God Gave Me Kurt Cobain

Every night when I go to bed I am confronted not by the demons of the past but by the wraiths of the future. Maybe it’s just the vision of my own black cat crossing my path, the fact that I have broken countless mirrors in my lifetime or that I walk underneath the ladder stored in the garage every day.
I think it’s just paranoia, but it still sucks.
But maybe it’s because I am finally really happy, almost boringly so, and not used to this kind of feeling.

Actually I’m used to total chaos. I mean at school things were relatively straightforward. I had more time on my hands to get bored with and did kind of cool things with it, like glue a bunch of beads together and then throw it out the window.
And when I met a boy I worked out strenuously every day seven days a week until my body was perfect. But he kept going back to this other girl so I kept at it like a…well a teenager.
But then he went back to her anyway.

Then time was spent on writing AWFUL self loathing teenage poetry to the croon of Radiohead’s Bulletproof.
And then writing TERRIBLE self pitying songs in a dark room with my guitar.
My sister once asked me if I wanted to be Kurt Cobain.
I said no I want to marry him, duh.
She said he has been dead since 1994.
After waking up from my faint, I explained to her that Kurt Cobain is my DESTINY!
Nope, sorry sis. He’s definitely dead.
Shotgun head dead.

After doing the necessary research to moot this preposterous notion I had to do an hour of extreme cardio…because it was true.
I suddenly realized I've been praying every night for God to give me a dead man as a groom and here I was mourning the death of the most beautiful and romantic future relationship.
But at least I knew he went to heaven, I mean with that face and voice he could go anywhere.
Wait a minute… no, no I think the face and the voice and the minor incident where he accidentally killed himself might have caused him to go to hell.
What does the bible say? THINK THINK!
Oh yes, I think it said something about some guy that went to hell begging for just one drop of water on his tongue but then just a little bit later God yanked him out and took him somewhere else. Ah yes, it was Lazarus.
Well I was saddened by the thought that my Kurt might be in such torment so I went to my sister and asked her if she thinks we can pray for someone after they have died?
She said knock yourself out.
So I did. For about a month, I think.
So hopefully Kurt is in a Nirvana of sorts now, probably playing a harp instead of the guitar but man I bet he is ROCKING that harp!

About ten years after the tragic loss of my future rock star husband I was dancing in my favourite club called Zeplins. My heart had recently been shattered by my first true love and I was rappelling off the wild side of the cliff’s edge, if you know what I mean.
So there I was doing my thing, funneling straw rum, bouncing from guy to guy trying to get some attention (don’t judge me, my self esteem was slightly compromised by being dumped by someone that said we were meant to be together forever even in the afterlife, that God said this to him (Really? Did He have a very deep voice? Because it could have been the janitor).
I was about halfway through my tenth quadruple gin and tonic when I saw him.
It was Kurt Cobain. But less dead. And younger.
I stared at him for as long as possible without people noticing the sad, weird little 6 staring at the magnificent, can-get-any-girl-he-wants 10.
It was about a week later that a friend of mine said she saw a cute guy but felt too shy to go chat him up and when she pointed at “Kurt” my heart sank.
He would go for her. She had long legs, clear skin and sky blue eyes.
She was an 8.

I realized that my chance to talk to him was fading rapidly so I volunteered to go chat him up for her. Well at least get him to come over.
So I bounced over to him on a 150% flirtation velocity power.
I said dumb things, he didn't say much, there was a roaring in my ears and my blood was the raging rapids in my arteries.
Somewhere in the conversation which was very short, because I kept inhaling and forgetting to exhale and worried about exploding disgustingly in front of him, he came back to meet my friend.

They dated for 3 effing years.
Three years of pure torture.
They came over to house parties, braai’s, movie nights, everything! I couldn't stand seeing him so often because it fanned my crush and I loved my friend so I knew I had to get it together and keep it together.
But it was a real challenge.

I couldn't make eye contact with him for fear of starting a conversation…about how beautiful he is.
I couldn't smile at him for fear of him smiling back, in which case I would be blasted into a fantasy world in my head where he is mine, which I couldn't do because that would be wrong. So I avoided the smile.
I also couldn't be with him in the same room without lots of other people there which was sometimes very difficult. As groups move, some people move as a bundle and some move in their own personal space, usually after waiting for the throng to get through the doorway first. “Kurt” and I obviously had that same condition because we were always the last two to get out of the room.
Now this might seem stupid but even a second with him next to me and the others trailing down the hallway was temptation enough for me to grab him by his shirt and scream I LOVE YOU PLEASE MARRY ME into his face.
But friendship came first for me in those silly days, so I worked hard to delete my feelings.
Eventually when they broke up he disappeared and I thought I would never see him again.

But about 5 years after that, out of literally thousands of people, I ran into him and his new girlfriend who I barely saw (except for the fact that she was skinny) because I was agonizing over the insane cruelty of life.
Here I am running into this man, looking hideous.
I was going through an identity crisis, you see, I had cut my hair super short, dyed it bright red and decided to pick up like a 1000 kg’s as an afterthought.
He seemed pleased enough to see me again but not exactly falling over his feet. If I was a 6 before, I was a 4 now.
We chatted a bit and then said goodnight and split up again.
I thought I was never going to see him again.

But about 2 years after that I ran into an old friend, from the Zeplins days, who invited me to his birthday party, and BOOM!
There the man stood in his friend’s living room looking leg bucklingly beautiful as always.
While I was staring at him, a very skinny girl came from the right and said “Elmien!”
And I said: “Do we know each other?”
And she said: “yes silly, we met at that big party about two months ago, when my boyfriend didn't even introduce me” (some resentment in voice).
Oh, it beautiful man’s girlfriend.
Ever heard that song by Avril?

Hey hey, you you I don’t like your girlfriend, no way no way think you need a new one, she’s like so whatever, I can do so much better.

I am not proud of how I behaved that night. I was recently divorced and had nothing left to lose, so I went in firing on all cylinders and flirted shamelessly with him.
“Hey nice to see you again, such a pity you have a girlfriend, we could have been making out in my car right now”, I must have been high off my rocker.
I even tricked him into having our picture taken, just the two of us. Forced him to put his arm around me and then bit him on his armpit. He barely blinked an eye.
So I shrugged my shoulders and accepted the fact that this 10 will never be interested in a 7 like me
(by then I was thin as a rake, my blonde locks were back and I had had breast augmentation surgery, thus the upgrade).
But for some reason his girlfriend wanted to be friends with me and after a while, I started liking her too. So once again it was the situation where a friend is dating my “Kurt” and I end up dodging eye contact, smiles and alone time in rooms/cars/churches/whatever once more.

When they broke up I was devastated. The two of them had become my best friends, now everything would change. I knew I could never be friends with him because of the fact that my sporadic urges to overpower him might get in the way.
I thought I'd never see him again.

A while after the grieving period had subsided; I was once again, at a friend’s birthday party, sitting at the bar feeling hung-over already and bored with the company, I received a text message from The Man. I froze. Did they get back together? Just read it you piss ant!
“Hey how are you doing?”
“Bored at a birthday party, Brooklyn Rhapsodies suck. How are you doing?”
“Visiting my parents in Centurion.”
“Cool”
Long pause.
“Wanna come over to Rhapsodies in Brooklyn?”
I clenched my jaw and swore inside my mouth like a ventriloquist. Great, he’s going to say no and then I will have one more devastating rejection on my bedpost.
“I’ll be right there”
Whaaaaat?
I waited a little while for the waves of shock and excitement to pass when I got another message and was convinced it was him canceling, but it wasn’t, and as I waited a little while for the shock and starting pains of disappointment to pass, I saw Kurt Cobain walking up the stairs to where I was sitting.

We moved in together after six months, have been living together now for one and a half year. We are the doting parents of three cats and one dog.
We are best friends who fell in love.
Which is why I worry about the future at night.
Please God, don't let either of us die before we can spend the rest of our lives together.

How my Cat Broke my Arm

When I turned six I got a cat for my birthday.

Meraai the First.

A few days living with us, my first 6-year old thought was that maybe she liked vomiting blood.
But my mom, having always been brutally honest, told me that she is probably very sick.
She sadly passed away about a week after getting her.
Seems SPCA rescues are subjected to all kinds of weird bugs from other dogs/cats/birds/janitors/other bugs.
And so Meraai the First bit the dust long before her time.

I plagued my mother for a full week before she agreed to get me another one.
Because (duh) the first one had a manufacturing fault and had to be returned. It’s called reimbursement mom! I did not actually say that because of the possibility of backfire...and death.

So off we went to Danville where people don’t sterilize their pets in mortal fear that they might not breed like hopped up bunny rabbits and overtake the planet.
Danvillians really really really want domesticated animals to re-inhabit the earth.
So as luck would have it, an unwashed family’s cat got frisky with a feral and BOOM:
6 adorable little fluffykooshnoos.

My mom let me pick one out after arguing for 20 minutes that we should take this fine strong little one home.
I then picked the one that she said she thought was the least likely to even survive the car ride home.
But the chosen one only died when I was 23. He he he, I love it when my mother is wrong.

I, on the other hand, almost didn’t survive the car ride home. Little kitty was not impressed with being in a cardboard box inside a metal box that vibrated and rumbled like a rabid dog.
She slid all around the box exaggeratingly with her tiny but flaming sharp claws scratching baby trenches along their path.
While she was doing the hissing and the scratching, and that freaking awful sound a cat makes when it’s really pissed, my mom and I were arguing our next topic.
What to name this one.
She adamantly stood by Japsnoet, which I thought was stupid (but I didn’t say it because sometimes I got a little bit nervous when her eyes went slightly crazy and I didn’t know exactly what she might be capable of…love you mom).
I wanted to call her Meraai the Second. Because it was a nice name for a cat and the first Meraai didn’t live long enough to wear it out. I was only going to grade 1 the next year, so my understanding of bad omens was at best sketchy.
Then my mother did the scariest thing known to kids with mothers. She burst into tears.
I said fine we can name the damn cat Japsnoet but I think it’s STUPID.
Turns out my mother either wasn’t in the mood to maim or she actually wasn’t capable of it. I still think it’s the former.

I was, like, 22 or something, still thinking about the day I made my mommy cry, when I realized she wasn’t crying over the cat’s name but about a bunch of other proverbial shits hitting the proverbial fans, of which I was still blissfully unaware of (cannot stress enough the importance of school, for the “harder lessons in life”).

Meraai the Second (who will, from here on forward, be referred to as “Meraai”) was the funniest looking little kitten I had ever seen. Her ears were bigger than her body, which doesn’t say much because her body was minute. She looked adorable in one of my sister’s roller-skates and only mildly terrified when I dragged her around in it by its shoelace and then later a rope (it was longer so I could go faster)
It was not long after that, that I realized she is a little prankster.
Hiding in dark corners, behind curtains, on wardrobes, inside wardrobes, in bushes, under the bed, just above the bed, in trees and behind my drum set (and she only sat there when she knew my sister and I had just finished watching a scary movie and had to walk down the dark hallway, past my drum set, eerily draped with a white sheet).
Then leaping out at the speed of white lighting; yelling MIAOW at me/us/them/it (she did this to the dogs too, poor things). Scaring the scheisser out of us.

This was a fun combination of hide and seek and tag, only when playing with Meraai I was always “it” which I thought was unfair.
Meraai was the product of a semi-feral but stable (if a bit promiscuous) Mommy cat and a crazy, hands off the wheel, feral alley cat Daddy and boy did she get all the right genes.
She was batshit crazy. But the good kind.
She refused to go down to the kitchen for breakfast (at 06:00) without a chaperone (me) even though she always had a full bowl waiting for her.
She had a series of “tricks” she used in the tedious process of waking me up and getting me out of bed so I can escort her to her meal.

1. The Decibel
First she’ll start climbing loudly in and back out of my bedroom window, ensuring her hip bones bump an appropriate amount of times and that her nails scratch frantically at the sill as much as possible.

2. The Tornado
Then she’ll run in a circle on my bed until my duvet resembled the top of a soft serve swirly ice cream cone.

3. The Stare
This is the part where she will come and sit with her little face awfully close to mine. And then comes… The Stare. You might not think that it could be possible for a staring cat to wake up a semi-comatose person but the success rate is scary.

4. The Lickbite
In the event that The Decibel, The Tornado and The Stare all failed, Meraai brought out the big guns. Say hello to her little friends: Scratchy Tongue and Razor Sharp Teeth.
She will move even closer to my face then slowly and lovingly start licking my nose.
AND THEN BITE IT!

This usually did the trick but if I made her go through the whole rigmarole from start to finish before waking up; I would have to prepare myself for a poke in the eye as soon as I opened it.
For real, she poked me in the eye on more than one occasion.
We would then proceed (me in the lead as if I am driving her limo, she trailing behind as if she is a passenger in her limo), to her little bowl of kibbles where she would sit down neatly, look up at me to see if I am watching and then finally start eating. I had to stand there throughout her whole breakfast before casually being dismissed.

So one gorgeous atumn day when I was eight, Meraai and I were charging through the house jumping on things (mostly her), crashing into other things (only me), when she pulled this unbelievable stunt.
I can’t remember it very well because the awe of the moment blinded me a little but I think it went something like this:

How she did it:
Zoom full speed down hallway.
Bound into my room at the end of it.
Immediately bolt for single bed #1.
Do a back flip from single bed #1 to single bed #2.
Jack-in-the-box onto the desk then fling into the air.
Land perfectly in a martial arts crouch position.

How I did it:
Zoomed full speed down the hallway.
Tripped on the threshold of the room and timbered onto the floor, breaking my left arm in two places.

As I lay there groaning in pain, Meraai passed me on her way out.
Amateur, her disappointed glance said as she lifted her tail and strolled off.
What a class act.