Where the light takes me

I don’t know why I love like this…in stops and starts. It’s either fully or nothing at all. It’s always some great burst of affection and then absolute emptiness. I don’t know why my heart yearns for the things that aren’t good for me. It’s been 10 full moons since I discovered my worth. The first one was red and stranded in paradise. I was broken and it was whole and shimmering. I wanted to trap it in my teeth and suck out the star dust. I wanted to wade into the ocean with rocks tied to my feet. I wanted to stop feeling everything all at once.

I left my shoes in the water.

Since that wild December I have learnt to breathe by myself. There were moments of absolute suffocation where it felt like my grief would consume me. There were moments of clarity that shrouded my soul in vanilla and told me I can do this. I can walk away. I can cut people out. I can decide to wear yellow and put daisies around my waist and stare my demons in the face and tell them that they do not deserve a piece of my narrative. You are dead to me. The me that let you overwhelm my peace is dead to me. There is only growth left. There is only the soil I was planted in that June evening when you cried false tears over my affection and called it love. There is only me. Wrapped in wildflower petals and sunshine and soft piano solos, I have risen out of the grave you tried to bury me in.

This year I have learnt to collect my own flowers. Sweet winter daffodils in angry pots, old oak trees with snapping limbs and short tempers, gentle vines of jasmine, with delicate branches and wilting roots. I have learnt not to need the flora. I do not want to be part of any garden unless I have grown it myself. There are sunflower seeds in my lungs.

They will bloom wherever the light takes me.

Don’t worry about me, I’m just mildly depressed and might need to be medicated for it.

I can’t remember the last time I was truly happy. My gut tells me it was December 2017 when my sister got married and my body was 10 kgs heavier but my soul was 1000 times lighter.

All I can think of is that if this is adulthood, if this is really what’s in store for the rest of my life, then I don’t particularly feel like it.

My dad phoned me today and told me he thinks my blog was good for my mental health. My mom just wants to know why I only write when I’m sad. Mom, it’s because when I’m sad I can feel the million different versions of me trying to claw their way out, and they make themselves known through paper and pen. The writing silences the aches in my chest that only appear on miserable winter mornings, after 2 am, and lately, all the fucking time.

There’s a lead blanket that’s settled on my heart, and it’s stifling my favourite parts about me. It sits on my dreams at night and tells me I’m not and never will be good enough. It convinces me that the people I love will always leave, and then it pushes them away just to prove a point.

The other day I wanted to stop existing. Not die. Just stop. For a little bit. I phoned my best friend and she reminded me that I’m valuable and precious. That even though I can’t see it now that I have purpose. That this feeling of being so wildly out of control of my own life and mind and happiness can’t last forever.

But maybe it can.

Maybe I need to try and smile more.

I miss you in fistfuls

I miss you in the quiet hours. When the day has yet to rear its head. When everything is blank and still and lonely. I miss you when I drive home at night; the sky is open, your heart is closed. It has always been so.

I miss you when I fall asleep. It’s an angry kind of missing, a drunken, violent, spitting kind of missing. I miss you in fistfuls. I miss you in gasps. I miss you in moments.

I miss who I thought you could be. Not the person you are. My idea of you never existed, he lived in the beams of sunlight peaking through my blinds and in between the pages of my journals. He flitted out of sight. I wish I could trap him in a jar and keep him close; the fantasy you fed me. The you I wanted to see. Never the one that existed. Never the one in front of me.

I do not miss your shattered soul. I never want to see it again.

Something to consider

I want you to know just how much heart-aching joy I’ve felt in my life since I decided you were no longer allowed to be a part of it.

Baby, it fills rooms.

My peace tumbles from my hair every morning as I float around the room, thanking myself for every step I took in the direction away from you.

My happiness trails down rain-streaked boulevards; filling cups and leaving soft kisses.

There are flowers in my lungs where you once planted weeds.

Baby, they’ve grown roots.

You can’t kill my trees.

Iron sunlight and quick-moving clouds and me.

I’m currently sitting in the library of my old highschool, about to help my mother teach Macbeth to a bunch of kids from the rural schools in the area.

For now I’m trying to finish some marking for the assistant lecturing job I worked hard to get, at the table where I used to study for my matric exams, and where I wrote a bad poem about using sunlight to warm my soul when my highschool boyfriend broke up with me. I’m staring out the same window I used to stare out whenever I was stuck on a Math problem, or wondering why the dude whose locker was next to mine didn’t like me back (he’s gay, Harriet).

I just took a trip to the prayer garden round the back of the building that looks out onto the river. I sat there dramatically in a cloud of gnats, and reflected on how many times I’ve stared out into my life-shaped abyss only have it stare back at me and say “baby girl, you’ll be grand.”

“I know you think everything demands to be felt so loudly, but you always bounce back from adversity with this insane tenacity and defiance. You’ll be fine, you’ll be fine, you’ll be fine.”

I’m sitting back where I first started. And I’d like to think that the inner-me who is still sitting in her school uniform, staring out onto the river and writing bad poetry about quick-moving clouds and her sunlight-coloured soul, would be pretty proud of how we’ve turned out.

Because we were fine. We are fine. We will be fine.

Blooming

I’m slowly learning that devastation is just another side effect of growth, and the more you embrace it, the faster the healing process.

I am no longer afraid of the taste of sadness, I will eat it alive if it means progress.

Spiritual Dismembering

Image: David Fanuel

I have cut so many people out of my life that my phone is starting to feel like a graveyard of dead friendships and abandoned conversations. But I’m not sorry. I’ll never be sorry. From the burial mounds I’ve sprouted flowers, and from the silence I’ve curated peace.

I’m just planted.

Image: Benjamin Patin

I took Friday morning off to cry.

Okay, I actually just took the morning off and the tears were an indirect consequence of it. I woke up hungover and devastated – every single emotion I’ve suppressed over the past few months rising to the surface of my soul – demanding to be felt. I’d kept them locked up for so long, feeding them distractions and unhealthy vices and bad poetry, I stifled their voices by pretending so desperately to be happy. It worked for a while. I think I’ve spent the last 8 months drifting in such a state of complacency that any emotion other than “being” scares the crap out of me – it’s such a stark reminder of my own humanity.

But on Friday I think they’d had enough.

The thing that made me sob loudly, uncontrollably, and very unattractively actually had nothing to do with me. I was simply an innocent bystander, watching an episode of Queer Eye, trying to make my head stop pounding and my serotonin start working. It was the episode where the Fab Five are trying to help the religious dude with the 6 kids who only gets about 2 hours of sleep every night. Bobby was helping him plant a new vegetable patch when suddenly he says something that literally made me sit up and howl violently into the void.

“Sometimes when you’re buried, you’re actually just planted”.

It was the most comforting thing I’ve ever heard.

Oh my God. I’m not buried. I’m not buried, this isn’t the end of anything. I’m just planted. my roots are taking hold and in a few months I’m going to bloom. I’m not buried, I’m not buried,  I’m not buried…I’m just planted.

I cried out of relief for the rest of the morning, every single little twinge of regret or anxiety, or devastation poured out of me like a burst pipe. I mourned over the person I used to be, wept over who I’ve become and spoke blessings over who I will turn into. I smeared mascara all over my pillow and let my pain be felt. Sometimes these things demand to be addressed, wallowed in, and then let go.

I’m still very much not fine. It still feels like there’s an anvil sitting on my chest, but at least I’m no longer being suffocated by the debris that’s tried to claw its way down my throat.

I’m not buried, just planted.

I’ve outgrown you

Image: qi bin

When I was 20 I thought I had fallen in love with a boy. He had sharp cheekbones and expressive eyes and I wrote him countless poems, trying to somehow show how I felt. I think he wrote me one back – a strange, sad sonnet, stuffed into the back of a blog that I stumbled upon months after our demise. It described me as “subversive”.

I think that’s the best way anyone has ever described me.

Subversive. Insurgent. Renegade. Agitator.

Like I somehow managed to revolutionise his entire outlook on life.

I don’t think he meant it like that at all, but I’ll take what I get from the lovers who’ve lost me.

When he left it felt like I couldn’t breathe. I can still remember clutching my heart on the train home, sobbing over how unfair everything seemed to be. It was all so raw, so painful, so desperately sad. I think I described myself as a “rubbed raw, icy footed, miscommunicated mess”. I think I described him as “right and good and lovely”.

I think everything was a little too dramatic to be honest.

3 years later, I am completely healed from my brief cosmic dalliance, this dance with desire and despair, and sobbing his name repeatedly on public transport. I found myself a million miles away from the person I was on that train platform, light-years ahead of the me who considered that boy to be the best thing that had ever happened – because better, more exciting, kinder things have happened since. I found myself in a bar belting Wheatus and having my hair lightly ruffled by a mutual friend. He grabbed me by the shoulders and looked me in the eyes and told me that he thinks I’ve outgrown the person who made me feel all those things.

Do you hear that? I’ve outgrown him.

That’s so wild. I used to be convinced that I never would, that I’d stay stuck on that train platform forever, that I’d be devastated and miserable without that little patch of sunlight shining on my life.

But I breathed through it all. I breathed and I lived a little bit more each day and I discovered my own resilience in the midst of my disappointment. Then eventually I stopped telling myself to breathe, I just did. I stopped choosing him and chose myself instead. That sounds ridiculous doesn’t it? Like I should have been choosing myself from the start, I should have remembered the golden rule of “I am number 1 and everyone else must fall in line behind me”. I think when you’re young and someone kisses your palms like they hold entire galaxies, you start to believe that the universe can only exist within you if they keep telling you it does. Turns out the cosmos have been lying dormant in my chest this entire time, waiting for me to acknowledge their perennial existence regardless of whether or not that other person reminded me of them.

In two weeks time none of this is going to matter. You are going to be breathing despite your doubt, you are going to find everything a little easier. Your patch of sunlight is going to expand with each dust-mote and beam that finds its way onto your bedroom floor, you’re going to be okay.

Just keep loving yourself, and loving the people who ruffle your hair and tell you you’ve grown. Just keep filling yourself up with good human connection, and trust whatever process you believe is out there, because there is one.

You’ll be okay, there are asteroid belts wrapped around your lungs and super novas in your soul. You’ll be okay.

“Setting fire to our insides for fun”

Image: Kinga Chichewicz

Hi,

I’m back…for now I guess. We can’t say how long this is going to last because I’m really bad with commitment. The only thing I’ve ever properly committed to has been a 1 and a half year relationship that ended about a month ago, so hey, there’s your answer.

That’s also roughly the same amount of time in which this blog has been briefly abandoned. Weird. I think it’s because I’m not very good at writing when I’m feeling happy.

My mother actually asked me last night why I only write when I’m sad, my answer was simply that happiness is not an interesting enough emotion to comment on. Think about it. When I’m happy I wake up early and stretch and greet the hobos milling outside my window like I’m Snow White and they’re the little forest animals. I skip out of my flat and down the road and I fist bump car guards and breathe deeply and stare up at the blue sky and grin widely into the universe.

And it’s all very boring.

The real shit. The interesting, mind-bending, gut-wrenching, soul-searching shit, is when it’s 2am and “Daughter” has been playing on a loop since midnight and everything feels a little too real, too uncertain, too wild. And when the dawn arrives there’s a certain victory in surviving that shitstorm of emotion and adjectives. That’s how Plath wrote “Daddy”, and Eliot wrote “The Wasteland” and Spike Milligan wrote “On the Ning Nang Nong”.

Don’t try to tell me Spike Milligan wasn’t deeply emotional when he wrote the line “And the teapots jibber jabber joo”, I will fight you.

Anyway, I wrote something at 2am the other day and it was moderately good. So here it is:

Hey, I know you’re tired, and scared. Life is awfully fresh and raw and uncertain right now. You’re not too sure where you fit. Here’s the thing…in a few years time you will be a little less immortal. You will be sitting on new sheets in a bigger bed, with more money in your savings account and more stability in your heart, and you are going to miss this moment.

You are going to have more of your shit figured out and you are going to wonder why you didn’t cherish being 23 a bit more. There’s so much youth still on your side. The world is beckoning you with its fingertips and all you have to do is leap.

You are going to miss being this young, this unsure, this devastated, this inspired.