Prosopagnosia
It’s a Saturday morning, 15 November 2025. Eight days before Mat suddenly dies. I’ve just done my regular car review and motoring news show on CapeTalk. I’ve appraised the latest Chinese SUV, the rather impressive Jetour T2.
I’m planning to drive it to the cabin tomorrow to spend four days with my oldest friend, Meg. We met each other at drama school when we were both Ophelia-wannabe, little anarchist actresses.
Today, I plan to spend the entire day in Cape Town with Mat and Joe, our rescue dog: chill out, make dinner and play The New York Times Spelling Bee and Flashback Quiz.
Word games are our happy place.
Our mutual love for them appeared right from the start, on that very first weekend when we met in real life, after swiping right on Tinder.
Mat is a total super-brain freak when it comes to words. During our first-ever conversation on that dating app, back in late 2014, he throws the word “prosopagnosia” into our conversation.
I have to google it.
“Known as face blindness, prosopagnosia is a cognitive disorder of face perception in which the ability to recognise familiar faces, including one’s own face, is impaired.”
What the actual fuck!
For those first seven days of our burgeoning relationship (which is still online), he brain-fucks me with words.
He regularly throws the word “sapiosexual” into our floods of text conversations. I am ashamed to admit; I have to look up its meaning too.
“Sapiosexual: a person who finds intelligence attractive and arousing.”
I am so aroused.
We finally meet in real life, seven days after the swipe right, with me catching a flight to Cape Town in a fit of spontaneous passion and him meeting me at the airport.
He is standing there, broad and tall.
As I walk through the swing doors into arrivals, I spot him immediately.
It’s like every love movie you’ve ever watched. The world stops. Everything goes quiet. We move towards each other in slow motion. The heavens ring. The angels play their harps. The light turns golden.
Finally, we touch each other’s faces slowly and tenderly, disbelieving, eyes drinking in a recognition so deep that it spreads across time and continents. It cracks through the Ice Age.
“It’s you,” we both say. “It’s you.”
(Are you) the one I’ve been looking for? by Nick Cave becomes our love anthem.
I am still on those brain-numbing psychiatric meds when we meet. For all he knows, I am still an insane klepto junkie.
We both instantly know that we will be together forever.
I jump his bones as soon as we get into his house.
We spend the next three days enmeshed, drinking each other in.
Between divine-inspired physical exploration, we play word games and general knowledge quizzes online. We get completely entranced by each other’s minds. (Plus he has an ass like the Greek god Hermes.)
He knows the meaning of words that I have never even heard of. How the fuck does this German know so much English? His knowledge is wide and broad.
Mat seems to know everything.
On that first weekend, after insanely passionate sex that is more like a spiritual coupling than a wham bam, I look deep into his eyes and say: “Fuck! You are so clever! You should go on one of those shows, you know, like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”
He stays silent.
“No, dude, you really should! You are so hectically knowledgeable.”
“I have already,” he quietly says. Reluctant, embarrassed.
“It was in Germany. Long ago,” he mutters. "Wer Wird Millionär?"
“Oh my God,” I say. “That’s insane. So which round did you get to?”
He stays very quiet. Finally, half-embarrassed, he confesses: “The second last one.”
What the actual fuck.
“What did you win?”
Long pause.
“Five hundred thousand euros.”
Jesus, Mary, mother of God.
“But I lost most of it on bad Thai investments after 2008,” he quickly adds.
I was never sure if I quite believed him. Mat never ever lied, but on that second day of knowing him, I think he might have. I couldn’t really blame him. I had by now given him a copy of my debut memoir, Smacked, detailing the dark and crazy world that I had fallen into as a slave to heroin and crack between 1993 and 1999.
I’d already told him in unabashed detail of my vast and dodgy life: the smack, the spiral, the ghetto, the street-hooker-for-drugs period. Unlike Picasso’s Blue one, which lasted four years, mine was a relatively short six-week sojourn in hell.
I’d already described to him in lurid detail, in one of our online chats, how I’d gotten clean in 1999 and clawed my way back to life instead of jumping off a high-rise building in the ghetto.
I weighed 48 kilograms back then.
I was selling my body on the streets and sucking my dealer’s dick for crack.
I was so far gone, I thought I was doing great.
In our first week of meeting online, I told him in detail about the temporary loss of my two baby boys in 1999, the homeless farm and the Ferrari crash in 2013, the previous year. How I mistakenly totalled a red R3.2m rare California, in celebration of my 14-year sobriety birthday, during a test drive for a review that I was writing for a magazine where I worked as features and motoring editor. About all the legal and financial drama that ensued. I told him everything. I spoke to him at length about my recent hospitalisation at The Clinic.
I am still on those brain-numbing psychiatric meds when we meet. For all he knows, I am still an insane klepto junkie.
I beg him to show me a photo or recording from Wer Wird Millionär? He says there’s a DVD somewhere. I urge him to find it. Reluctantly, he goes into the study to look for it.
When he returns, I convince him to play it to me. And so we sit watching 42-year-old Mat in 2004, the handsome Herr German doctor psychiatrist, all dressed up in one of those nifty Joop or Armani suits that are still hanging in his cupboard, in the room next to the one he died in.
On the show he is like a rifle, lightning quick, bam-bam-bam, answering every question thrown at him. He will later be recognised in Germany as one of the contestants who answered questions the fastest in the show’s history.
The final answer is “Schiller”, he tells me ruefully, before we even get to that place in the DVD.
On the show he hesitates when asked the million-euro question. I can’t remember exactly what it was. He stares into the beyond. The camera pans to his young blonde wife in the audience. The tension mounts. She screams: “Bank es!” (“Bank it” in German.)
He suddenly feels the pressure and decides to take the €500,000. He’ll kick himself forever for not just blurting out “Schiller”.
“I knew the answer was Schiller.” He says this twice as he ejects the DVD from the laptop.
He takes it back to the study and gets back into bed. He seems disturbed by the memory, ashamed even, but I am speechless and so impressed. I am totally in love with him.
My heart wants to burst out of its cage and envelop this man entirely. I stare at his face. He is still the cool dude on the show, just with a few more lines and a little less hair. He is so hot right now and was so hot on Wer Wird Millionär? I want to swallow him entirely.
I am all in.
I have never met a man like this.
We make slow, gorgeous, beautiful love. I know he is my soulmate. He knows I’m his.
There is sudden order and symmetry in this brutal and chaotic world. Everything is exactly as it should be.
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