A week in love: Monday

'Can you taste my absence? Does it itch when I haven't stroked your back? Did you see the love I've etched on your back? '

- Absence.

A week in love: Sunday

She was devoted to the voices in her head and the comfort she found in her thoughts was unmeasured. She drowned in men’s affections and her luscious thighs were bruised with his bites and pulls from last night’s love. She wanted him to thirst for her and be addicted to her but she kept convincing herself that a time for a love like that had passed and this is what she needed. Moderation. She knew she needed moderation. And that’s what he gave her. Just enough kisses. Far and wide smiles. Of course, there were more dangerous loves, hungrier men but she preferred to be starved by this one man.

Breathe

he said you are drowning because you do not honour your breath.
So I came up to the surface and split my lips apart
I took in the Light and the world
My lung capacity could not hold
what was before me
So I had no choice but to expand
Now I can not tell where the world ends and where I begin

On Condition that you stay

'Stay in this dress and lay this way. Be here when I get back and don’t forget to bring the wine. Be calm and don’t post anything. Stay this way, in this time. Please stay this way and in this condition.'

I am easier to love on Fridays, when I am too tired to argue. Saturday I am rested and full of light. I feel my eyes twinkle for you as I strain my neck looking into your eyes. I am fun, I am perfect I am sensual. I am ready, I can quieten myself enough to see only you.

You asked to see me on a Sunday. A day I felt it difficult to see myself in the right light. A day filled with all that I run from. They were here, all of them, the words, the whispers and the lies had come to visit.


"Yes, you may come through” I responded full of uncertainty. Then adjusted myself to be that way. To stay in that dress and lay that way. You were here and my absence lay beside you. I adjusted myself to lay that way, in that dress so you may not have noticed that I was not there.

How do I learn to make you stay when I am out of the condition? When I am loud, when I am not in that dress, when I cannot outrun myself, will you stay in those conditions?

Finding comfort in discomfort

So I sit here a woman growing out of the girl I used to be. I have no excuses and it hurts.

I miss my excuses that I could run to and clutch when accused. But I am free but now I am burdened.


I am full of contradictions and dying from wanting. I want everything but cannot give up anything. I am full and empty of all the things I truly desire. I lie and but I am laced with the truth of my humanity. I dance with wolves at night and tend to sheep through the day. I am both scarred and healed. I am running from my past while creating a new one.

I am trying to move to a new rhythm as life constantly changes the strings. I release my feet and I allow myself to be the hypocrite I truly am. The sacrificing Christian, the humble yet ambitious, the meditating Zulu, the submissive feminist. I paint myself in grey and sit in the sun. I am what I am. I am incomplete and I am content. I want the gold and silver but I am also drawn to the mellow image of walking down a street with a baby in arms. I want my existence to be enough but I am constantly conscious over what I am not creating.

I am a house divided today. I am proud but ashamed at how perfectly inadequate I am when I look around. What I fear hangs solely in my mind and it is real. I am in between a growth spurt and it hurts. It hurts to be wrong and at times dis-empowering to not know what's next. We want comfort and the glory and I have yet to see them side by side. I feel my heart's resistance build up as I admit this fact that I have to become comfortable with the thought of failing. The thought is the enemy, the looming spear, the evil laugh with no face that is who I fear. The fall itself injures but quickly fades and can easily be transcended.

What do I do with these hands? Where do I go with these thoughts? Do I lay it all down and let myself be? Do I fight the nature and pick a side, the better side of my face and forgo the complexity of the other? These are thoughts I lay down as I feel the tug as I feel as though I am on the brink of myselves. The edge of all I know and to fall into a wonderland of my dreams, prepared to take the lashes for love and content opposing thoughts that are merely suggestions and projections. Falling into a fearless state. Falling at ease with oneself and ready to meet my Maker, greet him and proceed with what I am here to do.

Living together, after the lonely

The older I become, I realise that a visit differs greatly from living with someone. There is that longing that one has when they visit. You have been craving their conversation and you want to hear the ring in their laughter. You share for hours on end, re-living moments that felt significant in your life. You exchange stories. Some are pleasant causing you throw your heads back in laughter, pour out showers of tears and shake your heads, all out of joy. Some are sad, leaving you heavy in spirit while watching the warrior in front of you shed their armour and expose their vulnerability. These are rare. They are made beautiful by the fact that time ticks against you. Even though you run together, it outruns both of you and it is time to say goodbye again.

Living together is a little less sparkly. It can be mundane. It is safe conversation exchanged over the day’s trivial events. It’s a run-down of the day, a summary of the to-do list presented orally. Sadly, the ever present thought that tomorrow you wake to face the same predicament is not nearly as assuring as it disappointing. There are no surprises, it’s an everyday life. We switch roles and play parts.

I have known a loneliness so thick, that when I finally learnt to keep my own company it became sweet solitude. I now have to learn to accept other people’s company. The desire to shut out is often so strong but here I am, role playing. Could it be that I am in love with myself and my own thoughts? See company can be a disruptive innovation. It’s good for you eventually, after it almost wrecks what you’ve always known.

I am to learn to open up again, to trust people with my feelings and thoughts. Maybe even invite them over. Visiting is easy. It is as simple as closing the front door to many parts of myself, leaving my house for a while, showing you my best and then coming home to myself.

Living with someone requires moving my whole self so I could perhaps share my space. It requires me to constantly put my thoughts away. It’s not out of fear but they compete for space. I can only be consumed by another in bits at a time.

But something has to give because living in companionship is beautiful. I have lived in many people, got spewed, I was homeless and eventually made a home in myself. Maybe we should call it an extended visit. You and I living together, I might bring some of my stuff over, and you will bring yours and we will make a house. I will leave my front door open but might still keep my security gate. Maybe then you will see my face, the way it is painted in my thoughts. You might like it, I had to learn to. Maybe then we will review your itinerary and I will return to myself to cuddle my thoughts. We will be happy.

Living together may just be better than a visit. 

Poet’s presence

His presence was mostly awkward. He seemed timid. His scruffy look indicated he was a man of the book. Too tall for his humble presence, he did not seem like much.

He stepped onto the spotlight and his voice did not boom when his lips parted before the mic. His voice so mellow I feared I would quickly lose interest. It did not hold the room until I heard the poem slip out of him like thick smoke seeping through a smoker’s lips. His words were potent.

Drawn to the description of the woman who held his affections I wanted to be that woman. One who had occupied his mind long enough for him to make her home to his words. The words were something of a playful banter of the childish ways of boys. He admired her but judged her, I could tell the girl had fascinated him but not enough for him to call her his.

He drew her out with similes only to quickly catch her again with witty metaphors. And soon it was over. The tease had tantalised the crowd. He left us hanging. He did not speak a word again of poetry which left me wondering how much of it was left in him.

I wondered each time I saw him how many words had he strung together. All of a sudden I longed to be immortalised by another like the many men who would stay alive in the pages of my diary long after my affections for them had died. Here was a total stranger demanding my attention and I have no choice but to draw him:

He walked into the room, unshaven and unassuming. He did not falter under the intimidation of the many men who spoke big words and replicated ideas. He was not possessive of his space but kept it without the burden of possession. So we waited to be led by what seemed so mild.

“Tell me why you write?”  The best question I had ever been asked and I knew I was in the right space. The excitement was quickly thwarted by the sad realisation that I was surrounded by completed strangers. My reply was meek and what I had believed to be a passion, would be perceived as a hobby.

I wanted him to ask me why I wrote and I would say because of you. I would say because of people. I would say that question was better than the any question I had ever heard because it would require me to use the very words that I love.

I wanted to deliver my answer to only his ears so maybe he would cradle my answer and look to me with the admiration of a new father. It would be like I had birthed in him something he had dreamt off but didn’t know could be realised.

My words fell flat and felt still born when delivered. Those eyes never shone in reverence but only acknowledged my attempt at explaining my love. I, slightly disappointed took to basking in other stories which were all so different with the same chord running through each of them. We came to write so we could escape. It was a fortress, a parallel universe where we could have our souls exposed without the pain of dodging the spears of judgement.  

Some clapped, while some were swallowed whole by the spotlight but we had all achieved a kind of liberation that we could have only find on that stage. In that week I had revealed more of myself than I had in a long time. Pity the poet’s presence whom I had loved to be in did not realise this. I am glad of it. Maybe I would not have flown so high when I was showered with those bright lights.

On Poverty

The true plight of the human

Poverty is dehumanizing. It creates an endless hunger in its victims. It renders you hopeless. Your brain slows down, it blinds you and kills you while you walk. You wander around, looking for sympathy. You exist for the next moment, live by default, by hope. 

Age gives you some dignity but you cry out for the bad in the world. Simple tasks become difficult. You think the world owes you a lot. And it does. It offers itself each morning but in your pain there’s comfort. Like a pig in shit, you do not know better. They robbed you off your ability to enjoy your labor. But they gone now, those beautiful thieves, yet you have been crying on that street corner, clutching onto what you had. You birthed your kids in that misery, they grew up to be bitter, fighting everyone but the thieves. When you breathe in poverty, there isn’t much to exhale. 

The whole world in you

She sat cross legged in her room.

The world’s burdens did not rest on her shoulder

She was trying to find a way to sit with the world in her womb

Braamfontein

This town has a stale smell of all the people I held clenched in my palms.
My palms are glummy with sweat from those I have struggled to release.

Response to seeing the sun

Well it moved me to write this:

Maybe our hearts must break entirely so we can learn to feel how real feels like.

To feel everything, no alcohol required.

Sometimes I feel the good, the good sinks in and my soul dances in response to the rays

It claps along to the chirp of the birds and this feels so good.

I drag my“feels so good” knowing there isn’t a better way to describe the simplicity,

Of watching the rain fall ,but even better

Seeing the sun after two whole weeks of showers.

Knowing you were wrong for thinking that the sun may not come out again

Of course you never shared this fear with anyone

But God knew

You hung your clothes up and it out it came

You had to learn to dance with the sun for the first time ever

It was a struggle but once you forgot yourself

It was easy, still is. 

You couldn’t see the rays but you moved in accordance to where they struck

Whether it was your bare shoulders or you’re your nose

The only places that ever show evidence of your long love affair with the sun

Joy was injected into your body.

Full of life you bounced like a new born baby.

God smiled. You giggled. 

Box of ashes

It is not so much that I do not recall what was going through my mind at the time; it is what was going through my heart. Sometimes I feel like it is so far but it is so easy to bring the feeling back again. The heart just remembers the pain and all the joy at the same time. They work together see, like veins and arteries flowing to your heart, each needing each other, yet such opposites of each other.

The plethora of memories I have tried to keep alive, are fading like ancient photographs; moments in time, a little evidence of events, if only I could revisit the feeling. The presence is constantly adding stains on the photographs and perhaps one day they will be completely faded with only bits still recognizable.

I never want to forget, but I regret that I have to, as that is what life dictates. We must not live in those memories lest we get stuck there. It steals beauty from today. If today looks bland and colourless, we should fill it with the hope of tomorrow. It might be a beautiful day and maybe it may even rain, but tomorrow you may feel something more genuine than faded emotions that are aroused by a simple song.

It is a day thing, every single day. I affirm to the heavens to bring me an endless joy and I open myself to receiving the joy and joy I have. It is in everything and nothing. It is in me, somewhere but I suppose I would have to shave off some imaginary walls that I have created for my heart.

My heart was placed on a diet. It wants to indulge entirely in feelings but they are futile and feeble. They are like words written in pencil; soon they will fade, even though the writer intended that they last forever. The heart is perhaps in itself, like a child you see; it is pure, without contamination. Its intentions are always clear and good. It needs protection which is why we have to filter and filter what we allow it to indulge in lest we lose it. It is fragile but not futile.

So I recall a time when my heart together with fate led me to the marvellous bliss of drifting far above everyday life. I floated all too well on that bubble and it is a high I cannot find myself with my own efforts. It is a gift, a blessing, which goes on being a blessing long after the source has ceased to exist. So I do give myself permission to reopen that box, let the emotions fill the room, then close it again. I set it back into my cupboard, along with the many other things I have put to death.

Rant: The words that save

Oh the words that saved me from insanity and from my own sanity. Oh words that can no longer stay hidden in the crevices of my heart but pulsate giving me life again. I run along life hoping to get some kind of warmth and hugs and laughter and the laughter grows louder not because I am guffawing but because I myself am laughing at my own inadequacy to grasp the simplicity of life and how it should be.

We release thoughts of poison that slowly consume our identity until we can no longer control the act of negative thinking fuelled by comparison to those we cannot even touch because our brows now touch therefore we are no longer beautiful because we not prim, proper and straight.

Oh but the written word draws us back to that place where we can be us again. It brings us back to the words that God himself spoke to us when he exhaled his breath onto us at Creation. Oh dear God let your word be true, let it trample the whorish thoughts that so easily spill out of our minds, they themselves full of pesticide that seeps through unconscious mind leading us to believe in the sadness of our minds though our hearts speak only joy and vibrate from a frequency basing all we touch from our hearts with love which is a strong foundation that you so aptly described in your good word as a solid rock we can trust each time each the storm threatens our very existence that we may find light in that fortress, that our very minds would remain in that fortress and betray the seductive wildness that leads us to doom.

Sigh.

 

All filled up with no where to spill

How much of us still remains when we have read and read and read all these books. It is great to learn and adopt but it scares me when I adopt a voice, an author's voice in my thinking and in my writing. They inhabit your mind even if it is for that week, but where does the rest of the voice go?

And then you start writing hoping that you can at the least describe your experience with people and the world. You attach words to it, as far as your vocab can take you. You hope your words are important enough to be desirable or entertaining at the least (not ideal). Well it is hard to compete with entertainment, we live in a world of images. Imagination appears to be losing its charms.

I pray words stay alive and the millions of authors and budding authors who also experienced the wrecking power of a good book. Those who opened up their very selves and filled them up with someone else's thoughts and desires. Words are demanding, they desire your mind and your time. You travel to another world filled with these characters and places. You meet yourself along the way, in the paragraphs and chapters. You cry sometimes and laugh too. You laugh along with fellow word lovers.

What my feelings sound like

Corrine Bailey Rae

This is maybe my favourite "Slow Jam" Artist of all times! Her music captures my emotions when I cannot find words to describe them

                                          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARFnffnuDQU

Parts

“A muse? What?” he exclaimed with a confused expression in his face. 

“I saw it yesterday, in her journal, there are pages and pages written about you” she replied excitedly.  Her hands were moving erratically as she explained what she had seen.  He looked at her nervously wondering exactly how much this girl had written about him

He bit his lip, deciding between freaking out and feeling smug. “She doesn’t even know me though, how could she draw so much to fill up a journal, a page is even too long, I don’t even know her name!” he laughed. He finally found the humour in the situation.

She stared at him laughing away and after a long pause, she started laughing too.

“It is not you that she writes about, it's the parts of you that are part of her, and the things you do, the parts of her that she will soon find in her whole”, she replied with a sudden straight face.

He looked terribly disappointed.

Why RomComs still matter

We watch these movies, each time a new one is released we drag our male companion to the first cinema we can find. We know what will happen, boy meets girl and then they fight and break-up but by some force of nature get back together. There is usually a scene where someone is running at the airport. We know this. I know this. That fact still does not deter me from watching another and another and each time feeling a glimmer of hope, that someday, maybe today I will meet the perfect stranger.

I did meet the perfect stranger who became very real in my life. There were scenes of our meeting that were so surreal and movie-like. I spent hours and hours replaying and telling these unbelievable stories to all my friends who listened in awe. The truth is, I had spent most of my teenage years watching everything from Titanic to Save the Last Dance and wondered if a Quirky Cathy like me would ever experience that. I experienced more than the light stuff, I experienced some darkness too. While I understand that a bond is far more important than the flashing scenes of “it was fate friend!” , those moments still make me smile. Honestly those are the things that remain as treasures that we can open and reopen again and again. The first time someone surprised you with a gift, picked you up or kissed you while the sun set remains engraved in the warmth of the heart. After the wounds have healed and the anger subsides, we are left with those irreplaceable memories.

Be it cheesy or not, we all have some kind of reel of our favourite moments. This is why I watch and am moved each time. It is not because I am obsessed with the idea of love, but more the possibilities that love can bring. Science fiction or action even romance can show highly unlikely scenarios but only love can make us crazy enough to make them a reality. Or at the least desire to make it our reality.

OMG stop fluttering

"You silly, silly pretty bugs !
those lilies are not for us"

Instant fluttering in my tummy
his presence is adorned with lilies
white lilies
 roses
 sunflowers
he is a good bunch

Shhhhhh!

"We cannot let him know"

I smile quietly
and wonder
if I even warrant that bunch
if I could ever be handed that bunch

I want it so dearly
mostly for myself
partly because their wings fluttered
 while I stuttered
in my greeting
that was only a whisper

I wonder if my whisper will linger
or will I go on longer
in deep hope
that that good bunch will someday be mine!!!

(PS lets not get too carried away)

My butterflies won't come out

My butterflies won’t come out

For anything less than lilies

Or sunflowers

Maybe white roses.

They refuse to be lured by laughter

Interest

Even peculiar strangers.

They sit patiently on green stalks

Laughing loudly

Throwing they beautiful heads back

The kind of laughter that makes you nervous

But its totally powerful and intimidating.

There is no humour about it.

I present them with yellow carnations

And the pretty little bugs wont budge.

“Really ”, they snap.

My mind turns around slowly

Embarrassed looking at the yellow common flower in its hands

It’s sad. It’s heart-wrenching.

The mind thinks it’s time

The heart is almost ready

But my butterflies will not budge.

They were so quiet for so long

I was convinced of their death.

They want beauty.

“We could do fine with these tulips,

Petunias but soon we will need more”

I look to the heavens and ask for a white lily.

God smiles and whispers “Not yet”

“I have been weeding Dad”

“I know but not yet”

I turn around half glad

Half disappointed. 

I blow another petunia away.

Feed your faith

Flee from fear

it creeps in
disguises itself as caution.
"Yes its caution"

until you didn't do it
you didn't do what what you came to do.
You woke up everyday and did everything else
Except what you came here to do.

"what if? oh no!"

I will stay here and watch
watch your dreams wither.
I will watch you conform
watch you  change
change
conform.

"Who am I?"
"Why am I here?"

Now you don't know who you are.
I didn't do it
I asked you
what if it doesn't work
You said yes
it might not work.

now you don't know
Why
You chose to feed me
and let your faith starve.

there's still hope.
*grabs watering can*