could not bring myself to touch. I remember playing it in childhood. Perhaps my children will play it. I remember Vincent playing it. He will be flying to Long Island. I do not ask questions anymore. I know that will be the death of me. The music room is an office now.

My brother’s office space. He sat behind two computers. He works in Johannesburg now.

He has a son. A girlfriend. He wants to have a family. Then I will never see him again.

Already he is different on the phone. When I cook now it is just for me. He is no longer Peter Pan. I remember childhood. It is a different planet Earth. One filled with toys. Art on the walls. I am all by myself except for dad. It is my job to look after him. Somehow, life does not get easier. I thought I would have those kids. I thought my life would be epic. That I would be a media legend. That waterfall has gone. My nephew plays the piano. His fingers bang on the keys. Life is great when he is around. I can see myself in him. The baby of the family. Then the silence seems to grow. It becomes as large as a room. I can see my brother, the introvert. I worship him. He worships family life. I guess life begins at thirty-six.

No matter what they call it, it is still a stranger to me. Bipolar. You who have blessed me with fire, and inhabited me with creativity. You who have stayed with me for the longest time. There is something beautifully awful in both madness and sanity. I wish I could hold onto sanity more. There are bodies and words. There are words and there are bodies. I could make a monument out of the depression. A prison cell out of the suffering. The sadness. Biting the filament made out of tungsten. Knives were in the air just waiting to backstab me. Oh, they were social up to a point. The day was as yellow as daffodils. I know what pain is. Scars. Rain. Wounds. Tears. Dark waters rising up to meet moonlight. Pale March. Autumn breeze in post-apartheid South Africa. Rushes right through mourning me. Washing rubbish away. The wind was chilly and fractured. The psychosis was a black river. The aftermath of a melting storm. The sea was a glittering neon mass. The doctors gave me the tools to call myself crazy. The city is quiet. I read my old diaries where he existed. The English teacher. That I was half-crazy in love with then. Love, all love is beautiful, but I still had to learn that, give in to that euphoric feeling. I was still in love with him. Convinced that I needed him like air. Jubilant death knew of me. I did not know him rather well. Found myself in the woods not far, from where I lived in a dream. That soon turned into a nightmare. The light seemed swollen but it always did that way in the afternoon. I mentally had a flashback to high school when no one would speak to me. I pretended I was a scorpion. Therefore, they had every right not to.

How do I keep track of my poems? What is a good night? In my dream, I am in a glass room. Not experiencing any drama or social pitfalls. It is the most beautiful room I have ever been in my life. Something is missing. Poetry is missing. I am too afraid to touch anything. Afraid something might break. The furniture covered with sheets. The sheets covered with dust. The ceilings made out of glass. It reminds me of the series of hospitals I was in for my depression and psychosis. In my best dreams, there is the floor covered with poetry. I fill notebooks with poetry. In the dream with the glass room, there is no poetry only free speech. I find utopia in my poetry. I could not run I had to walk in the cold passages of the mental hospital with their shiny floors. I could not yell, scream, or sob. I could not write in the hospital. I had to present myself to the doctor. Paste a smile on my face. My brain is getting older. I worry if I am aging gracefully or if I am growing fat, lazy, more dependant. Is this what freedom is? Running around, and trying everything while at the same you are having a nervous breakdown. I have grey hair at my temples. The thing is I do not keep track of my poems. They are all on the computer. They will live there like dust like fairy dust and gossamer wings and they will go there to die. I do not know how they feel about it. People do not read poetry. People do not read period. I keep track of my poems sometimes by reading them aloud or rereading to myself or sending them to poetry magazines. Well, the best ones. The crazy ones. I wake up from the dream in which I am in a glass room. All I want to do is write poetry.

The arrangement of the Milky Way. I wonder if loneliness has touched it too. The aftermath of it. The haunting of a meteor shower in its illusion. Is it hungry for company? It is beautiful up there. I prefer wolves, lions and tigers. I like my stars up in the sky. Not within reaching distance (not like the swings or the slide). There must be guardians of the Milky Way. There must be a lost and found for a brief history of time. Does it chase the encyclopaedia of the sun? Not everything is ‘beware of the dog’. Not everything is agriculture or genetically modified.

You will survive me. If we survive. We all think that we are alone. We buy each other gifts on our birthdays and at Christmas. At Easter, we exchange hollow chocolate eggs. The arrangement of light and goodwill blinds us. Our aloneness. Well it becomes a mantra. We feed off on its gift. Imagine it is gills. We sketch breakfasts. The wilderness histories of it all. The golden butter and toast of it all. Omelettes and French toast. Eggs and bacon. We all take turns.

Meal preparation turns into an era. More is more. Eating and creation is a gift. Every child given a chore. One makes the salads. Another will peel the onions. Another finds glory in scrubbing potatoes in the sink. Recipes taken out of context by the baby of the family. She makes the dessert. Blueberry cheesecake made from scratch. The kitchen table, counter tops turn into chicken skins and peels. Basketfuls of fruit. Green apples. Daddy is diabetic. They are for him to snack on. Well in case, he gets hungry. We have survived each other. Even hurts have deaths, and bad blood. Blood is thicker than water. If we were empty vessels, we would be able to bang our heads together like coconuts.

I did not ask his name. I came upon the boy in the late afternoon sun in a parking lot one day. I found myself talking to a boy after a workshop. It was years ago but I remember I got goosebumps on my arms even though I was wearing a winter jacket and it was a warm day. He had beautiful hair. I remembered all my writing rituals. It took a while for him to land there on the page. It was kind of an impromptu landing through prompts. Going through old diaries. Was I supposed to remember him or did I just forget that I had to remember him? This stranger. It was difficult to say what linked the two of us in that moment in time. It was not blood instead — the blood was rushing to my face as a river flows. It was as if someone had drawn a circle in chalk on the ground around us casting a spell over us. I did not ask his name. He did not ask for mine. When we spoke, he had an easygoing manner. We were two plants who spoke the same language. On the surface of things, you could see we were two different races. Complete opposites. I fear many things. I fear the mannerisms of a real man. The air was ancient there. Electric. It is quite important to fall in love.

I felt I needed to put my doppelganger out there. I do not fear pain anymore. I deserted him in the end. Made up some excuse. Girls do that. It is part of their insane nature. To shield themselves. He made me feel territorial. He had sad, beautiful eyes. He was too perfect. Me, afraid of love. When my dad went to the hospital, again cough syrup was soothing. I had been sick with the flu for weeks. One day an exotic little flame lit itself up inside of me and for a short while, I was happy. I could even write. I got more acceptance letters my birthday month than I could live with. Happiness to me was telling stories. I told myself that the sea could not always glitter. Only when it was rising up to meet the moonlight could it glitter. I realised it was water-fat making my orchid from the mountains of Fuji grow.

I stopped wondering if he was ever coming home again. I thought it best. I watched series reruns on my laptop into the early hours of the morning. I forgot about the things we used to do. The long talks we had. The endless cups of lukewarm microwave tea, we drank. I knew I could never be happy ever again. I hated the ride in that paramedic’s van. I hated the long wait at the hospital. The words ‘trauma unit’. Going to the ward with my dad half-asleep on the bed. He just was never the same. Then the flame was gone. Things went back to normal after that. More rejection letters. Less acceptances. I read on the bottle it could also be addictive. I sat next to the hospital bed watching my dad sleep. Did he recognise the sound of my voice? When my father went into the hospital. He could not eat or swallow anything. His eye swollen on the one side of his face as if someone had beat him up really badly. I wondered if he still remembered me. His daughter. If he remembered the ride in the paramedics van. I felt lost. I felt as if I was Alice in her trippy wonderland. I even had my own Cheshire cat, Gilmore. A tomcat that my brother’s girlfriend had given us after we had picked up my nephew from her place. Beware of the dog.

I have such a beautiful language. Lasagna too speaks such a beautiful language. Bolognaise. Mystic pizza. Only one person in the entire world knows how to translate it other than me. That is my dad. I have to declare that he is an enemy now. When he speaks, it is a voice I no longer admire or am in awe of. However, he has a pretty craft. Taught me simple skills with special instruments. Like any carpenter would. He taught me well like any father would teach his daughter. I hope he does not feel lonely where he is tonight. There is a winter in my head, my heart, inside the lining of my lungs. All around me in my environment. I miss my father. I wish he were here. I have to stop asking when he is coming home. When I asked God for a role model, he delivered one. I was particularly impressed by the snow that shocked me this winter. Its whiteness. Its wet coldness. It had an alien quality to it. All the roads leading into winter. I have not made up my mind yet if I miss him. If I miss a part of him. My heart has to make its own mind up. Daddy has been in hospital a week now. His recovery is slow. That is the meaning of being weak. Infirm. It takes a long while to recover. There were other infections swimming inside of him. I want all of him or nothing. I loved him during my own heartache, brokenness, and I wish him all the best. A speedy recovery. What would home be like on his return? A home with a caregiver. I would have to be more involved. I wish he were here now. I wish he never relapsed. I wish it were not so cold. I miss him.

Something is untitled. Christmas in Swaziland. The last time my second mother was alive. The water in the river is brown. I know if I swallow any of it, I just might come down with something. I stay in the river’s hole. It is the day after Christmas. We are in Swaziland. We are having a barbecue outdoors. I am in a vegan-phase. I will flake the pieces apart with my plastic fork of the white fish in the tin foil. Yes, I will be having fish. I cannot see to the bottom of the murky water. There are days when I feel dead to the world. Then there are days I feel so alive ready to jump out of my skin. Those are the mania days, touched by fire days. Family is the most important thing. Do not sit like a stature, my mother said. I think she wants me to be more involved in the night’s festivities or in the kitchen. She wants me to help cook and not eat. Not be an observer. She wants me to be more like my cousins with their fine hair that dries without a comb through in the wind. They have hair that does not curl when it is wet. I wear a bandana wrapped around my head like David Foster Wallace. I could scream. We light fireworks at night. We do not have to put dogs in the garage. They do not have dogs. In place of dogs, they have avocados. It is a warm night out. Summer. The trees are full of overripe avocados. My aunts, my mother’s sisters and my mother park themselves with cocktails that come in a box readymade in deck chairs. We light sparklers. There are leftovers from Christmas Day’s buffet-style lunch and Boxing Day. The women cooked and made the salads. Beans, leafy greens, pasta, and potato salad. While the men watched sport on television and drank too much beer. The men, uncles and fathers, their stomachs are round and soft. Potbellies. Their voices chilled out to the maximum. They demand food constantly like children. I looked to my heart. Felt eternal gratitude for family life.

Winter talk. I know what dignity is. Daddy, I need to know that a replica of you exists outside of yourself. Somewhere in this world. You promised you would stay with me forever. That you would protect me forever when I was little. What will I, the grown up me who is only half-a-woman do without you? When you are far away? Nobody can compete with you. Fill up the missing space. That you left behind. You have become a stranger to me overnight. I can make furniture out of sticks. A fireplace out of broken, dry twigs. Arrange stones in a circle. Voila. A fireplace that I can warm myself by on cold nights. You are as beautiful to me as the weather. I miss you absent father. I feel myself withdrawing more and more from the world around me with you not around. I eat cake more. I know I must be more forgiving of myself. Of course I know I must not eat cake as if there is no tomorrow, but what do I do when it feels as if there is no tomorrow with you gone. With you not here. What can I do? You are no longer there. Who am I sheltered, protected from? Who is the real me? I look at your shirts. I look at your pyjamas. Your socks. I miss you terribly. I do not pray anymore. I am going under. There is no one to save me.

You would think a sleeping pharmaceutical or that a drink would help the cause of an insomniac. I have a pharmacist. He serves me well. It is a world of pharmaceutical delight out there. When you need to sleep for every candy bar, for every packet of crisps, for every slice of cake, there is a pill. You see, I understand pain. The taste of it is always bittersweet. Yes, there is a place for pain in all life. I understand that now in volumes.