December in Cape Town rubs me up the wrong way. The tourists. The traffic. The tourists in traffic. I hate everyone and everything, but it’s the heat that really rattles my nerves. While my sweaty thighs chafe, high fiving each other to make me look like I peed myself, my brain can’t seem to get enough oxygen through the duvet-thick-air-suffocating my sinuses. I know that no one is to blame for the heat. But I also feel that there is something so rude about the soaring temperatures. I once saw this tweet: if Cape Town is a hot girl, she has a messy bun and is ignoring my tweets right now.

Laughing at my struggle with humidity, my mother always says the same thing: “Shame my child, at least when it’s cold, you can warm yourself but when it’s hot there’s nothing you can do.”

Wat se shame. My mother is from tropical Durban where humidity is as tantalizing as masala-coated pineapple. I know she says that shit with glee. When I was small, she would run deep baths of boiling hot water, luring me to sit on the side with the promise of stories while she luxuriated in Radox like a suburban Scheherazade. She made it look so good that all I wanted to do was hop right in with her, but obviously had to wait until the water had cooled, by which time she would be ready to get out. That routine taught me to stay in my lane until I can handle the heat.  

My mother treats her love of high temperatures like it’s not just a preference, but a pain threshold that makes her superior to everyone else. When we went to The Baths in Citrusdal, she would bask in the thirty-two-degree heated pool longer than any of us, smirking as the European porpoises turned puce while she maintained composure, slick as a river otter.

When it was my turn to stew in the bath after her, she would knead Dove lotion into her skin like she was about to massage bread into being out of thin air. Jealously, my eyes water-level like a crocodile, I would always ask the same thing: “Why isn’t my skin like yours?”

What I meant was ‘Why am I not perfect like you?’ I know it’s a thing to think your mother is the bee’s knees, but my mother really does have very beautiful skin. It suggests all my best visuals. Augustus Gloop falling into the river. Juliette Binoche lovingly stirring pots of melted magic, while she herself melts every time she looks at Johnny Depp. Professor Lupin saving Harry from Dementors. My father tells anyone who will listen that she is a Black Magic Woman. Her skin is a big part of the spell which makes sense since it is the first port of call for all sensory experience.