Dating : A flat white to go

The weekend that just passed was more emotion-filled than most of my weekends so far this year to put things mildly. My weekends always seem to be filled with social commitments that are never spontaneous and are always someone or other’s birthday. This leaves me with the strangest feeling of me being less than thrilled to start my weekend giving my time to other people and planning in my diary when I’ll likely have enough time to wash and dry my hair.

Friday afternoon brought two hours of traffic on my way home from a meeting, cue load shedding just as I step through the door of my flat, and then a birthday party shortly thereafter. We socialise and make small talk and the food options are actually quite inviting. I don’t know what it is with me, but when I’m hungry and can’t quite put my finger on what I feel like eating, it really sets my mood off. We take what felt like an hour to settle the bill, obviously with not all people calculating their sums correctly, and the manager even put on some music for us to dance. We were a table of ten plus that constituted the entire restaurant’s visitors by that time of the evening. I’d add that it was kind of weird but I was also dancing. We head on over to the nearest pub that allows for people our age to party in Pretoria that isn’t filled to the brim with underaged youths pushing and shoving at the bar.

My boyfriend and I had come home after only 20 minutes of people dropping their beer mugs and awful, awful deep house through substandard speakers with not a single sing-along to delight the masses.

I drove, so it should be mentioned that I wasn’t feeling festive, but regardless, I felt a very deep sadness in the pit of my stomach as I sat on a flight of stairs inside my apartment block as we overlooked the full moon. My boyfriend shared that he felt sad too, which seemed quite dramatic for the usually-understated man he is, and added that it seems a poison has spread over the town. Maybe we were just experiencing a case of sympathy syndrome — you know the one where you convince yourself that you have similar symptoms to someone you’ve come into contact with, and may even go as far as to sync periods as we do in my office.

The daily three bouts of loadshedding, the endless traffic, there being no welcoming, decent place left for us to have a drink after dinner with friends on the weekend as normal twenty-something-year-olds do, a mix of seemingly outdated cultures that can’t come to any sort of political agreement or achieve a glimmer of what a unified nation should be, all overwhelmingly added up for me at that moment — and even the seemingly full-bodied, shiny-yet-hollow moon appeared to stare back and sigh with us in agreement. We’ve been making a bigger effort to frequent new spots in Joburg and

The feeling left me waking up with the pain still in my heart, with it being cloudy and cold to match — weather it never is in Pretoria. We stopped for a takeaway coffee at my favourite little spot, and Fabio waited in the car. It was so full that it was bursting at the seams with new-comers eyeing out when those seated would leave with much intent. A dog with the cutest smile and teeth sticking out with an underbite came to say hello.

I bent down to give him some love, and he rolled over, tail wagging and nudging me all over. His owner asked me if I had any dogs, sensing my enjoyment. I burst into tears with quite the force and couldn’t manage to get any words out to order my two flat whites and crossaints for the road. The poor man didn’t know where to look and as if he wished he really rather didn’t. I took a minute to tell him that my dogs had recently passed away. He said that he was sorry and let his canine finish giving me the love I needed (I don’t know who needed it more) and the owner of the coffee shop gave me such a big hug. I hopped back into the car and cried all the way to Joburg and suddenly lost my appetite. A trigger like a song or a familiar name on a billboard, leaving me to only deduce that the brown-haired dog inhabited my dog’s spirit for a few moments to lick and love me another time.

Sunday was lovely. At lunch, I had a glass of the tastiest grapefruit gin and a huge veggie bowl to console me in the most wholesome way. I didn’t really feel like going, but I’m really glad I did. I laughed and I didn’t have to cook — Life’s up and down and up again.