We lay naked in bed together beneath a Stone Roses poster. The bed was just a single mattress in the corner of a room in a three bedroom flat on the top of Yeoville hill in Johannesburg. We were both filled with all the hormonal excitement that goes with being seventeen.
Our bodies were tangled together, a confusion of firm body parts wrapped in perfect skin. We had been dating for two, maybe three months and the end of the affair was only three or four weeks away but in that moment we didn’t ponder such projections of the future.
She was warm and beautiful and talented, and probably the first girl I could reasonably say was my girlfriend without stretching the definition of what that label entails. I hid my lack of experience in all things romantic and sexual behind a wall of bravado. She had in the recent past told me that she loved me, which was both delightful and scary. She was also pushing for reciprocity of feeling on my part. There is little worse in the world than someone telling you that they love you and then falling silent and staring at you in expectation. I cared for her deeply. I’m certain today that given a chance then I could have one day loved her but I was young and the idea of that level of honest, emotional expression would take some time.
Tongues locked under the gaze of printed indie rock stars. Hands explored the geography of romance in all its complex detours, hills and vales, roads both smooth and muddy. She looked at me smiled and said, “I love you.” I looked back, it was warm, it was tender, “I love you too,” I lied. Her smile grew. Passion stole the guilt and hid it in a small corner of my heart and then went in search of a mutual orgasm to make itself feel better but the hollowness of that seemingly small deceit could not be tucked away and forgotten.
The night seeped away and life went on but now with the dread of expectation. The moment would come again when she would look at me with love in her heart and then wait for its return. Almost certainly the next time we saw each other.
The week passed by. I tried to recall how I felt waiting for its end but there was nothing memorable, school, friends, undone homework and cigarettes down by the river. The living was ceaseless, the universe was completely indifferent. It was only I who was changed. I wished that I had not said this thing. It was done only to ease my own guilt of not feeling the thing I should feel. I want to love you. You are perfect in this moment, this space, with me.
The weekend swung round and with no place to hide I set up a date to see her. We sat on the floor in my bedroom and I confessed to my crime. The words stumbled out of me, half mumbled, half whispered as I looked at the floor, the ceiling, anywhere but her eyes. She didn’t get cross. She didn’t scream but she was visibly hurt and that broke my heart. I think I started to fall in love with her in that moment but before I could realize it, it was over.
The relationship ended in the courtyard of a closed restaurant in the middle of the night after my sister made me sing Itsy-bitsy, teenie-weenie, yellow, polka dot bikini at a karaoke bar only a few hours earlier.
