Hi, my name is Marlize and this is me.
She sits in her leopard print nighties on her red leather chesterfield look-alike chair and looks at her reflection on her phone screen. Facetime calls are difficult for her. Science have shown that people are mostly attracted to a photo when they are in it, and now with Facetime being a thing, she struggles to look at the person on the other side of the screen, instead of at herself.
She’s never had a problem with her face. Although. recently she has had more trouble looking at her own reflection. She looks drawn… almost as if she has been chiselled out of stone. She also looks yellow. It’s forever been a thing – when she gets stressed her skin tone goes from a healthy tan to a jaundiced yellow.
“It’s all about control,” she moans to the listener on the other side of the line, who is also hacking away at her keyboard, “civilization as we know it, is balanced on a knife point and we could lose it any minute.” She bites her bottom lip. When there are no fingernails left to tear into the flesh, her bottom lip is always next. A while ago, when a friend’s life hinged precariously close to destruction and she had to go and help out, her bottom lip was raw by the time that she reached their home.
The past few years have been interesting. That is an understatement. Since 2021 she has been hopefully praying against all logic that that year would be the year where God would snap his fingers and put everything back into place. But nothing was in place. Nothing had a place. Everything was bunched into chaotic suspense, and it was as if she lived in a constant state of holding her breath and anticipating destruction to rain down.
Then her teenage boy sent her a link about “How you introduce yourself.” Watch it, he wrote, it is good. And it was. Thing is, she doesn’t know how to introduce herself. What does she say?
“Hi, my name is Marlize, and I am a mum.”
or
“Hi, my name is Marlize, and I am Andy’s wife.”
or
“Hi, my name is Marlize, and I am a coffee addict.”
or
“Hi, my name is Marlize and some days I am hot and bothered because I am nearing menopause, yet I still have my period religiously regularly. But my body is a vixen and does not let me know when she is going to start with a new trick, like being a week late and scaring me that I may be pregnant, despite not having had sex in a while. I mean, how do I tell my husband and only sex partner for the last 29 years that he is going to be daddy, but it was an immaculate conception? No one told me how betrayed I would feel by my body changing. No, I was not pregnant.”
or
“Hi, my name is Marlize and I hate it when people ask me to please not write about things they tell me, because writing is part of breathing and when you tell me things and ask me to not write about it, you ask me to not be myself.”
or
“Hi, my name is Marlize and I believe every woman is exquisitely beautiful and deserves to have at least one photo of herself where she can see that beauty and it breaks my heart when she doesn’t and she carries her self hatred as if it is a badge of honour.”
or
“Hi, my name is Marlize, and I am fat. I would like to blame it on many factors, but I think it could be that I just eat too much.”
or
“Hi, my name is Marlize, and I am a good friend. I am a friend to people who have lived lives that will make other people turn around and walk away from them.”
or
“Hi, my name is Marlize, and my children spend too much time on their screens and some days that is a welcome habit as it means that I don’t have to mother. Does that make me a bad mother? Not wanting to mother?”
or
“Hi, my name is Marlize, and sometimes I wish my husband would stay quiet for a minute and not talk to me, because I just can’t take in more words into my already saturated mind, but I don’t say that to him. I am thankful that he still talks to me and I love him more today than I loved him yesterday.”
But she does not introduce herself that way. She is so aware of the box that people have put her in. A goody two shoes square. A holy square. A humble square. She is so aware of the preconceived ideas people have because they never really get to know her. She is afraid of her own darkness, so she walks the perimeter of the confined space of their knowledge of her.
Her Facetime friend tells her that she must go. They are installing a new stove at her home today. The sky is blue, and there are white wisps breaking the blue. Her home is quiet. She’s had two cups of coffee already. The warmth fills her belly. It is 7:06 on Friday the 5th of February. This year is still in its infancy. In 9 days’, time it is Valentine’s Day again. Maybe they should have KFC and ice cream, like they had when they started dating more than two decades ago.
She thinks about her mum having health issues back in South Africa and about her sister, whose birthday was yesterday. And she knows that her worries are nothing compared to what they must go through all alone.
She thinks again about how she would introduce herself.
“Hi, I am Marlize, and I won’t judge you.” Yes, she thinks that is a good way, because she hopes that people, when they are faced with her darkness, will give her the same courtesy.