36 Questions to Fall in Love...in 36 days!

Chapter 1: Blinding Anger and Hiccups

26th of January 2023🥀

“Your anger is blinding, Leonardo.”

Letting his words hang in the air, Mkhulu (Grandfather) stands at the door of my room. Black cane in hand. His salt and pepper beard with more black than grey hairs along his formal attire. His sharp, dark eyes that mirror mine with stark similarity.

He casts his gaze down, where the model of my black airplane is broken beyond repair.The airplane that literally went flying moments ago and almost collided into his face as he opened the door. The airplane that I threw across the room, in a fit of rage moments ago.

From the look on his face I can tell that he is not happy. That makes two of us.

"Look at the mess it causes you to make." Mkhulu gestures to the floor, his eyes piercing mine, his nose flared.

I look away, pretending to busy myself with getting ready for school, as I fix the sleeves of my white shirt.

"You're blind." Mkhulu continues, walking further into my room, his cane clanking along with his footsteps

"Because,"he starts off but I cut him off, finishing the sentence for him.

"-Because all I see is red at this moment." I hold my gaze in the mirror, as I fix my blue tie, a whisper of a smile almost touching my lips and forming my dimples.

"Don't act smart with me, boy."

Mkhulu is a recovered, Angerholic, his words not mine. He's been anger free for twelve years, again, more of his words. So as any recovered person he feels like it's his right, no, his purpose to turn me from the path of anger and to the path of whatever he's doing right now.

"All you see is red." Mkhulu makes himself comfortable on my bed, his cane still in a tight grip as he continues his lecture that I've memorised from heart now.

"That's not how it's supposed to be, Leonardo. With anger you can't control the feelings within you.You just feel. We're not supposed to just see red. You're blind and you don't even know it."

His words, like many other times never ease the situation. In fact it only adds as this fuel to  a sort of unquenchable fire and I want to ask him to leave. I want to lose my manners for a moment, forget he's and adult and I -

"Maybe I want to be blind."

Mkhulu catches my dark eyes from the mirror and for a moment no word is uttered. My hands freeze on my tie.

"I have a cane and I'm not afraid to use it boy." He clanks his cane for emphasis but the tilting of his lips is not missed by me. The lighteness that contrasts so much in his dark eyes that it cannot be missed.

Mkhulu stands up, making his way to me with his metal cane. There was a time when I fainted before the cane even landed on me but I'm not afraid of it now.

No matter how loud it clanks and how close he gets I know he won't beat me. He told me that the beatings were for my youth and that if the rod didn't discipline me then I was a lost cause. I wonder if he thinks of me like that or if I'm becoming the man he wants me to be.

I turn to face him, my dark eyes holding his identical ones. He frowns at me the wrinkles forming on his face. Then he immediately gets to the task of fixing my tie properly.He unravels the angry mess I've made of it and starts at it again.

"When will you learn?"

The chuckle dies in my throat, I stay quiet, not trusting myself to say the right words.

Mkhulu says that anger is blinding because it makes you see red and only red but sometimes I disagree. Like right now. It's not that I don't see but it feels like I see everything, and with clarity. I see it all, to the tiniest details and that's what makes me angry.