The last days of Spring/9

I have arrived at the hospital. But I have been refused to go in because it is well past their visiting hours so I am now walking towards the bus stop where I will pick a bus headed towards Engel’s street. I have gotten to the bus stop and while I stand watching the cars speed past, I am reflecting on the whole mess of love, which is unfolding around me.

I am angry with Tanya. I am angry with her for trying to kill herself over me; how does she think that dying will solve her problems? Or does she think that by trying to kill herself that I will now love her? Does she not know that instead of sympathy I will begin to feel resentment towards her? I cannot be blackmailed into loving her, how can she be so foolish as to think otherwise?

Yet in my anger I still feel a bit of sympathy and a bit of fear and I wonder how comes love can become so self-destructive? And as I reflect on what she has done and I try to understand her motives, I am beginning to see that I am not that different from her; I begin to see that it is the same thing that I feel for Adelaide, which is now making Tanya to think that I am indispensable to her and I begin to understand that I really do not have that right to feel anger towards her.

I do not also have that right to judge her because in judging her I am really judging myself; when she says that she cannot live without me, she is echoing the same way that I feel about Adelaide. And I am beginning to see that her attempt to kill herself is just the same thing as my own self-destructive journey into drinking and whoring.

We are essentially the same. Tanya and I are just the same; she is the bolder one, who is willing to be rid of her anguish at once-to violently be separated from the thing that distresses her, while I-the coward-choose the protracted route of self-indulgence, clinging on to the thing, which I detest. The thing which I detest…?

Can this be the same love that poets write about and romantic movies are made of? Can this be the same or have we both, without our knowing it, fallen victims to something else-a lot more disturbing? Something I detest?
I am now confused; It is beginning to dawn on me that the reason why all along I have not been able to “take things easy and enjoy myself” is because this is really about me.

I need to talk with Tanya and let her know what I am beginning to understand about us…about myself; I need to help her to begin to understand that maybe it is not me that she loves…I am beginning to understand that all this has to do with the way she sees herself and that for her to be able to get home…to Africa…I may not be the one whom she needs.

I will go to her tomorrow and I will talk with her before she tries to hurt herself again.