2012 - a tale of dark love lost

I've never been a winner. It's a reality I have to deal with every minute of every single day spent on a constant bullshit spree that doesn't really capture the truth of who I am. Who am I? This is a story that dates back to a moment when my life changed completely.

Flashback >>>DECEMBER 2011<<<Flashback

Congratulations, Mr Tlou. You have been provisionally accepted into the Journalism and Media Studies 2 course for the year 2012.

Back to reality!!!!!!!!

My life changed quite rapidly from that afternoon onwards. I made the conscious decision to drink a lot less and become the ideal student. I had been afforded a second chance to make right the ills I had committed in that extremely eventful year. I came back to Rhodes, a reasonably changed man.

The thing about change is that ... well, is that it's not easy to keep at. "If you keep on doing what you've always done, you'll keep on being what you've always been. Nothing changes unless you make it change." And now I'm citing a wonderful quote from a movie where Samuel L. Jackson shags his on-screen daughter. Irrelevant! I tried to fight it, but at the end of the day I kept on doing what I had always done and so nothing changed.

I got my first paying job as a journalist this past June vacation - working for Cue Newspaper. Oh, what a monumental bitch that was! But I learned ... I learned how to write better than I'd ever imagined possible, learned that even the Titans among us bleed red and bruise blue! I learned what it's like to give your all - day in and day out; to stretch yourself to points of flexibility hitherto unknown to the self. I learned what it felt like to win and lose on the very same day. I survived Cue, but I failed dismally in my academics. 

I remember that morning as clear as the screen before me. I was confidant of my impeding academic successes to the point of cockiness. How wrong I was . . . I saw my results and I died inside. That is the morning I lost the biggest part of me; my reason for being at Rhodes. The days thereafter were all the same. Mornings were as dark as the night - the afternoons darker still than the others. I was lost in a world of complete darkness; where nothing mattered anymore. I came back to Rhodes for the second semester - and burned myself out two weeks into the third term. I had worked myself to the point of depletion - I had nothing left to give. I could not see the light at the end of the tunnel. I gave in to the dark; threw in the towel and quit.

I stayed at Rhodes simply because I could not bring it upon myself to call my mother and ask for a one way ticket out. I sought out help for burnout - but it was too late. Depression had sunk it's talons into the fibres of my heart - and was squeezing the life right out of me. I had nowhere to go, nowhere to turn to but inside myself. I lived, and I found a flicker of light which gave me a sliver of hope for an coming dawn. But it may have come a bit too late. My body and mind were weak - and bronchitis took advantage of this; reinforcing depression's grip on my heart with a dark, twisted blanket of phlegm over my lungs. I couldn't breathe for coughing up pain and misery; could not laugh without cringing from the agony. And on my deathbed - she came to me. I had not seen her in a week or so, as she had been the cause of my burnout. The last straw which sent me spiralling out of control and further away from any hope of external salvation. Yet she returned to my side as I lay me down, gasping for air.

Enter Annabelle and Chris.

Setting: It's 11pm, Chris and Annabelle - having made up after their previous wayward moment - lay facing each other. Chris, struggling to breathe, stubbornly refuses Belle's suggestion that it may be time to mission off to hospital.

Annabelle:   Stop being so damn stubborn! You're barely breathing, and I refuse to wake up next to a corpse.

Chris:          They're going to put me on a drip, Belle. I'm not going. Besides, you don't see me freaking out over your constant wheezing. Relax, I'm fine.

Moments pass and Chris's breathing becomes even more faint.

Chris:          Hospital, you say?

Annabelle:  Oh, so NOW you want to go?

Chris:          Will you stay with me, Belle?

Annabelle:   Of course I will.

After waking his subwarden, Chris and Annabelle get a lift to the hospital, where Chris is admitted, placed on a drip and oxygen mask.

Back to reality!!!!!

I woke up on a hospital bed, my hand extremely swolen and painful from the drip. I tilted my head to the side and there she was, curled up in a hospital chair, uncomfortably tucked into my extra large nightgown. It was at that moment that I knew that I was in love with her - and she felt something for me too. The previous night had been quite an adventure laced with cabin-fever enduced content which I shall cherish for all my days. She left in the morning, but returned hours later. She came back to me, for me . . . twice.

I was discharged the following day.

She came to see me in my room - nothing had changed. A week later, she was with another man. I now sit in a rather breezey computor lab reflecting on the deteriorization of my happiness over the period of two months. My marks have gone up, and I'm now a sure-in for third year; my heart is healing - but I still feel like I could have done more to make her stay. A part of me feels that I may be better off without her in my life, but I'm afraid of the lonliness that is sure to follow.

I have been here before. I have loved one who's heart lay with another - and it killed me to know that I wasn't good enough for love. It kills me now, still, that I will continue looking in on love from the outside.

I have had an eventful year, no doubt. I was cast in my first production - Ukuphuthelwa (Insomnia), directed by Mandla Mbothwe. Followed by reprising a character portrayed by Samuel L. Jackson (Black in Sunset Limited). I got my first paying job as a journalist - as aforementioned; fell out of love with the woman who hurt me, fell in love with another who forced me to relive the traumatic experience of not being wanted. I danced with the probability of academic exclusion, drank with the Dark to the loss of happiness and I lived to tell my story.

 

I'm now 21 years old. I may not be where I had planned on being 3 years ago, but I'm extremely close.  Unlike a few month ago, I see the light shine at the end of my tunnel - bright as the sun's rays, clear as the full moon's glossy stares. Who knows what the future hold in store . . . All I know at this point in time is defeat - and how to conquer its inevitability one bloodied step at a time. All I know is how to survive the violent shit-storms that haunt my dreams and stain my waking days with dark spots which are damn-near impossible to get rid off. All I know for a fact is that I would not trade this life in for anything this world can possibly offer.