You are new-born. I count your magic digits. Your nose, lips, eyes and mouth are a requiem. You have eczema. I was unemployed. Across the valley’s face you came home. I did not expect you. I did not help paint your room a bright sunshine yellow. I regret that. This bundle. The science of sinking flower. Magus visiting on a floating ship. Milk-fever on your brow. You cannot speak my name yet. One day you will hate me and say I hurt your feelings. This will happen as a self-aware four year old. I will feel ashamed of myself. I shouted because I was afraid. Afraid you were going to hurt yourself. I did not speak when you turned your head away. I felt afraid. You’re a good psychologist at five. You tell me a baby will make me happy. I believed then in hope like a girl. A man enters the picture when I am thirty-nine. The man I think I am going to marry. It doesn’t work out. In reality it doesn’t but in my head it does. I can hear something that draws my interest as I try and fall asleep. The dogs move in the dark. Their shadows silent manoeuvring disconcerting to me at first. The one walks behind the other.
Then it is the art of serving and helping during Covid-19. Everybody thinks it’s the apocalypse. I don’t think of anything but of getting out of this tiny isolation room they’ve put me in. Now two years seems like such a long time ago. I shit in this room and everyone can see. I pee. Everyone can see. That is not lost on me. I am a Coloured female biracial of slave stock grandfather came from Saint Helena guinea pig. When I was in the normal ward whatever normal means the male nurses could see us showering and would just stand there and watch. They had to. To keep us safe because of safety matters or matters of safety.
The aftermath of the promulgation of the Group Areas Act in post-apartheid South Africa should be a matter of every South African’s interest. Might I add it is very much a disquieting Jungian path.
To a sister in Europe that I feel as if I’m learning these things much too late. The things I needed from you. The things you needed from me. You needed someone to listen to you. Well I needed that too. It has come much too late.
I conduct an interview with water in the swimming pool. The droplets of rain feel like ice on my skin. Underneath I am surrounded by giant tap roots and blue trees. A safe blue forest. I can live here forever like I did in high school. I was baptised in the swimming pool hitting forty by an Apostle Harmse.
My mother’s face falls. My father interprets this as both cunning deceit on her part and lovely.
Joyce Carol Oates frightens me. The way her mind is engineered to think. Her conditioning.
Of this I am certain. Gravity. The leaf falls.
