First blog post

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Home Alone

I now know the sound of my footsteps. I can recognise my breathing anywhere, how it mirrors my mood and how it gets its tone from my heartbeat. Its often subtle, almost silent. I don’t move around much, or do much but listen. Listening and familiarizing myself with the voices that echo from these walls. In these three months of solitude I have learnt so much about myself, parts I hid unravelled before me. Unveiled for what feels like the first time. I sometimes walk into a room with my eyes shut, I have mastered the structure, each corner, I no longer have to count my footsteps. It’s 7pm and I decided to end my afternoon nap. I am now watching the stars settle into the night. I marvel at how each seems to know its place. They are still, at least from where I am standing. If only I knew their daily routine as well as mine I could have woken up sooner to see the sun disappear. Cause now I am all alone and everything around me seems to remind me of that. A few years ago I had written about someone’s departure and how empty it made me feel. Difference with this is I walked into this knowing I would be all on my own. No one is leaving. It’s just me and filling any void with pieces of whatever memory I have of companionship.

Good enough tears

I wonder how my life would have turned out if I didn’t have a broken past. Would I have a sad story to tell? Would mine be sad enough? Would I cry when another woman’s story resembles my yesterday? Would my voice be as loud? Are all the outspoken activist the same people they were before? Before their lives changed? Before they learnt to say no? Could they even say it? Were they even given a chance to? I’ve learnt that my voice comes from all the times I failed it. I failed to even echo a stop. This is to the 5 year old that didn’t know what to say, the 13 year old who was too shook to even utter a word and the 24 year old who grew weary of fighting and let him get away with it.

An ode to Grieving Object

I’m back where it all began, in that very room. The walls have been painted and its a different bed but it’s still the same house and the memory is still as new as fresh dew. Me in my green dress that I’m sure still fits me just fine, except I will never wear it again. What’s rape to you?! Although it never reached penetration with me I was still violated. It was the second time my body had been sexualized but this time it was continuous. My skin condition left an irritating itch for me to hold on to, to serve as a reminder for every time I had tried to close my my eyes and imagine it wasn’t real. That I didn’t feel a thing. My innocence tainted and the idea of what my first teenage love would be. All of that destroyed. I couldn’t even bare the thought of taking a bath or getting dressed. Anything that meant that I too put a hand in myself. I hated walls and doors too or anything that wasn’t pure space, air. I would later question and resent myself for allowing my then boyfriend to hold me. The guilt, the confusion of why this felt right and that didn’t. I’m alone in this room, almost 11 years later and I can’t shake the feeling off. I know I’m home alone but something in the air gives me chills of how every embrace I’ve ever received since I was 14 reminds me of you. Maybe if I slept in a different room this trigger would have resurfaced old wounds but it just hit me that every room holds traces of places where you’ve marked me.

Homecoming

I’m a heartbeat away from leaving my body

I’m a breath away from saying goodbye

I’ll follow you down

To the bottom of something, somewhere

Where gravity leaves all of its victims

I’ll awaken the corpse in me

My bones feel burdened with flesh and blood

I’ve got so much body to lose

If I had the urge to get out of bed

I’d be hanging from a tree , the source of life

In defiance of every unsolicited breath of oxygen it has given me

I could be plenty of things

But all I am is a warm body, burning with defeat

Staring at walls, trying to embody their lifelessness

How I envy their stillness

I want to be numb as the concrete roads I walk on

I want to mirror the quietness of clouds

The invisibility of air

The darkness of an almost full moon

The quietness of the soil

Death, I wait for you

With every every breath, I wait

You’ll meet me on my bed

Waiting for you to call me home

Waiting on my last sleep

Waiting to be reunited with the very dust that formed me.

Unwavering Legacy

Shadow of my forefathers

Inherited an almost fulfilled dream

Forsaking my destiny to walk eternity in his shoes

A path not my own, but paved out for me

His legacy pending

Dependent on my obedience

Burdened with the task of reminding the world that my ancestors were here

My existence a service

My every breath echoes his dying wish

A womb of every dream expected to birth its reality

I’m a shadow of forefathers

Member of the voiceless generation

A walking corpse

Void of a body of thought, an identity, a vision

Silenced by the responsibility of carrying a history that wants to be present, to be relevant

Event though its time has come and gone

I’m a pebble thrown into a river of dreams

Mine is to ripple the water , to soar

My final resting place

Accomplishment

 

 

 

The Darkness and Light

Eskom has shed some light on darkness, call it a lightbulb moment. Today’s load shedding got me thinking… In school I learnt that black is the absence of light and that the two cannot co-exist. Not seeing light doesn’t take away one’s ability to see. Darkness merely camouflages everything, making it black. If you can see the colour black in broad daylight, why dismiss it at night or claim to see nothing?? Is seeing only one colour not a sight in itself?? Guess the point I’m trying to make is that darkness is just as beautiful and important as light. It should not be made inferior to light by being called the absence of it. For if you claim that the two can’t co-exist, they must surely their own time to shine.

Orphan at heart

-I have a religious submissive wife for a mother and a man who dare be emasculated for a father. My father is never wrong and my mom is moved by guilt.

Met an incredibly open guy on the bus, who also happens to be a twin, the eldest one for that matter. 9hr bus trips are not fun at all but this one I will remember.

-Why is it disobedience when a child had a different view to their parents? Why is fear of not blessed in my adulthood used as a tool to silence me? I feel so detached from my parents, it takes the the world for me to bring myself to a point where I am able to ask them for anything. My parents are pushing me to have a job, I want it to. I don’t want to go to bed another night after hearing how difficult it is for them, how much they struggle to make ends meet.

-When do you know that your parents are done raising you? Is it when they take 5 days to send your rent money? Is it when you get a handshake and not a hug or peck? How must you become an adult when there is a part of you that will never be seen as grown, as wise, as right, for you will always be a child in their eyes.

-emancipation for me will come when I get a job. It’s the norm in our community for parents to cut their children off when they are financially independent. I lay awake at night dreading the day I go a year without hearing from them. I can feel that they are tired, I have even assumed most of their parental responsibilities.

Majority of my friends have lost both parents or one and I’ve been called ungrateful plenty of times for appreciating that they are still alive, whether they breathing or life.

Sunsets

My muse Lucky, a photographer IG:@maccony takes the greatest of sunset of pics. This is one of them

And so I wrote this

Melancholy

I remember my smile, it was beautiful.
Oh how I miss joy, so forgiving and naive.
My laugh was loud and carefree. Now I’ve forgotten how to be happy. I lost all of that along with my innocence on my way to adulthood.
But how I miss her. I’ve not seen her since, she lives in parts of me that have long died. Just the other day, I realised how much I miss my non-existent childhood. It saddens me because there is nothing to her, I’m not even looking for a fond memory…something to reminisce of will do. She could have been my home, the place I return to when I’m down and out but now. All she’ll ever be is history tucked away behind adolescence, misery, regret, longing and a distant memory of nothing

Skin Deep

Don’t tell her she has a nice smile or that her radiance is the envy of the sun or a shooting star. Don’t tell her you love her just yet. Rather tell her the truth, she’ll believe it. Tell her you know what makes her happier than her favourite ice cream. Tell her you know her heart rate whenever a sad song comes on. Then she’ll look into your eyes as if to look away. Trying to to hide the parts you’re yet to see. Holding on to pieces of herself, her last secret, her dimple and all that she has always been afraid of giving away. Wondering what she could have let slip and hoping you wouldn’t remember. By now she knows that you probably meant it when you told her you’d be around. Now she knows that your love isn’t blind. She’s shown you parts of herself that she has not even come to see, to realise…for you have seen her at her most vulnerable. Then she’ll finally turn trusting it’s okay to let her guard down, she’ll lean it with her back against your chest in your old blue t-shirt, and leave you wondering what she looks like underneath it all