was in too much shock to pick it up or touch it. So I simply sat on the edge of my bed and watched as it began to go round and round in a small, tight circle. Finally, when I couldn’t take the noise any longer, I reached down, turned it off, threw it back into the drawer and slammed it closed. I stared at the drawer for a while, my mind racing. Trying to connect the dots of all that I was seeing.
This was me.
A woman that no one knew, or liked, for that matter. Who lived in an apartment that looked like a morgue, ate bland and boring foods, spent most of her evenings, it seemed, at home on the couch watching Netflix and reading books about facts and then, at night, coming in here to read from her favorite book and . . .
I cringed.
But the picture I got of it all was so depressing and sad that I wanted to cry. I could see myself, even if I couldn’t remember it clearly, as a lonely someone, reading romances that only other people got to live and pleasuring myself because, clearly, I didn’t really get it anywhere else. The vibrator in my drawer was not a sign that I was sexually awakened, or kinky, this was a sign rather that I was all alone. I did push. I pushed away, I never pulled. And I was sure, looking down at my bed, that I’d probably never pulled anyone into it.
Ever.
CHAPTER 34
I woke up drenched in sweat. My pillow was wet and my hair was stuck to my face in tentacle-like strands. I sat up on a loud inhalation, sucking air in as if I hadn’t been breathing for a while. Lightning bolts in my head. Flashes of light illuminating pictures and memories and . . .
I jumped out of bed. I felt unsteady on my feet as memory after memory hit me like flying debris. They were chaotic and random. Out of order. And not all there. I ran into the kitchen and flung open a cupboard, reaching inside for a bag of tea and . . .
I knew where I kept the tea.
I knew where I kept the sweetener that I put into the tea.
I knew that the button on the kettle stuck so I had to give it a shake before I turned it on.
I knew a lot of things.
I held onto the kitchen counter as the kettle boiled and I waited for the memory flashes and pictures to stop flying at me, so I could pick them up and order them into something that looked like a timeline of my life. But they kept coming. Each time it was something new, something I didn’t know about myself. Finally, it was over and I stood there, catching my breath.
I remembered. Not everything. I could still feel gaps everywhere in the fabric of my memory. But large chunks had been filled in, like a tapestry in progress. I mentally picked all the memory shards and fragments up and began sticking them back together like a puzzle, and when I was done, I knew so much more.
I worked at an ad agency, but not as a creative.
I had worked there for seven years.
I had lived in this apartment for seven years.
I lived in this apartment because it was across the road from my office, and I walked there. I did not own a car. I did not have my driver’s license. I was afraid of driving. That much I already knew.
I had studied online, I was too scared to go to a university, I had studied isiZulu and Arabic. Two languages. Arabic because I’d always dreamed of going into the Arabian desert like Amanda Stone in my book, and isiZulu, because, for some reason, I understood it. Although I couldn’t remember why.
I had lived in my parents’ house in Durban while I was studying.
Then I’d come up to Joburg when I’d been offered a job as a primary-school teacher.
I had lasted one day. The kids were all too dirty. They sniffed. Their hands were filthy and all I could see when I looked at them was germs. I had decided teaching wasn’t for me. And a job with less contact with people would be better.
I got the job at the agency through my landlord, whose son owned the agency and knew about the job opening. I think he only told me about it because he thought I