*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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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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Yesterday’s sleep deficit, the three cups of full strength caffeine before 10 am, the two hour long status meeting (my status – leisure is now a cruel and laughable concept) and the compounding of twelve years of inadequacy; all contributed to what could only be described as one heckuva lousy afternoon.

And then i get the phonecall. It’s the mother of one of my closest friends. It disorientates me somewhat as this is not a usual occurrence and I hope to God that the ice beginning to develop in my stomach is not about to translate into something tragic.

And it doesn’t. Alhumdulillah.

But what she asks of me is, nonetheless, overwhelming.

She says that she’s always considered me to be this vibrant, happy personality and how these qualities could help in assisting her son’s friend who’s having difficulties at home. She wants me to be a positive influence on this girl, to be a friend to her and maybe osmotically transfer some of my ‘bubbly spirit and optimism’.

At that moment, I feel so utterly fake. How could I say that I was by no means suitable to play life mentor, when the only thing stopping me from chucking it all, was that I still needed to get through my slab of Lindt 70% coacoa.

But listening to her go on about this girl and how I could play such a vital role, I did an inner double take. Why did I get this call today, at this time, at the very moment that I felt like destiny was just out to shaft me?

It was like I had taken a serious misdirection and was plodding along some alien path to nowhere, when suddenly this signpost grew out of the ground in Hogwarthish fashion.

Sometimes people have alot more faith in you than you believe.

And that Big Guy, hey, i gotta say, He works in crazy ways.

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