Black Sunflower

By Queen Gugu

Honesty, openness, and vulnerability are all spiritual gifts laid at your sacred altar, ever ready for you to enjoy. How far are you willing to travel into yourself to seek the meaning of who you really are—can you bear the face of the raw image gazing at you? Are you ready to face yourself, heal, evolve, and be who you truly are meant to be? In abundance, in fullness, in truth, in health, and in love? Let’s rewind the tape and move forward.

Walk in the light. Walk in love. Walk in confidence, Black Sunflower.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664161283

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Copyright © 2021 by Queen Gugu.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. [Biblica]

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 07/12/2021

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Contents

Love and Acknowledgments

Hurting and Self-sabotage

Mellow awakening

Breaking free—the process

Why the Sunflower?

Extended Love and Acknowledgments

Love and Acknowledg ments

To you,

Magadalena Ndlovu

Charles Ndlovu

Rendani Ndlovu

Allen Potts

Adored friends and family

Loved, appreciated reader

Life, the teacher of it all

I am grateful.

Let’s take a trip, rewrite the cliché script, elevate, evolve, heal together in pure harmony, accompanied with occasional tears-turned-revelation, to the gifted realness we bury deep inside.

May we?

In no particular order, I wrote myself into a coma one night. Thoughts are messy; they race and pace from one corner of the brain to the other, rationalizing the irrational, deciphering the essential, rewinding the tape to move forward. This is what came from it: cause/effect, endless causes. You are about to experience the effects.

Hurting and Self-sabotage

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Mandla’s Power

Mandla, what do you want from me? What are you doing in here?

He did not speak, just moved slowly to put down his quart of Black Label beer on the window sill, placing his index finger on his cracked, dry lips, signaling me to be quiet. He stumbled, hopping on one foot as he struggled to free himself from his shoes, followed by his overall orange pants and matching jacket shining in the darkness.

Mandla, what are you doing? I asked again, but he said nothing.

I hoped that he had mistakenly walked into the wrong room and undressed to prepare for slumber, but the heaviness in his breath and the focus on how he unzipped his pants made it hard to believe that he may be acting in unconsciousness. He rubbed his chest as he clumsily searched for something in the pockets of his jacket. When he found it, he leaned away from my clear sight, as though wanting to hide what he had found. His right hand rocked for a few moments, as though he were rubbing off a tough stain from in-between his thighs; then he breathed quickly and finally stopped.

He used his teeth to cut through the plastic wrapper. It sounded like the wrapper used to cloth candy. He bent carefully to look at what seemed like his lower body; he fiddled and fidgeted with his hands for a while, then straightened his back. He then slowly turned, walked toward me, and climbed on the bed, where he met me with an awkward smile. I flinched but kept my eyes open; I had my blanket bungled close to my body, like a cloak of protection wrapped around me.

Mandla… I called out his name, seeking a response. He said nothing, I cried. He brought his body close to mine, inhaled the scent of my hair. He was so close that I could smell the beer on his clothes and everything stale in his breath. I sobbed as he put his hand around my mouth and whispered to me, If you shout or ever speak of this day, I will break your mother’s neck, then yours. You hear me? I did not agree. Nor did I disagree. At that moment, my mind was too terrified to produce thoughts sound enough to reach the tip of my tongue. I just froze.

You are a stunning girl. How old are you? he had asked when we had first met in the kitchen. He had stood opposite from me, separated by the table that stood between us. He used to live in our house in one of the rooms when my mother needed financial support for the instability caused by her divorce. Mandla must have been in his early thirties. Tall, scruffy, black man with light skin—the type of black skin that indeed had been diluted by his ancestors’ interactions with people of fairer skin. His aura, more specifically his presence, communicated narrow-mindedness, coldness, and long dark alleyways that reeked of old piss. He looked like the type that would get aggressive if a woman did not answer his questions or even give him attention.

When he would speak, the things he said made him sound insecure. I would not be surprised if he had had two failed marriages. No judgment—sometimes it’s in the way people feel; it was all in the way he felt, energy, spiritual energy. So I raised my head and politely said, Thank you. I am eleven years old. All my life I had never met anyone that had asked me my age before they asked me my name, but I hadn’t lived long enough to have met the world. He had smiled at me, showing off his missing front tooth. I stretched my lips awkwardly to force a smile, immediately feeling uncomfortable. I felt his eyes on me, traveling up and down the behind of my body. As I turned around to face in his direction, I was met by his toothless grin again. Inappropriate. Waves of fear, intimidation grappled me.

Days went by effortlessly as they always did. It was 10:00 p.m. My mother was out on her second job. It seemed as if nobody was in the house. So I soaked in the temporary freedom, in the company of a book and my thoughts silently before I decided to take a late-night hot bath. The hot water filled the tub. I undressed and suddenly felt free as though the clothes I had been wearing were holding me captive. The hot water soaked into my skin to heal the parts of me that needed my father’s healing touch that lay too far away for me to reach with my bare hands, too far away for my father to recognize or care enough to rectify. When he left pain sat in my chest and refused to go away but still when he came, he never stayed long enough to know. As soon as I was done, I hopped into bed and felt scared for no particular reason. I dismissed