I’m no good at arguing. I get too overwhelmed and my mind goes blank, so I say nothing.
❖
Ma insists that my friendship with Nyasha will only result in pain. She insists that foreigners are crafty, and that Nyasha is only being my friend to steal all my knowledge and overtake me. This is what foreigners like to do, she says. They come to our country to take from us all the things we fought for.
I’ve given up trying to reason with Ma. When I go home on weekends she makes me take off my clothes at the door; she doesn’t want me coming into the house with Nyasha’s charms and black magic. It’s her way of getting back at me for leaving her and moving in with Nyasha.
If only they knew how similar they were, how much they have in common. They both want me to hate white people, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to hate foreigners, either. I don’t want to hate anybody. It’s tiring. I’m already so tired from work. It’s much more than I can deal with at the moment.
But they constantly remind me that I must. They retell old stories of deceit, of conniving, of looting, and then share new ones. I don’t want to disappoint them, make them worry that I’m unfocused, that I’ve dropped the ball. So I often just nod in agreement and hope they’ll stop. But this ball is too heavy to carry. It hurts my arms, and with it in my hands I cannot do anything else.
❖
So I don’t tell Nyasha what I did with François at the Christmas party. And when he walks past me in the doctors’ parking lot and smiles, she’s immediately annoyed and goes off on one of her tirades.
“White men think they can just smile at a black woman and she’ll oblige. They think we should be flattered that they even see us. No, not just flattered, honored. It makes me sick. Even the morbidly obese ones, who could never summon the courage to approach one of their own, think we’ll just drop our panties at the sight of their skin.”
I pretend not to hear, mumble that I have pre-op bloods to take before the morning ward round, and rush off.
❖
Nyasha is a lone wolf at work. I never see her in the doctors’ canteen. She always eats on the run. She’s polite with the staff, but she doesn’t care much for small talk. I don’t even bother asking her to have lunch with me. I know there’ll be an excuse. I recently learned that there are other friends, a writing group that meets weekly, where she goes to share her poetry with others. I learned about the group—and the other friends—not because she’s ever cared to tell me, but from the Post-its on her wall, the makeup on a Wednesday morning, and the reminder on the fridge. I don’t care that she’s never invited me along. I wouldn’t want to go, anyway. Who still meets to recite poetry anyway? That’s so ’90s. Maybe it’s a Zimbabwean thing. Who knows?
❖
There’s nothing worse than having a good dream disrupted. You can’t get back into it. I dreamed François and I were on a quad bike, me nestled cozily into his crotch as he directed us through hills of mud. I was in a bikini, a white bikini, unconcerned that blood might come spilling between my legs and ruin everything. But the phone rang twice, then three times, then nonstop, so I picked it up. I knew as soon as I heard Ma’s voice on the other end, rambling about Aunty Petunia not inviting her to Seipati’s magadi, that I should never have answered, and that sleep and my dream were irretrievably gone and I’d have to listen to Ma for at least another ten minutes before I could make up an excuse to get off the phone.
❖
I hate mornings because that’s where all the sadness waits. From the ringing of my alarm clock to the fighting with my hair to being late anyway, despite how hard I try to prepare in advance. My car is a casket that daily carries me to my death. I ask myself over and over if I shouldn’t just leave, start over, go back to the beginning, but then the voices in my head begin to get loud.
“What will you do if you quit?”
“You’re no good at anything else.”
“Do you want to waste six years of your life?”
I try to tell them I’m not good at this anyway, that I’d rather waste six years of my life than the lives I can’t help. But they don’t want to listen.
❖
Sometimes I see things out of the corner of my eye. The red washing basket on the floor is a squatting man in a red hoodie, trying hard not to be seen. Sometimes a fork rises from the pile on the dish rack. When I flick my head around to catch it, it lies motionless, cold and lifeless. I ignore these cracks in my psyche the way a smoker ignores the occasional speck of blood in his sputum. I dare not ask the obvious. Am I going mad?
If my mind were to fall apart, what would become of me? Would I be just another has-been lying numb and drugged in the female psychiatric ward watching medical students poke around in my file?
❖
I feel like I’m on a bus hurtling along the highway at 150 miles an hour. I’m not clear where we’re headed and fear I’ll hate it when I get there. The people on the bus aren’t my friends. The driver doesn’t hear my pleas to stop. Nobody does, and I’m not sure if I’m only pleading inside my head. I can’t
