On the way down from Karasburg to Cape Town, Mark told me that he was going to meet up with this Swiss woman down there and that we’d all have fun. She was gentle, mysterious and sexy. Not like me. She was kinder than me too. What wasn’t to like? Mark ended up feeling left out.
After a day in a car together, I mustered enough self-respect to escape the metaphorical threesome.
“I’ll show him. I’ll eat our stash of Nutella,” I said to myself.
You inquired in a deeply serious yet non-threatening voice, “Are you stealing my food?”
Hold me, thrill me, kiss me, kill me.
Still not yet turned towards you, I smiled. I felt thrilled. You’d come to represent my first great dare. Daring to become more me through alchemy with the other. The corners of your mouth reached your big ears. Your tired eyes drooped at the outer corners and squeezed shut beneath the enormity of your smile. Soft, sweet and wet with delight. At 22, your 30 felt so sagacious.
I laughed. You laughed.
We sat down. I ate Nutella and white bread while you ate sushi. You lived at the hostel and worked at a Japanese restaurant.
Within about 10 minutes you said, “You know we’re going to fuck tonight, right?”
I replied, “Naturally.”
You, aiming to shock me, ended up shocked. We laughed and our faces held our grins as we kept talking. Our faces would ache from smiling over the coming days.
You told me your name, meaning blood of the soldier in Turkish. I told you what experiences pained me most. You told me your dreams. I told you my fears. I told you something about your mother. You told me something about my father.
We were no longer strangers the next day as we walked around Cape Town holding hands. We stopped here and there for espresso and other refreshments, breaks for our sweat-dripping hands.
I called Mark and told him I wouldn’t be joining him on the bus ride back, I would be staying a couple extra nights. He said that he’d stay behind as well and that he wanted to meet my friend. I said, “No,” I said. “I’ll see you at the bus stop.”
That night, you and I got our own room. Surrendered and surrounded in the ecstasy of your full embrace, I traced my hard nipple up your ass crack. You shivered and then cried. I had my own petit mort from giving that to you. I woke up the next morning with a new lease on life.
We stayed in touch and at some point I said, I’m sorry, it’s getting serious with someone. You said, “Fucking Italians.”
You were part soulmate, part con man. Country-hopping every six months. Money schemes. Multiple wives. Essential insight. You changed me and you changed my life.
You’d get in touch with me sporadically, finding me every couple years. Once you found my office phone number in Italy and when my colleague handed me the phone saying it was someone in South Africa, I thought to myself, “No, it can’t be him.” ‘Hello?” You said hello by singing your song of me. We’d talk on the phone all night and then poof you’d disappear again for a couple years.
Hold me, thrill me, kiss me, kill me.
We’d get in touch for episodic bursts of encouragement centering the goodness in one another that we remembered from the days down by the Cape of Good Hope. I’d suggest you go a bit slower and more sober about your ambitions and you’d suggest I get bolder, embracing more the raw dignity of the fool who proceeds before certainty arrives.
The Santa Muerte Tarot