*Been stewing for a while. and no, I’m not about to go buy a Kenny G music-to-slit-your-wrists-by Special Holiday edition. This is pure self-indulgence. Insert disclaimer of choice here.*

“Welcome to the pity party. So pleased you could join us. We have trays of masochism and punch so good you’ll cry. Should you be so inclined, a selection of razors and blades are laid out on a table near the DJ box, individually wrapped for your protection. Please enjoy yourselves, but not too much. Hope you have a wretched evening.”

 

I left the park last weekend. Packed the accumulation of a year into stackable cardboard boxes and took the highway to the East Rand, where I will now spend most of my weekends.

 

*mandatory benoni girl joke*

Q. What do you call a Benoni girl in a white tracksuit

A. The bride

 

 

Moving’s never easy. When you’re strapped for space, you suddenly realize just how much of all that you value is clutter. Books get heavier, cds stack up awkwardly, jackets bulk up, hard-drives hulk like museum dinosaurs.

 

One of those weekends too, where tragedy laid a pall over my family when my uncle and aunt met with an accident on their way to Port Shepstone. My aunt lost the baby she’d been carrying for the last 7 months. Both her and my uncle had to have one of their hands amputated. I’ve never been good with grief. Losing the people you care about around you makes you no expert. I never know what to say, except when I think of my own bereavement and all I can say is, “`it’s hard, and you will feel self-pity. You will bargain with your God, and you will be angry. That is what it was like for me until the resolve to accept sets in. You’ll become too tired to be angry. Its time to resign yourself, because ‘Why’ sometimes remains one of those questions to which the answers will not leave you satisfied.” I stopped asking ‘Why’ a long time ago.

 

–

 

I feel like-

I’m being strained through a colander.

 

Like I’m being forced to spread and separate, until I’m only reconstituted Saaleha.

With Work, with Home, with Study and Family issues, I’m being stretched.

I’m walking around; static mess, this field of scratchy unintelligible sound drowning out my clarity, slaving me to disorganization, inefficiency, procrastination.

My eyeballs are lubricated with seeded strawberry juice, the insides of my eyelids lined with a fine grade of sandpaper.

 

It doesn’t help that I haven’t been to gym in two/three months. The monthly bank debit glares at me disapprovingly, judging me, poking breadsticks at the extra-Saal.

I also had a pimple on my chin, so large it deserved a christening and its own facebook profile.

 

I was heavy inside. The kind of heavy that has you choked up. The kind of heavy that makes you a gut bag of lachrymal fluid filled up till the skin stretches and shimmies. One muscle twitch and you’re bleeding salt all over yourself.

And I sat there looking at my phone, scrolling through my phonebook and not knowing who to call.

So many friends. So many big-hearted, kind, beautiful people. So many I love, so many I would die for. Why, when I fill up with heavy, am I so uncomfortable and reluctant to ask them for their ears?

And when I do choose to share, I’m left feeling like someone sneaked up behind me and pulled down my pants.

–

ok. all done now.

Beeg deranged smile.

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It’s the feeling you get when you come across an old diary. You wonder what foreign tongue dribbled its ink in slashes and dashes here; the ascenders and descenders wiggling in sanskrit-samba on the page. You hold the paper within sticking distance of your contact lenses, as if mere proximity will decipher this marriage of rambling thought and tactility. And this for the next page and each page after.
Strange, the stranger one becomes as years tack off.
Invite a you from every year to a party, expect the room to spin with the eclectic meld of personality and characters.

And it was like this when an email from the past dropped into my gmail.
Saaleha circa early 2006.
Evidently, this chick had some issues at the time.
And when I read what “I” wrote back then, one of the voices in my head riposted, “eh?”.
And the others guffawed when the memory-dam breached. “Oh. that.”
(Embarrassed silence amplified in the little-monarchy-in-my-head)

And the fifty-cent epiphany:
The things we lose sleep over now, are the things we won’t dream about in the future.
All will come to pass, even the issues that look set to fail us.

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They say, when it rains, it pours.
They say a lot of things, most of them trite and clichéd, like the above soporificism.
But there’s some truth in what They say.
Fuck They or Them or any other wise-ass who has the perfect thing to say at any given moment. (this from the master of treppenwitz)

So how am I handling the downpour?
Not too well, I’m afraid. I’m waiting for something obscure to fall out of the sky, like a kamikaze lemming and land on me while i sleep. Let God make the decisions for me. Let the epiphanies strike down upon me, boom. boom. boom. Just like that, in a steady staccato. yes. yes. no. no. are you crazy. yep. no. don’t even consider. He doesn’t work that way though, does he? We gotta schlep through this stuff, make our own decisions, Free Will (couldn’t he just stay in his damn cage?) and all that. But You do know I’m sucking at this O Omnipotent One?

Much of it, is of course, my own doing. I, the playwright, the architect, the narrator of this wanton tale of excess, conquest and ego overriding self.

give me a Hell Bleh.

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