I enter the stage from the left and place myself at its centre. The path from the wings to where I take my position is a well-worn one. Once in position, I look out into the audience which is nothing more than an image of me reflected on my mother’s heavily carved dressing table mirror. Between it and the edge of my parent’s queen-sized bed, there is not much room. Fortunately, I have honed my craft to rely heavily on dialogue rather than elaborate movements across the stage and so the space will do. Having settled on a scene in my mind, I take a deep breath and begin:
Me (looking towards the right): Ridge, how could you do that to me?
Also Me (looking towards the left but never losing sight of myself in the mirror): I’m sorry, Taylor, I did not mean to hurt you
Me: What do you mean you didn’t mean to hurt me? You know Brooke has been chasing you all these years
Also Me: It was a just a mistake
Me: A mistake?!?
Also Me: Yes, you know I love you more than anything in the world
Me (desperately willing a tear to make an appearance): But how could you hurt me like that?
Also Me (suddenly remembering that Ridge is meant to have a baritone): I’m sorry, Taylor. I love you
Me (still waiting for a tear to come and instead yawning): I love you too but---
And then not knowing how to proceed with the scene, I take a moment to think how Stephanie could enter the Beverly Hills mansion full of righteous anger. Towards whom or what, is not very clear to me but since I was not very successful at crying, which is to my mind the hallmark of brilliant acting, I figure I might be able to carry anger better.
Just then, I hear someone at the kitchen door and realise that one of my parents must be home and I need to vacate their bedroom fast if I know what’s good for me.
Such scenes were typical for me when I was growing up. My parents’ bedroom was a forbidden cocoon I could escape to during the quiet chaos and confusion of my teenage years. It was always neater and more pleasant smelling than my own room and therefore a much more appealing space to be converted into a scene from The Bold & The Beautiful or Days of Lives.
More importantly, it had a mirror, a set of three mirrors, in fact, part of my mother’s ornate bedroom suite that she bought with pride at Winston Sahds Furniture. The bedroom suite made their small room even smaller but what mattered to her is that it was from Sahds. What mattered to me is that it gave me the imaginary audience I needed for re-enacting scenes from my favourite soapies, practicing school speeches or pretending to be Whitney Houston or Dolly Parton.
During my teenage years, there were infrequent stretches of time that I spent in solitude whenever it so happened that my parents and siblings were not around. We lived in a quiet suburb where I had one friend to visit in the neighbourhood and my hometown was far from my school where I had a bit more of a social life. And so, in those moments of crushing boredom, I found ways to convert my parent’s bedroom into the Forrester family home or Salem University Hospital.
It is where I recall singing the first song I think I ever wrote. I’m not sure when exactly I went from singing Dolly’s “Just Because I’m a Woman” to singing “Ubuph’izolo” but I remember reworking parts of that song to punctuate the edge of each line with isiXhosa words ending with “o” and failing. The song takes the pride of being my most inauthentic creation ever because there I was, an unkissed, unrelationshipped, 17-year-old virgin, asking “my man” where he had spent the previous night and threatening to leave him if he didn’t tell the truth. A blues woman in the making.
I never did become that blues woman but the combination of boredom and solitude over the years would give me the space to write songs about other kinds of heartbreaks. The silence of those moments birthed words and melodies within me, giving my emotions wings upon which to flutter at first and eventually fly out of my body.
Of course, this was long before I owned a cellphone or cellphones became the cursed objects that they are now. It feels to me like boredom came easily to me then, or it was simply the general weather under which I lived whether bored alone, at church, in the classroom or when there were grow-ups visiting our home. I couldn’t do much about other moments of boredom but at least when I was alone, I could cultivate the treasures of my imagination.
Now I am likely to reach for my mobile at the slightest hint of boredom rather than sit with it and wait for my mind to excavate whatever lies in its recesses. It does not help much also that the burdens of adulting preoccupy my mind in ways that make boredom even more of a luxury for me.
It could very well be that as with most childhood memories, I remember boredom under a glowing light of nostalgia whereas it was not always the most productive asset to have at my disposal. Certainly, when I think of how the flame of a paraffin lamp licked my hair as a six-year-old while I was playing on my aunt’s dressing table, boredom and solitude were not necessarily always good for me.
And what about those moments when I was possibly the victim of other’s boredom? When my teenage uncle initiated a game of equal opportunity in which we would hit each other with rocks knowing full well that my seven-year-old swing was nowhere near as powerful as his and that I was not as agile as him to duck, did he not suggest that to rid himself of the perpetual boredom of village life? I will never forget the sharp pain a rock he pelted me with sent through one of my buttocks and the realisation that I had been duped into a cruel game.
Most recently, I have been made aware of the dangers of boredom for people recovering from addiction. A close friend of mine shared how their biggest struggle has been facing long hours that were previously taken up by consuming their drug of choice suddenly unoccupied. It is in such moments that fantasies of using again return and they must find ways to keep boredom at bay because for them it could result in a life-threatening downward spiral.
It is harder for me to sing the praises of boredom knowing its negative impact and what it means for some. That said, I cannot help but think that boredom is the bedrock of my creative energy. Without it, I am not sure that I would have discovered all the pearls of my imagination that give me life.
And whenever I find myself in a rare moment of boredom, in front of a mirror in my home, I’m transported back to when I was Taylor and Ridge, waiting for the Forrester matriarch to save me from bad acting.
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