I often attach easily to people but feel no sadness in letting them go.
It’s an emotional ambivalence bordering on psychopathy. It’s as if I
always perceive relationships, platonic or otherwise, as accidental
Not too long ago, I went to visit somebody in the northern KwaZulu-Natal town that housed my primary school. My travelling mate and I decided to take the short drive inside the premises of the school.
The complex seemed ghostly and dejected. It was during the school holidays and the only person in what was a co-ed boarding school was the principal and his wife, who had both been there for at least 25 years.
The memories of those primary school years engulfed me as I stood there, even as I seemed to dwarf the very buildings that constituted some of my most uncomfortable moments.
The boarding school had since been shut down, the principal told me, because it had become too expensive to run.
Set free to roam a space I had not seen since my departure for high school in the early 1990s, I instinctively walked towards the building where, as an eight-year-old, I sat with my mother the day she had come to visit me in probably my first year of boarding school.
On a grassy spot adjacent to the dining room, overlooking a field where children played football and ran 50m sprints, I had looked into my mother’s face and asked her when I would be able to come home.
“In six weeks’ time,” she said. “When the term ends.”
All these years later, this is still my defining moment of boarding school.
The painstaking countdown of six weeks. The strain on the umbilical connection I had with my mother and the resultant relationships forged out of a necessity to survive emotionally.
The irony here is that, for the first 16 years of my life, home itself was a boarding school. My mother worked as a nurse at another boarding school for much of my life, dropping me off 160km away, only to go back to tend to other people’s children. A return from my school meant a return to hers, forlorn as the high-schoolers deserted it for their own homes.
Thinking about it now, I realise that my mother was never fully mine, investing her energy in other people’s children as a way of investing energy into me. She became something other than real — a kind of archetypal figure with infinite resources. But of course she wasn’t that.
Before boarding school, I saw her as something of a narcoleptic, falling asleep while trying to shove a spoonful of supper into her mouth after a day of standing.
On the odd occasion, I recall how the experience of being locked away in the care of strangers profoundly altered my sense of belonging to things and people in general.
I often attach easily to people but feel no sadness in letting them go.
It’s an emotional ambivalence bordering on psychopathy. It’s as if I
always perceive relationships, platonic or otherwise, as accidental
(in)conveniences.
Interactions with my closest friends, some of whom I have known since those primary school days, tend to follow the pattern of long silences and almost romantic reunions, as if we share secrets about human nature that only our forced communion could unravel.
Of course, the socialisation of men into gendered groups carries with it a whole host of problems that often manifest violently. In my case, I guess it is the constant search for solitude that could be perceived as cold and calculating. It is not so much the desire to be an island but a piece of an archipelago, adrift.