Neither There Nor Here: Vhuludu, Memory, and the Ache to Succeed or Be Seen

I’ll never be Icarus, but someday I hope to have the courage to try and fly.

I’ll never be Icarus. I’ll never fly too close to the sun. I don’t dream big enough.

These are thoughts that constantly plague my mind as a Black South African woman who seems to be fading into an indifferent middle age. Sylvia Plath once said: “What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.” I find myself here, manifesting into this fear and also considering the Sylvia Plath method because there is absolutely no way that this is my life. I have so much to offer, I could really change the world if given a chance—but hey, that is neither here nor there.

They say depression fries your memory and I believe them because I am living proof. There are large chunks of my life I don’t remember, some due to cringe, but most due to mental illness. There are gaps that feel like entire years got swallowed by fog, and if someone tells me something that happened I feel inclined to agree, because what do I remember anyway? This is actually how I lost my ability to trust my own intuition.

I remember one afternoon when I was young and had just discovered I could sing. Not just sing, but SAAAAANG. I wrote down a full tracklist for the album I’d one day release, excited by the inevitability of my own future. I showed it to my parents, beaming with joy, and my dad tore it up.

He said no child of his would be a musician. But then he backtracked—maybe guilt softened his tone. He told me he and my mom used to have a band once. That they made music. I listened to their old cassette—Ncandweni Christ Ambassadors and Shongwe neKhuphuka vibes laced with the unconditional love children have for their parents, I thought they were the coolest people on earth for that. I didn’t care that it hadn’t “worked out” for them as musicians, I cared that they had dared to make anything at all. They had CREATED. They had followed an impulse. But that same day, MY creativity was shot. Something in me shut down. And I’ve been trying to resuscitate it ever since.

In family systems therapy, they say some parts of us get stuck in the age they were hurt. I think my inner child is still there. Still holding onto the shredded tracklist. Still hoping someone will tape it back together and say, “Sing, Bongmusa, sing.” My best friend has actively tried, almost successfully so, but I am still afraid that someone will come around and tear the joy singing brings me apart. I feel this way about a lot of my passions, even writing feels like I am seeking validation.

It doesn’t help that my career path has felt like it is in a standstill since I graduated, I don’t know what I am doing or why I am alive. I am quite bored with what I do professionally now, and anytime I try to learn or do something new there I am met with resistance.

I am feeling very depressed right now. I am living in a town without a support system, but I also feel lost when I’m back home with my people as a person who no longer lives there. When I go home for a visit, I feel like I have become a ghost in my own home. It hurts but it is not new.

When I was younger, my younger sister got sick with pneumonia, spent 3 months in hospital and I faded as a being. I learned then how to be invisible… see-through, someone who survives without any attention. I think that’s when I became the glass child—seen only in the reflection of someone else’s suffering. I was the firstborn, the first grandchild, but maybe I was once adored. I don’t really know because I do not remember and this is not anything negative about my sister.

Lately, everything feels like a filler episode. Seasonal depression has me finishing a piece I started writing back in Easter. I live in a town where I am a migrant labourer. A town that awakens my anxiety on weekends. A town that is quiet in a way that makes me loud in my own head and I am already loud to my people in person.

Solitude is not foreign to me. I don’t mind being alone. In fact, I often prefer it. But there’s a difference between solitude and loneliness. The former is a choice. the latter is a sentence. The loneliness creeps in while I wait for my air fryer to finish my quick dinner. It creeps in when I step out of the shower and all I hear is the silence of my thoughts. It sits beside me at 13h00 on a Saturday, whispering how much of the day has passed—and how much of it is still left to survive, live through.

I cry every time (which is often) I listen to Vhuludu by Muneyi, a song about solitude, written and sung in TshiVenda, a language I don’t really speak or understand, but I feel every note, every word. Sometimes I think I understand the language of ache better than my mother tongue.

I spend a lot of seconds thinking about death—not because I want to die, but because I imagine dying might feel less lonely than this. Still, I know God is not letting me go anytime soon. And if I’m going to live long, then: Please, God, let me love long, too! Let me love my life and what I do with it!

They say girl children inherit their mother’s nervous system. And I wonder if my mom has ever felt truly seen? Has she ever let herself fall apart without needing to be the neck of the family, offering support to the ‘head’ whilst fighting for her life against all the changes that come with being a wife and being mom? I joke that my mother is a “pick me,” because much of her identity is attached to her being my father’s wife but she really glows when she tells us about how she was chosen by my dad. Maybe that’s her anchor. Her proof of worth. Which I guess works because my dad thinks she’s his best treasure, but imagine the alternative…

During the COVID lockdown, I spent the pandemic in solitude. I was okay. I’ve always been okay alone (reiteration). But I’ve never felt whole. I’ve always been the one talking, smiling, performing—but never saying what I’m actually thinking. My sadness is dressed in jokes and laughter. My disappointments buried beneath years of silence and existing passively.

Queen Latifah’s character in The Last Holiday says, “You wait and wait for something to happen, and then you find out you’re gonna die.”

I would hate to die waiting.

I just want a life where I get to sing without any anxiety that I am betraying what my father wants me to be. Where I get to be loved without earning it or love without worrying that my mother’s homophobia might affect the future that I am trying to build with someone. Where my worst self is still welcome. Where filler episodes turn into plot twists. Where I can dream beyond again.

This is neither here nor there. Just like me. Just like this piece. Just like my yearning for more.

I’ll never be Icarus, but someday I might have the courage to try. Maybe I’ll also get to fly.

Sidenote/Digression: An expansion on Romantic Vulnerability I ache for a love greater than me, just like my mother. A love as reckless and free as diving into a waterfall. I want to be chosen. Held. Witnessed. I want to send messages like, “You’re my wife, you just don’t know it yet,” and not feel like stupid. And I am not a serial dater too. I take time to move on. Maybe too much time. I nurse crushes that will never flower. I want someone who wants me around. In varsity, I read about mine man wives—older migrant workers who take younger men under their wings. Sometimes these relationships are platonic, sometimes domestic, sometimes sexual. A way to create a home in an unkind place. A way to feel less lonely. I think of that study often, now that I work in mining. Then I have to navigate the dating scene as a gay woman who has not really experienced long-term queer couples with healthy love stories. Yerre, Jesus God me help me.