pauses (,) and periods (.)

I remember my four years of university in scenes, some prosaic, some profound.

A night during O-Week, lying on a beanbag in some guy’s flat whom I had never met before. People strewn around the floor like sweet wrappers, a hookah pipe travelling around the room like a prostitute among desperate men. Strange music, strangers everywhere, pretending they – we – are already friends. (We’re still not).

Getting back my first Media Studies essay, bludgeoned by a red pen and a confidence-crushing 58%. Growing a thicker skin there and then, appreciating the lecturer’s acerbic wit over my own “Modernity is a multifaceted term that refers to a period in the....” jargon. (I still don’t understand what modernity is).

Watching the first ever episodes of Desperate Housewives in a marathon session, all six of us crammed on or at the foot of my friend’s single bed. I&J chicken fillets roasting on an illegally imported mini-grill that could get us expelled from res. Stolen posters from the cinema for wallpaper. Eating off paper plates instead of dinnerware, sitting on overturned boxes instead of dining room chairs. No curfews, no rules of decorum. Such small but sweet freedoms.

Walking to Pick ‘n Pay on a Sunday morning to get breakfast. Watching with bemusement as a dude runs out of the pub in his birthday suit, flashing cars, and high-fiving strangers. After seeing people diving into bushes “for fun”, and racing in the “naked mile” after taraweeh, nothing short of phenomenal displays of stupidity can surprise me anymore. (I do still appreciate Chuck Norris jokes though).

Interviewing Akin Omotoso over lunch; my first big journalistic assignment. He bought me juice and gave me ten pages worth of story in between bites of pasta. What began as a textbook interview became an earnest conversation between absolute strangers that is as rare as it is rich. (The only thing I did wrong was forget to ask for an autograph.)

Putting together my final multimedia portfolio over the past few weeks, all the while love-hating the exhilaration of getting technology to adhere to my whims. Each menu button, each edited video clip is a tiny, pathetic, necessary victory. Slave to the machine, I eat jelly tots for supper, curse like a truck driver and press the proverbial pause button on my life until it’s all over. (It is and it isn’t).

Now is that time in my life when people start blurting inanities.

“You’ve finished university. Now you have to enter the real world,” they say, equating my last four years and all its lessons to a measly pair of fake Pumas.

“It’s the end of the road for you. A new journey begins,” they philosophise, as if our past, present and future are separate highways.

I am not overwhelmed by this “end” because I don’t really believe in it. Life is just a long string of sentences, each experience separated by commas, until God inscribes the big fat full stop.

the tentacles of time

The prelude to death scares me more than death itself. How vain of me to be twenty-two years young and petrified of ageing, but it’s not the mental image of wrinkles or dentures that make me quiver. 

It’s the thought of the gradual erosion of everything – one’s eyesight, one’s memory, one’s selfhood.  

It’s the inability to climb a flight of stairs, or bake chocolate cake, or read Douglas Coupland anymore.  

It’s the feeling of everyday, all-the-time helplessness as someone else scrubs your back, feeds you lunch or plaits your hair; the things mummy used to do for you when you were six.  

It’s the indignity of having to greet visitors when you’re in a hospital bed and your chest is exposed and you are wearing a urine bag. 

It’s the inevitability of loss as your children surround you, and you relate memories of your youth and remind them to bury you next to your husband.

It’s the unmistakable sound of your own gulps for breath, and the taste of too many pills and the slow tears of no more hope.  

It’s the quiet, bewildered surrender as you lay there, empty, having come to the end of yourself.

if you were not...

you could be

light blueness,

a poet’s muse,

braai'd marshmallow,

soft rain,

a beautiful poem,

gel pen ink,

silk,

a rusk dipped in Earl Grey tea,

butterfly wings,

mist,

the scent of petrol and vanilla,

an esculent word,

dusk,

a cashmere shawl,

autumn leaves,

cocoa butter.

but you are, and in so being,

you’ve become

my reification and

Love’s inscape.

Asking for it

The next time someone, however naively, asks if I am "forced" to dress this way, I will reply:

"Yes. My dad will disown me if I expose my arms and my husband will smack me around if strands of my hair are showing. I am as oppressed as you assume me to be. Want a pic to go with that?"

If only these budding journalists-cum-activists would fuck off and find real oppressed women to liberate.

Transience

There’s nothing like a run in with mortality to bring one closer to Allah. Even if it was not mine; especially because it was my father’s.

He was shot in the chest on the night of the 28th July in our kitchen, by one of two burglars. They escaped with nothing but our peace of mind. My brother, who was in the next room, drove my dad to the hospital while my sister, barefoot and hysterical, tried calling my mum and family members for help while in the car. (Her R12 of airtime lasted, somehow).

She called me too, in desperation, but stuck in this tiny town a thousand kilometres away, all I could was pray. Please keep him alive, please keep him alive.

[Oddly, I remember thinking of the novel Shades during those hours, and Father Charles’ belief that those who have enough faith don’t need to bargain with God. I didn’t. None of that “Please Allah, if you do x, then I promise I will do y”, because my dad also taught me that His will doesn’t come with conditions.]

I flew home the next day, but nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. My dad has always been my bastion, my cliched pillar of strength. I love him like he is invincible, as daughters often do. But seeing him outside of our lives’ template - in a hospital bed, wires protruding from his body, struggling to breathe, grimacing every time he moved – was a hack to the heart each time.

Two months later, he’s almost recovered from his injuries. He’s got his smile back, but not his verve. And sometimes I can tell that the puffiness around his eyes is not from exhaustion but tears.

Life persists, we comply dutifully, rehearsing platitudes that “we’re okay now.” Even if my sister has nightmares and my mother has insomnia and I cry in the bathroom.

I fluctuate between sheer gratitude and abject rage, ineffably glad that my father is alive but repulsed and terrified to be living alongside people with no humanity.