One warm night at the beginning of my second year at university, I found myself stumbling on the sidewalk in front of my house. I had been hosting a gathering, or rather, I was foisted into hosting one, as often happens when you are young, drinking, and your place is the closest to both the official venue where the night begun (our department of study) and the establishment in which the festivities were to continue (our group’s bar of choice). In fact, my house was almost the exact midpoint between the two accepted locations of our convergence. It easily became the unspoken place to drift to at that time of the evening when the serious work was over, but it was yet too early to begin the serious play.
At this moment, the usual faces and I were beginning to emerge from the insincere kind of play that tends to fill the hours between evening and midnight. This precursor to the real night’s event—where conversations, mistakes, and flirtations couldn’t be pinned on anyone with certainty—was coming to an end. Although I played the entertainer, floating from one thick, giggling circle to another, much of what happened that evening didn’t leave a lasting impression on my memory. It was, after all, just a practice round for what followed—a shadow party, a rehearsal.
This gathering was, after all, filled with people I believed to be close to me but who, as it turned out, were merely waiting for me to slip up. They were looking for any sign of the humanness we all try to hide—an excuse to stop feeling guilty about the resentment they’d harboured toward me from the moment we met—a resentment rooted in the unfortunate way women are sometimes conditioned to feel.
The little I do remember is padded with the heaviness of red wine. We drank from styrofoam cups filled with Namaqua. We were outside, then inside, then outside again. We took turns dragging from a joint composed of weak Eastern Cape weed and, at some point, a friend and I performed a short movement piece in the spare room while no one else was looking.
Later, my department senior-cum-boss let me know she was in possession of ritalin and, being that this is the type of thing university students do when they’re in for a biggish-small party, we proceeded to the bathroom to crush it on the toilet seat and snort it through a R20 note. Why did we go immediately to the toilet seat when we were in a private home and, technically, could have done the same action on any other (more hygienic) surface?
Perhaps it was a habit.
Maybe it was because we had gone to the bathroom to pee and the conversation had simply come up while we were in that location.
Or it was to hide our actions from others so that we did not have to share.
Regardless, that was where we did it.
I remember thinking it was odd at the time, silly of us, but going along with it anyway, in the way one does when they’re younger and red-wine-drunk and “The Host”. I also seem to remember the lights being off in the bathroom. But that’s absurd. Why would the lights have been off?
I was not yet 20 at the time. I was clouded by an air of innocence, which I myself did not understand. Although I had my share of rebellion during high school; I had started drinking at 14, had my first kiss with my best friend’s 18-year-old brother (a warm entanglement in his bed while his strict Christian parents slept a few metres away), dabbled in smoking weed, wore see-through shirts, and straddled boys in darkened fields behind party venues, I was completely unaware of the real workings of the world. In fact, I had never even touched a man beyond kissing, and the complex intricacies of adult emotions, of losing oneself to intimacy on every level, was a foreign concept.
Indeed, my interaction with the world had always been surface level. A game that I entered and exited at will. One I believed I controlled. I was lost in a childlike foray into danger, a sort of playful expedition into faerie land. Tentatively, I ventured onto the tightrope of womanhood, but only because I wrongly believed there was a safety net beneath me. This, I told myself, is a practice round. I thought, naively, that other people understood this about me. That they saw beyond my waist length dark hair, big-doe eyes, blow-job lips, fuck-me tits, and all out invitational behaviour to the truth underneath.
I was wrong.
Around this time, my best friend and I were taking our first steps into love. Both of us had been somewhat overlooked romantically in the past, and suddenly, we were overwhelmed in very different ways, by all the new attention we were receiving. A few weeks earlier, we had attended a university event—a field party, where our somewhat more experienced friend, the ring-leader of our trio, had taken 16 shots of tequila and disappeared.
My best friend and I were ourselves in the process of disappearing, leaving the event for more established drinking venues, when we fell into a disagreement. I wanted to go to the club where people got white-girl wasted, danced, and generally behaved badly. She preferred the bar where cool, artsy people sat, chain-smoked, and discussed the politics of expression.
We were, in fact, happily on our way to the club when we ran into a group of friends (boys) who were heading to the bar. This group included a guy I was trying to get over, who was just a bit too unreachable for me, and a guy she was trying to get under, who was just a bit too old for her. We mutually decided it would be best to part ways.
I ended up following a dazzling blond boy to the club I wanted to go to. I finished the night by completing the ritual and following him to his bed. In this moment, I once again found myself on that tightrope: a short exploration of taking on new facets of personality.
Who am I if I do this, but think that? Can I be both?
I was not the sexy girl panting, legs wide open, waiting for him to unleash his desire on me. I was terrified of him, how I felt about him, and what it would mean if I let him touch me when I knew the things I knew about him. But I was more terrified that I still wanted him to touch me. More than that, to love me. We did not have sex that night. I thought I could just get it over with, but at the last moment, I could not. Told him as much. Said sorry. He pulled me into his arms and told me I should never have to apologise for that. He kissed every inch of my face, trying so hard to reach all of it at once that he flew over it, brushing his lips not on my skin but the air above it.
“You are so sweet,” he told me.
I fell in love with him that night and stayed in love with him for five years. But we never kissed again.
My friend, who had followed her own leader, found herself in a similar position. Unlike me, she did not run away, ashamed to admit her own inexperience. From that night, she started some sort of affair with the man who would eventually break her heart. I watched with an almost hurt curiosity as she transitioned into something different. Something I could not quite reach. It was strange, as someone who was wrestling with their own sexuality, to become an audience to a friend ascending into theirs with such graceful ease. Especially when that someone, until now, had been a fellow faerie-hunter, a comrade-in-arms. I was shocked.
Each time this new side of her was exhibited to me, something in me recoiled. She was unfurling in front of me into something more layered and intricate. It made me uncomfortable.
All for sexual freedom and the newfound happiness of my friend, I loudly supported her budding relationship. I crudely asked her for details, messaging “Yas, queen! Did you get laid?” Yet, I turned away when she spoke. I warmly accepted her late arrival to our planned meeting on the university lawns, delayed as she was by an unexpected invitation for an afternoon delight. However, I couldn’t help but notice, with a certain repelled interest, the light sweat covering her skin.
I suppose I felt some resentment. We had, after all, taken off from the same starting block. Her suggested success in love, though gratifying to me as someone who dearly cared about her, did place into stark contrast my own apparent failings. She was the person I knew I could turn to in moments of rejection. Unlike some of our other friends, I felt she shared the certain submissive quality that I had when interacting with others. A sort of deferential oh-yes-you’re-right attitude. I admit, I enjoyed not having to kneel to her whims.
She was my go-to when discussing my problems, perhaps because I felt her issues didn’t outweigh my own. With her, I could feel equal. So, a few days after we parted ways during yet another night out, I took myself home, dejected and licking my wounds, and I called her.
It was the early hours of the morning and my reasons for calling were partially to check if she was safe, partly because I needed some pandering, and to some extent because I assumed she, unlike our other friends, would not be busy. She answered the phone panting, distracted. I realised my mistake with a begrudging sadness.
She was no longer my playmate.
She was making a move that I was not yet ready to make. A move, through intimacy with another, to claim herself. Through giving up herself to love, she was finally allowing herself to be beautifully selfish. To choose what she wanted over what her friends/family/teachers/society wanted from her. Unaware of her chosen partner’s inadequacy, she believed she was giving herself all that she truly deserved.
This, after all, is how women are allowed to be selfish while still walking the tightrope.
By the end of that six-week term, he made the Adult Decision that she was not mature enough to continue a relationship with him. He didn’t want a relationship. At 26, he had just gotten out of a serious relationship and was heartbroken. Living back at home with nothing going for him. He was stressed about adulthood and his own lack of success. As a man raised in a certain society, he had no idea how to express or deal with these emotions. To be honest, he didn’t have the time or energy for a 19-year-old to love him. He did not, however, make the Adult Decision of cutting ties with her completely. Removed as he was from that place of innocence, he did not understand what his continued undefined presence in her life might mean. Centred, as he was, on his adult exploration of freedom and phallic gratification, he let her continually fall back into his bed as nights were winding down and starting to feel lonely. He did not consider how this might intimately affect her relationship with relationships themselves.
He had never been a 19-year-old girl.
He knew nothing about the tightrope.
I remember the night he ambiguously ended things. We were sitting on the porch of her house. Them on the dilapidated couch which looked out over the road, me on the ground below them, facing up toward their unpenetrable pairing. At the time, I knew something Not Right was happening. I did not find out until the next day the extent of what he had done to her. All I saw was her quiet compliance, her unwavering attention toward him as he sat coldly surveying the road. The friend I had known was no longer. She lived in a different world now. A world ebbing with the ever changing shapes of all-grown-up attachment, I could not yet understand I could not understand. Quietly, I sat with my own hurt jealousy and, the next day, when she told me in unfinished choked-up sentences how he shut her down, I pushed down my relief and tried to tend to her as any good friend would.
My relief was premature. Some part of me must have believed that the removal of his influence would bring her back into our safe, shared universe. My friend would return. We could once again play the game. But her safety wheels had been removed and she shot ahead of me, free-wheeling endlessly downhill. Disappointed, I tried my best to support her even though I had no frame of reference for her experience. I definitely did not do her justice. When he did allow her back into his bed, she received the invitation with such happiness that I supported that too, ignoring the Not Right feeling that now came to characterise this man in my head.
This is what brought me, stumbling, to the pavement outside my front door on that warm evening. I was waiting for the gathering to exit my house so I could lock the gate. While the majority of the revellers, done with practising and ready for something real, made their way up the street and around the corner, I was left behind, waiting on the stragglers to finally exit my front hall. My friend stayed with me. Fogged as I was with all the contradicting substances that were coursing through my bloodstream, I do not remember how we reached this topic of conversation. However, we found ourselves (of course) discussing her relationship with her half-hearted man. Even though he outwardly ended things, she said, he still wanted to be with her. She admitted to searching for ways to tempt him back to her. She admitted to receiving graphic pictures which, fogged as she was with all the contradicting substances that were coursing through her bloodstream, she pulled out her phone to show me. Blinking, unbelieving, at the screen, I felt a cold and sharp pressure in my chest. An emotionless scientific interest, mingled with outrage, and perhaps a tinge of fear. It was a sensation that was foreign to me then, but it would not be the last time I felt it, as the concept of sharing such images became a more accepted internet phenomenon.
But I inspected the picture she guiltily shared with me, I could not help but react with a repulsed fascination at the subtle aggression of their conversation. I was looking through a window at a world I had not entered, but one that I was perhaps, not unlike my position on that warm evening, standing at the lit doorway to. I discovered that I had no interest in entering. Though, theoretically, I was sex-positive, I felt something about the pictures were dirty and wrong. I felt incensed at the ease with which this man had sent them, joined by cajoling messages suggesting how much my own dear friend might have the desire to do something about them. I was taken aback by the ease with which she received them.
Innocence, sexual curiosity, and the desperate need to be accepted as I was by another, fought each other for control throughout that year. As my friend fell deeper down the rabbit hole of this man’s making, I found myself digging deeper into my own hole. I tripped up over others’ feet, terrified of stepping on their toes. I sidestepped my friends’ issues, which I repeatedly and deferentially accepted as more important than my own. In trying to escape from the unreturned love of that dazzling blond man (and the woman I felt had more claim to him than I), I fell back into the arms of the original just-too-unattainable guy I had tried to out-run before (angering a different woman) and a man who had no business trying to kiss me (but did anyway).
Each time I believed with naive sincerity that they saw me on that tightrope, that they were willing to take a moment to look beyond the outward brazenness I exuded to see Me, uncomfortable and confused, underneath.
Each time, I reached the doorway and I saw them beckon me inside, saw the easy cajoling aggression that awaited me there, masked as freedom, sexual and otherwise.
Ultimately, I stayed out on the sidewalk.
Serena Paver is a queer dance and movement psychotherapist, writer, and embodied creator. Born and raised in Cape Town and currently based in London Serena has received degrees in theatre and psychology from Rhodes University (Makhanda, South Africa) and the University of Roehampton (London, England). Serena’s work centres on the body, mental health, (mis)communication, and human connection, and has been published in IHRAM Publishes, Transnationalism, Foreign Literary and more.