NDUMISO NGCOBO | Sex, lies and young heartbreak - TimesLIVE

Near the end of April 1994, a first-year Wits University student boards a Greyhound at the Rotunda bus terminal in the greater Park Station precinct. Fate had unfortunately conspired to separate him from his high school sweetheart, spewing her out at the then University of Natal in Durban (UND).

Undaunted by the nearly 600km between them, the violent last kicks of the dying apartheid horse, AWB bombs going off on Bree Street and uncertainty around the April 27 elections, he heads purposefully in the direction of the love of his life.

He arrives at the UND in the late afternoon and heads to her room in the Mabel Palmer residence. After about half an hour of knocking on her door, he leaves to seek some of his mates from high school. With dusk rapidly giving way to the darkness of early evening, his friends accompany him to check if his eternal love is back. More knuckle-to-door tapping later, one of his friends suggests that he walk around the building to peep through the window, in the event that she is perhaps in a deep, sleeping pill-induced slumber.

What he witnessed through that window had two lasting effects. The first is that for a few years immediately after the incident, tears would well up in his eyes whenever his mates asked him to share what he saw. The second is that, from that day onwards, he developed an intense hatred for all fellows above 1.9m tall with an Afro hairdo.

I recently had to dig deep inside my vault of memories for that story. I was invited by a friend who mentors a group of young men at one of the universities to give a 30-minute talk at one of their workshops. One of them opened up about his recent heartbreak after discovering that his girlfriend of two years was having extracurricular intimate relations with one of the jocks on campus. Sharing that story from 32 years ago was my clumsy attempt at reassuring the young man that these things have been known to happen since time immemorial.

It has been my experience that young people derive some comfort from realising that they are not the first ones to be subjected to certain experiences. But even pointing out that the young man who peeped through a UND residence window and got his world shattered is now happily married with children and doesn’t even remember the girl’s name doesn’t help as much as one hopes.

Discussing this incident with some of my friends in a WhatsApp group triggered a series of similar stories of mishaps in the love department. One fellow reminded us of another fellow who rocked up at his love interest’s flat in Umbilo, Durban, bearing culinary gifts in the form of a chicken-and-mushroom pizza.

After knocking a few times without any response, he starts banging on the door rather forcefully. At this point, the door is flung wide open. A huge fellow opens it, heaving breathlessly, rivers of perspiration cascading over his bare Mike Tysonesque torso, with a tiny towel barely hanging on to his waist.

Cleary annoyed at the intrusion and disturbance of whatever hectic exercise regime he was in the middle of with my friend’s lover for life, he barked: “Why the loud knocking and what do you want?” The way my friend tells the story, all his self-preservation instincts kicked in. He says he looked up at the flat number and, in the most timid, high-pitched voice, replied: “Damn, this is number 234. My mistake, I thought it was 243,” turned around and walked away.

As if to pour hydrochloric acid onto an open wound, the skies opened and, as he walked back to his dorm, he was quickly soaked to his undies. About 15 minutes into his walk of shame, he says he realised that the box of pizza was still under his arm but was now a soggy mess. To this day he cannot stand chicken-and-mushroom pizza.

I am not sharing these sad stories to poke fun at those whose hearts have been rubbed with glass fragments, tossed to the floor and stomped on with heavy boots. I share them to be used by parents of young people to point out that heartbreak is as old as time itself and that we’ve all risen from the ashes of heartbreak like the proverbial phoenix.