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Tuesday, March 17, 2015

When darkness swallowed whole, The Shadows.

Indeed, the orbit is complete. Earth was exactly at this point last year.
It is not the sun that reminds me of this, but the cold at the base of my heart. I am shaking. The cold has nothing to do with this.
The air feels so familiar. If I had slept then till now, I would assume no motion at all. I would think all is still the same. The fear, the tears, the dangerous wind, the needles on my bed, the emptiness in my chest. Routine nocturnal dispare. I have been here before.

This is how you kill a man before he stops breathing; You make him wait!
I trusted the bricks and frozen cement to protect my troubled soul from the spiteful world. Hermit to all good happenings, my face was nowhere to be found. My name was everywhere. Outside my door, footsteps would send an icy lightning down my bones. Every siren scream dirty in the Johannesburg busy air was a death threat to my frightened heart. The giant lock could not protect me from the fear. The old cloth I tucked under to block the wind at the foot of the door did not help, tears found their way in anyway, like apocalyptic floods, under blankets, a liquid serpent, they made it to my face. The walls had already fallen deaf, lost all sense of sympathy, my throat became just a passageway of sound, nothing else.
'Men don't cry yo!' …
'Use your pain to better your art yo!' …
'Yo, are we still on for Friday?'…
…Imagining the future was a burning spear cracking its way through my chest. I had to stop making plans for the weekend,
'No my friend, I cannot confirm that I will see you tomorrow.'
It is ten o’clock now, thinking about lunchtime is too much of a dream for me, a mare; I cannot allow myself to see beyond the now. They might be here any minute now to take me. Fortunate are the madmen who wander nameless in these streets, for even though they are unconscious about their freedom, they have basked far too long under its warm wings and they know all smiles of a life without fear. I am dying. Waiting has never been so painful for me, ever, it gave me time to think, to dream, the senseless soliloquies with other shadows. No longer. Can it be over and done with already? I cannot do anymore waiting. Because of my curiosity, I was born with wide open eyes. It is not the terror that death promises to bring that kills me, but my silly talent of always wanting to understand and know things, it is my innate quest for certainty. I would rather be dead and know it. I’m a ghost, wandering in a living body, trapped. The scars mean nothing to me, nor does the hunger, ghosts have no opinion about the cold.

Just tell me I’m dead and there’s nothing to worry about. Someone please pinch my spirit and confirm that I’m not here? Tell me I’m just an insane unborn child dreaming up an erroneous literature assignment, a tragedy of a hidden boy with circles, the story of an undying dead person. Say all this is just my imagination. Conversations with a God I never gave a chance to exist, but only my sad reality replied. I couldn’t see anyway this could ever end. It hasn’t, even to this day. But that’s fine, The Shadows are warm sometimes.

Time has moved, events came and left. I have seen faces and shook hands. My face too has also been seen, my hand did also shake and wave. It is my heart they never saw, I wore it on my sleeves hoping they would shake it off. It found its way back to my chest now. More than it, it is the rock it carries that I feel. How metals break glasses between my ribs. This machine is becoming too ancient to carry this heart. Soft as it is on the hands of strangers. Light as my smile is on their pupils. These bones are becoming outdated to carry these scars, this daily crushing spirit. It is not a new body I’m yearning for. Give me certainty! Tell me everything is alright.

Seasons change and I’m thrown back to a ghostly past, benighted. The problem with time is that it is ever constant. We exist in the past, future and present concurrently. Well, it might not be about time, rather memory and intuition, how we can travel back in time and skip to the future even when the present gleams with so much smiles. In gigabytes; how big is memory? Can I fill my head with enough knowledge and new experiences to push out the past? Tell me there’s a hidden delete button behind my neck that I haven’t yet discovered.

Hugged by strange emotions right now, I’m re-experiencing all the terror. It is true that pain changes you. There’s a lamb inside me that this new beast cannot consume. It must die! I failed to die. It must die! I’m searching from my fingers the name of this lamb. Index and thumbs command me to repeat the lines above; It must die! I failed to die. It must die!…(cut to the present: A man tells me a joke about bricks and feathers, the fun in it is what Samuel Beckett once said ‘The essential doesn’t change!’…I find the joke too profound to laugh at, it makes me sad) …Back: I’m naming the lamb…It must die! I failed to die. It must die!…I found the name: the essential doesn’t change, says the lamb. If the lamb fails to die just as I failed and the essential doesn’t change,  who am I? Who is the lamb?…Sadly, I = Lamb.

I cannot insist on being a lamb when the world calls a beast out of me. I have died too many times before. How infinite can I continue dying?
I have met many other strangers with death written on their palm and still the lamb shook their hands and found a home in their hallowed chests. Even to this day, the tyranny persists. Something in me must die!

A dead prophet asks me to change myself and the world will follow. I’m afraid sir I cannot do that this time. I have been changing, I have even lost the landmarks to lead me back to my true self. I cannot do this changing thing any longer. I have been changing and the world is still the same. I have learned that significance is a relative phenomenon. I’m not that significant at times to the world, but the world is always significant to me. The essential doesn’t change. So, forgive me. I will not change this time, I’m going to destroy everything I hate about the world. I’m going to remove all the insignificant objects and obliterate all toxic people that the world has presented me with, starting with these beasts disguised as lambs shaking my hand next to my heart with their sharp claws. I today am the essential and I will not change!

…Back to The Shadows

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