THE LETTERS PROJECT HAD not worked.

The anthology project had not worked.

We had productive moments together: He encouraged me with my book, my book made him reach out to others. But on the whole Dambudzo was lonely. He suffered from the ignorance he saw in people around him, in publishers who were not interested in his work.

He felt rejected.

And so, he rejected me.

Not openly, not consciously, but out of the mood of a child who refuses to be good when the world does not give him what he wants and instead throws a tantrum.

The last months of the year were fraught. There were times when Dambudzo and I would find each other again, but they were fewer and fewer and the tensions grew intolerable. I would scream with frustration. People in the block might have thought I was in physical pain, that he was beating me up. He did not. He hurt me with words.

There were many angry notes that I left at his bedside.

‘Dambudzo, now it's enough, it's finished, it's out. Pain, anger, hate in my mind.’

‘Have you ever loved me? I don't believe that you can love at all, women are just there for you as something one needs, interchangeable.’

‘You say I am authoritarian? Just asking you not to drink too much before and when we meet?’

‘Yesterday I really got the feeling you don't care for me at all, there was nothing, just indifference, cruel drunken indifference.’

And yet, I could not let go. I depended on him. The more indifferent he became, the more my urge to be close to him grew.

I was clinging to a chimera. I wanted to hold onto the moments of bliss, of being one in body and soul that we had had. But the more I tried, the more elusive such moments became.

I was too intense, expected too much.

He wouldn't ‘deliver’ what I wanted him to be.

It was always the same pattern – he resented the way I ‘used’ him, as he would claim; that I always determined when and for how long we would be together.

‘What should we do?’ I said one night towards the end of the year.