Prague, Czechoslovakia
Photo: Kevin Andre
You really are the most beautiful thing in my life. The key.
The major lifeline. You are paradise, but you don’t belong
to me. You never did. You belong to someone else. Some
other. This is addressed to two people, and not meant to be
confessional, but it is. Two loves. Two others. One day I
will lose my mother. One day I will lose my father. Be alone in
this world. That will be game, set, match. You’re a paradigm
shift. You’re trig, you’re a trial, you’re a science textbook, whose
chapter on the mind interests me a great deal. There’s nothing
to love, only love itself. That is the only reward. You still
have the Sylvia Plath Effect on me. You go and do your hair.
Emerge from the salon with Slavic-cheekbones. The dark hair
you didn’t inherit from our mother, or father. You look as
you feel. Other. Flirt with being European, while the rest of
us look off into our non-European background. I wanted
him to hold me again, but he didn’t. I wanted him to call me,
me, my love, again. But he didn’t. I wanted him to write, but
he never did. He let me go. Like the others he let me go. Like
you, my flesh and bloodline, my gene pool. You too
let me go. I was in a hospital, but you didn’t come and see
me. I was in Prague. It was surreal. Dadaist. It was a non-
reality, then an ache, then a heartbreak. Like you. I hate you.
I hate you. I hate you. Once you were my beloved. I swam
in rivers, then oceans, then not at all. It made me feel exposed.
It made me feel being. Something of Rilke’s letters to a
young poet. You can’t just leave me. And you’re leaving.
You’ve been to the embassy. You’re the curator of your
own life. Your own museum, a genius experimental work-in-progress.
I can’t forbid it. Forbid you to leave me, and if I let you
go, what will happen to me in the end. I will become a leaf,
and fall to the ground, with no belief. No defying of gravity, the ache
will come with an entire community. It will be made public.
With the sun’s beautiful trauma in my eyes, you walked
out on me. They say that I’m unwell. That I have stopped
taking the medication. That I have no desire to live anymore.
No desire to pay attention. I’m just planting a church.
Testing the sea’s waters. The atmosphere of clouds in my
coffee. This is just another season in my life. You have children,
while I have none. One day there will be no one like me. No one
to look after me. No one that looks like me. No more reaching. That
will cease like the seasons. Praying for rain. I see the outside man,
like a tidal wave. It is the inward man that I love the most.
The very tsunami of him, like I love Michelangelo’s David.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Abigail George is a Pushcart Prize ("Wash Away My Sins") and Best of the Net ("Secrets") nominated South African blogger (Goodreads, link on Piker Press), essayist (Modern Diplomacy, Ovi Magazine: Finland's English Online Magazine), aspirant filmmaker, activist, playwright, anthologised poet, chapbook, grant, novella, and short story writer (Africanwriter.com, Hackwriters.com), contributing editor at African Writer, editor at Mwanaka Media and Publishing, and the writer of eight books. She has two chapbooks forthcoming in 2020, "Of Smoke and Bloom" (Mwanaka Media and Publishing), and "The Anatomy of Melancholy" (Praxis Magazine). She has been published on many online global platforms. She writes about women.
