Goodbye my lover, my friend

Lovers are always the last to know their lover is dead. My long-lost one got a cryptic “Are you still breathing?” from me on Sunday – and tonight I heard he’s not, thanks to his little princess.

The same princess he bought a property for in Holland; the same princess I know knows everything about me, simply responded on his phone: “He passed away suddenly a couple of weeks ago”.

It took me an hour, but I now know, he didn’t pass away. He simply died – and the goodbyes have been said. Just not for me. I have to do … stuff.

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I have to hug myself on my stoep hearing Nick Cave’s Slow Red Hand, wrap myself in the oversized towel he so loved after a shower – “because our bodies must be clean, Carine” – and dig out that pic I’ve been hiding of us on the cruise I got as a work trip.

My “man in port” I called him because he lived a stone’s throw from meeting me in the harbour.

“Thank you. Nobody has ever given me a trip where I don’t pay,” he tells me quietly at our first press dinner before slapping me on the bum with a loud “shall we go to bed now?”

Oh, he complained bitterly about forking out the R200 for That Pic. But he was always my humble, rich – friend…

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Call it pillow talk, but I knew his soul. I knew he never told a soul about the days he was “called into the toilet”; the day he was hit with a wrench across the face, laying passed out in the veld until the volkies carried him home.

I knew his obsessive “clean body” came from him being pissed on every day while captive in a dungeon during the bush war.

But I also knew he could make me happy. How we giggled late at night over TV’s Redding Internasionaal with its bad puppets we both grew up with.

How you grabbed me the day you bought me the bad necklace saying: “When last did somebody just hold your hand?”

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How you doused that same towel with your aftershave “because I want you to smell me till I see you again”.

How you were the last man I could ever see myself with: you with your bad tattoos and rough ways. But I could have married you, Tommy.