Fate II

Following on from my previous post, I landed back in South Africa, feeling a little depressed about being here all by myself as I had left India early and the rest of my family were only joining me two weeks later. As I mentioned earlier, after a six year separation, my father rejoined our family during the holidays back in India. I was not happy at the turn of events and it seemed like he was going to play a role in my life from the moment I landed back in South Africa. You see, the airport was 120km away from my home town, so my father had organized for one of his friends to pick me up from the airport. During the separation, my father lived in a town 45 minutes away from ours and this friend of his was going to take me back there so that I could get my father’s car and drive it back to my home. The town my father lived in was the ass end of nowhere. The most excitement that town ever experienced was the arrival and departure of the train. Despite my distaste at being forced to accept my father’s interference, I bit down my attitude and played nice - the guy that picked me up was a sweet old man and it wasn’t his fault after all.

We got to his house and he invited me in for a cup of tea before I headed off. Even though I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible, I knew that I had to be polite and so I agreed. As soon as I entered the house, I felt like I had stepped into another time zone, that of an old Boer world. Strange, the only part of the house that I remember vividly was the kitchen. His sweet old wife made me a cup of tea and the conversation drifted from my holiday and my trip to my father. Looking back, I am thankful that I ignored my initial mental rebellion at hearing anything about my father and instead opted to politely humor them, because it was the way they talked about my father that made me see him in a different light. The man they described was a completely different person to the man I knew. This person was loving, caring and most importantly missing us. I am not sure if my father ever opened up to them, but I think they saw a side to him that no one else had ever seen and I am not sure what made this complete stranger feel the need to talk about my father the way he did but I felt that his words came from a good place. And so it was that I landed up driving 45 minutes on a dusky African evening, through gravel pothole riddled road, re-considering the idea that was my dad.

I know this is a bit of a digression from the story, but it was only as I started writing this story that I realized the significance of that afternoon to the process of accepting my dad back into our family and to the decisions I would make in the very near future.

A few days after being back home, I bumped into Sweetguy online. It seemed like our time apart had helped our friendship somewhat. We didn’t have as many awkward moments, but I suppose my experiences in India provided enough material to keep the conversation flowing. As we were chatting, Sweetguy asked me if I remembered the guy we chatted to online a few years back, the obnoxious one that thought I was clicky. I did indeed remember the obnoxious guy and was brimming with excitement when he mentioned that ObnoxiousDude was online. I expressed my enthusiasm and carried on my conversation with Sweetguy. Eventually my holiday experiences came to a close and there it was, that awkward silence which continued for several minutes. Out of sheer boredom, I made contact with ObnoxiousDude. I was fully expecting a flood of obnoxious ooze from this conversation and to be honest I don’t quite know why I decided to make contact in the first place, but to my surprise he was quite the opposite. It turns out he was coming out of a serious relationship and I think he had exhausted his friends’ patience and needed fresh ears to listen to the pain he was going through. So he went on to spill his whole life story to me which shocked Sweetguy because apparently ObnoxiousDude is a VERY PRIVATE PERSON. Unless in pain it seemed. I think this may have been why Sweetguy did what he did next. I was supposed to drive my sister down to Cape Town when she got back from India and it turns out ObnoxiousDude lived in Cape Town, so SweetGuy got us to exchange our numbers so that we could meet up in Cape Town. And that was that.

I hardly logged on after that as my folks had arrived a few days later and I was trying to avoid any type of confrontation with my father, which meant making sure I spent as much time as possible OUTSIDE THE HOUSE, away from family. Fortunately for me, the days went by fast and it was time for our Cape Town trip. I was really looking forward to the trip because I had decided that I wanted to move down at some point during the year and this was a perfect opportunity for me to get a better feel for the city. I landed up staying in Cape Town with my sister for a few days and we landed up spending a lot of time together having fun - I needed that. While I was there, Sweetguy called me up and basically pushed for me to make contact with ObnoxiousDude. I wasn’t really all that interested but again, the only explanation I have for caving in is boredom. And so it was that ObnoxiousDude and I made sms contact and made plans to meet up that Sunday.

To give you an idea of how important these plans were to me, Sunday came and Sunday almost left before I realized that OH CRAP!, I am supposed to meet up with ObnoxiousDude, like two hours ago! I hurriedly sent off a message apologizing and as I hit the ’send’ button, a message arrived in my inbox. It was from him and I cringed expecting a very acid “thanks for nothing!” message…instead I got “OH CRAP! I completely forgot that we were supposed to meet up today…”

So once all the apologies were done, we decided to make it up to each other by making plans to meet the following day. This time, we did remember and that’s how I found myself, standing outside Primi Piatti’s at 7:30pm, tapping my feet waiting impatiently for ObnoxiousDude to pitch up. I can’t remember but I am pretty sure I sent him an sms reminding him of our meet up…just in case. A second later, a giant rounded the corner and since I was the only person standing outside, he made a beeline for me and I realised this was ObnoxiousDude. 6ft9, built like an ox. I am 5ft5…I could not believe how huge he was and the thought running through my mind at that point was “f***, you are tall!”. ObnoxiousDude says that I didn’t just think those words, but I actually said it out aloud…I don’t remember that.

After I stopped gawking, we exchanged pleasantries and decided to get seated, so we walked in and the waiter asked us if we would like to sit in the smoking or non-smoking section. Without so much as a glance in my direction, ObnoxiousDude promptly replied “non-smoking, please”. I was all “Oh, you are so glad I am a non-smoker buster!” - but in my head. We got to our table, sat down and I braced myself for those awkward ten minutes of perusing the menu and trying to make conversation about the food options the restaurant had, which would hopefully lead on to much more interesting conversation. Instead, we landed up starting a conversation right off the bat and although I cannot remember what we talked about, I do remember the waiter finally giving up on taking an order from us because we hadn’t even picked up our menus let alone decided what we wanted. Half an hour later we were trying to flag him down once we decided that we would actually like to eat as well. The conversation flowed easily, we covered so many discussions from family to education to life in general. We were in the middle of sharing another hilarious family moment when the manager of the restaurant walks over to us and announces that the restaurant is about to close. We both looked around, ready to be all “but the restaurant is packed!”, when we realized that we were the only people left. We didn’t even register what was going on around us…we were completely into each other. I was amazed and we both looked at each other with the same amazed look. After we settled teh bill, we landed up spending another half an hour in the parking lot laughing our heads off. Eventually we hesitantly decided we should probably leave before our parking tickets become invalid and we both got into our respective cars and drove off. As we drove out of the complex, me behind him, I couldn’t believe what an amazing evening we had and as he turned right towards home at the robots, for a second I toyed with the idea of following him. I didn’t want the evening to end. Instead I turned left and as I headed home, I watched his car eventually disappear in my rear view mirror and I felt such an intense feeling of sadness that the evening had come to an end.

When I finally got back to my sister’s residence, I sat in the dark, with my cell phone in my hand for ten minutes trying to decide whether I should send him a message letting him know that I had a fantastic evening. Eventually I decided, what the hell, and sent off the message. As I hit send, my cell beeped. It was a message from him about how he had the most amazing evening and he is so glad we met up. I was floating on air. From that moment on, we were in constant communication every day. We didn’t get to see each other again during my stay and three days later, I left Cape Town for home.

We both felt a really deep sense of sadness which really took us by surprise. We kept in contact via online chat and our cell phone bills increased dramatically! As I mentioned earlier, I did decide on moving to Cape Tow at some point, when exactly was left open because I couldn’t leave my mom by herself. I don’t think she could have survived that. This is what stopped me from moving out of the house for almost two years and even though my father had only recently rejoined the family, I had this unshakable feeling that it was the right time for me to make my way in the world. I can’t for the life of me justify why I felt this way because my parents had only been re-united for a month and it was by no means enough time for them to work through six years of separation and heartache. Maybe the picture my father’s friend painted a few weeks before had really stuck a chord of faith in my father as a changed man. My mom was very supportive of my decision and what my father felt was inconsequential to me. Despite how I felt, I knew that the only reason why I felt good about starting my life in Cape Town was that my father was back in our lives.

A month later, I was on a 12 hour bus trip to Cape Town. I arrived on a crystal clear, chilly February Sunday morning. Bright eyed and bushy tailed. During the month I was back home, ObnoxiuosDude and I tried to be mature and responsible and not get carried away by these pink fluffy feelings. We tried to do the mature thing and decided we would take things easy and see how our next face-to-face meet up would go. That lasted about two weeks before we realized that no matter how responsible we tried to be, we felt such an incredibly strong connection to each other that we knew, without a shadow of a doubt that when we met up again, we would feel the same way. That time had arrived and we were going to meet up for the second time ever in our lives that evening. We were both nervous. We had both discussed how we thought the evening would pan out….would we feel it again? would we kiss? Each of us had a scenario in our minds…and usually expectation leads to some form of disappointment. As I walked towards his car, parked in the driveway and saw him step out, made eye contact, I knew that it was not going to be a disappointing meeting. The evening was as magical as the first meet up. The evening came to a close as we drove back to my sister’s residence. He got out of the car and came around to open the door for me, what a gentleman! He walked me towards the entrance and I turned to him and we both smiled goofily at each other. He slowly leaned his 6ft9 frame down, cupped my face with his hands and we kissed. It was electrifying. I am not sure how long we stood like that, but it felt like a moment suspended in time. Even as I write about it now, I can feel how I felt that day, I remember the chill of the night. It was a postcard moment that will last a lifetime. And that’s the story of how ObnoxiousDude became TopDeck and how I met my soulmate.

So, if I hadn’t met FirstRealBoyfriend, I would never have become such good friends with BestFriend, I would never have met SweetGuy and i would never have met TopDeck. If my mom hadn’t pursued her dream of re-uniting with my father, decided to find herself a home in India, call my dad to rejoin our family then my father would never have rejoined our family when he did and I would never have been able to move to Cape Town even if I had met TopDeck through some other sequence of events. These two threads of events, happening in sync, were responsible for me meeting, falling in love with and building a future with the love of my life, my soulmate - TopDeck.