Life-moving moments

Prologue

(2002)

Looking back retrospectively, that moment was the beginning of the end. It was also the beginning of new beginnings but in that moment, I never knew that it was THAT moment.

Life is like that, I've learned. The significance of moments are only revealed retrospectively. Maybe that's for the best. We humans have an inherent self-destructiveness. Perhaps if we recognised life-moving moments as they happened, we'd fuck it up.

I'd think that I didn't recognise THAT moment when it happened because I had other things on my mind. I was focused on more pressing, more pleasurable and more worrying things, one of which was my hangry hangover.

That morning, I crawled off Emily's sleeper couch, my head throbbing, and looked for my phone to check the time. I read the message that had gone some way to soothe my conflicted feelings but my stomach screeched at me, so I didn't reply to it but stalked my way to the kitchen, where Emily immediately cornered me.

"Ava," she said, smiling at me in anticipation. "Did you hook up with James?"

I had looked at her wide-eyed through my haze of hang-overed confusion.

"What?"

Emily looked relieved.

"I knew it wasn't true. Roderick said he saw you guys kissing."

Who's Roderick?

"Who's Roderick?"

"He works with us at the mall."

The memory came back, vaguely. He was one of the new friends Emily and Andrea had made on the bus. They work together at Canal Walk and last night, after their shift, they'd showed up late to the party.

"Imagine if you had though. James would have hooked up with three different girls, three days in a row."

WHAT?

"Three?" I said, raising an eyebrow.

"There was the girl at the matric ball..."

"Yes, I know about her!" I said more shortly than I should have but Emily was too wrapped up in the juiciness of the moment to care.

"Who's the third girl?" I ask.

"You mean second," Emily said matter-of-factly. "Ronel. She jumped James in the bathroom this morning before he left for work"

My mind is a whirlwind of questions and emotions. Ronel? Emily's sister Ronel? Who has a boyfriend? A good, kind, albeit a bit dull, boyfriend. She jumped James? I feel surprised but not as surprised as I ought to be. Ever since we met James, girls have been all over him. He mostly politely rebuffs them, good naturedly, but a few are more aggressive.

Also, Ronel and her boyfriend Tauriq's relationship was notoriously loopy. Ronel routinely dumped him for stupid reasons - for a few weeks - and then took him back again but she had never cheated on him, that I knew of.

"She said he's a really good kisser," Emily continues disaffected.

"But where was Tauriq?" I ask. He had been at the party the night before. The last I'd seen they were still together.

"He'd gone to the shop," Emily says. "But that's not the point. Roderick insists he saw you and James hooking up?"

I kind of think Ronel and Tauriq's relationship status is a the point, considering the circumstances. He'd been his normal doting self at the party last night, which is not the behaviour of a freshly jilted man, but Emily, despite her annoyance with her sister's treatment of her long-term boyfriend, is not interested in them right now. She yammers on, oblivious that I am more focused on making coffee and getting food in me. Her eyes sparkle as she updates me on all the hook-ups and happenings of the night before.