I've met so many people for whom the weekend represents freedom. This started in school. Thursdays were looked at from an angle of excitement. They symbolised the nearing of the end of the week.
My feelings were different. I liked school. If anything, the weekend meant that I would have two days where I had nothing to do and nowhere to go.
I planned my Saturdays and Sundays around school projects, books I wanted to read and films I wanted to watch.
My friends were at parties, finding ways to experience their sexuality and drinking their stomachs sick. It was very clear that for them the weekend was time for revelry, away from their parents, away from teachers and responsibility.
I distinctly remember dreading Mondays. This was not because I dreaded school. Since my friends' weekends were spent in action, they had anecdotes. Whether they were true or exaggerated didn't matter. It was the theatre of having gone somewhere that mattered. What was I going to tell them? "Oh, yeah, man, I rented Y Tu Mama Tambien. It's this cool Mexican film ." I rarely finished my story before a boy had already started telling a story about a girl he had fingered. Sex was paramount. We were all horny.
The difference between my friends and me is that they spent weekends sniffing around for sex, desperate to experience even a gossamer-type graze of a hand over their crotch. I watched it in arthouse films.
As I became an adult I thought that my time would be allocated differently. A lot of the people I knew had jobs. Most of them did not like those jobs, so again, the weekend was a moment of respite, a moment of fresh air from the pollution of their careers.
I am an artist. I mostly love my job. I always say that I don't have a 9-5, but an eternity. I never switch off. But being in a relationship with someone who does have a 9-5 means that my weekends become a collaboration.
Yes, I'm always thinking of developing ideas I have for work, and when the muse tugs at my shirt, I'm going to put everything down and attend to it. But compromise (its less oppressive definition) became central to my Saturdays and Sundays. Not that my partner hated his job, but unlike me, he needed those two days to be days of recharging, of some leisure and of sensuality.
I could sleep all day, but on weekends I wake up to kisses and breakfasts that are an investment to the heart attacks that we will both have in our older age. We kiss. We go to markets and I make an effort to not buy any more books.
"Nakhane. You have so many that you are yet to read."
I retort: "I know, but I might never get this copy ever again. And if I don't, I will resent you!"
"Fine. Just one."
I buy the book. We drink, we talk about the future. We romanticise it. We argue about it. We go to galleries and create stories about the characters in paintings that we see. We have dinner. We go home and we make love. Before we sleep we laugh at how clichéd we are. I reassure him that if we're happy then that's all that matters. Then for him, it's back to the rigmarole of a 9-5 career...