Stone Poem -August 2025

I’m caught between trying to find somewhere in the house with strong enough wifi so that I can call P but also wanting to be far enough away from the middle of the house so that I can speak to her without anyone hearing me cry. I am a little taken aback by my tears. I don’t really understand why I’m so sad. I sit at the top of the stairs for a while, listening to P tell me about her Joburg days. Soothed by the sound of her voice and her stories from the weekend away with Hannah and Simon and them. Bella walks out of the kitchen and into the foyer and then out to the garden. I try to sound more upbeat at the end of the call than I did at the beginning of the call. Emil and Ida come back inside from the pool. I walk downstairs to try and find somewhere quieter. I stand in the kitchen pantry for a few minutes. I run my hands over the bags of pasta and tins of tomatoes and bottles of sparkling water. It’s beautiful here, it really is. The house, the pool, the sea, the view, the weather, all of it. But I can’t stop myself from crying on the phone. Paige comes into the pantry and gasps and then laughs when she sees me in here. I relocate to the laundry room, sit on top of the washing machine, listen to P tell me that everything is going to be fine. My mom comes into the laundry room. I head back to the top of the stairs. P has to leave for soccer now. I go downstairs and help lay the table. 

We break curfew during lockdown to drive our cat to the twenty-four hour animal hospital in Bryanston. When we’re stopped by traffic police P holds up the cat box to try and explain. The cop lets us go. Dotty meows in his cage while we wait at the reception in our masks. An old dog is slumped on the floor a few seats away from us, its owner typing on their phone. The dog’s brows tick up when the phone rings. Eventually it’s our turn. A doctor comes out to take Dotty away in his crate. We sit on the chairs. We haven’t been out this late at night in months. The women behind reception type and click and answer the phones.

Send me a link. Drop me a pin. Will you share your location? Can I bring a few friends? Is it cool if I smoke here? Don’t want the wind to bring it in. How much are you paying? Does that include the wifi? Oh, wow, that’s not bad, really. Might even be pretty good, maybe. With the sun coming in in the afternoons and a cat lying out on the balcony and a few herbs trying their best to grow. Could be quite nice, in fact. Close to the highway too, which helps. 

We decide to take the dogs on a night-time walk, which, yes, is probably a bad idea, but the weather is just perfect and the air smells of spring and the streets are quiet and the moon is big and bright. We stroll down the empty streets of our neighbourhood, stopping to let the dogs sniff and piss on anything they like. At first, the dogs strain against their leads and choke themselves, but after five minutes they relax into a more comfortable pace. We’ve left our phones at home. Just in case. No need to finish that sentence. We walk for maybe half an hour, building a route out of roads where the street lights are working. Some houses have already gone to bed for the night. Music reaches us from the park when we walk down Kerry. The dogs seem confused when we get home and suddenly it’s bed time.

P is in the Magaliesburg with her colleagues for the weekend so I go to a predrinks at Jakob’s house where Noah tries to teach me how to DJ. We end up at AND, where young looking white boys walk around with their tops off, bobbing up and down on the dancefloor to what feels to me like the same song played over and over again. I bump into Matt and Annie on the other, smaller, dancefloor outside, where more of the crowd has all of their clothes on. Why do we need to be standing right next to a speaker at two in the morning before the chats start to get deep? I think it has to do with the loudness all around us. Once people start doing coke I decide to go home to the pets. 

Mean. That’s what you are. It’s the 100th birthday of the school, and the week is going to be filled with activities. I ask my history class to make a time capsule on the whiteboard of things that feel relevant right now. Amapiano. 13 Reasons Why. Men are Trash. Tik-Tok. Vrrrpa. Greta Thunberg. Faking depression. Some of these feel very specific. 

Ja, drink your coffee out of your non-reusable cardboard cup you fucking ecological fascist. I’ll just stand behind you in line fondling the cork grip of my righteous glass cup that I bring with me wherever I go, except for those times when I forget it at home (but that’s not what we’re talking about right now). Oh, and you’re going to put a plastic lid on top of your cardboard cup for the five minutes it’s gonna take you to drink your flat white. Wow. That’s bold. So, you, like, really hate the earth, right? Like, you just get a kick out of burning down forests and poisoning cute little defenceless turtles, right? Cool, cool, that’s chill, you know, like, whatever gets you hot, I guess, you fucking HITLER. I bet you liked ‘La La Land’, didn’t you? I bet you didn’t even pretend to like ‘Barbie’? Ja, you’re probably one of those sick fucks who said something bad about Beyonce once, aren’t you? Admit it. Just admit it. Ugh. Disgusting. You disgust me. Mr Man. All content in your sleeveless puffer jacket. Enjoy your blood coffee, coloniser. 

If it’s a student’s birthday, they are allowed to come to school with a few birthday accessories. Crowns, sashes, tutus, things like that. More and more students bring elaborate bouquets of balloons, that float above them as they walk through the crowded hallyways, attached to their wrists by a string, bobbing up and down in class as they take notes or do trigonometry or try finish their bio homework during one of my more esoteric rants about America during a history lesson. The balloons become increasingly popular, to the point that scientists across the globe have to hire a sky-writer pilot and plane to decry the dwindling supply of the world’s helium, much of which is being diverted away from scientific research purposes towards more frivolous balloon celebratory purposes. Our intrepid headmistress heeds the scientists call (she’s a maths teacher by training so the spirit of STEM runs through her blood like how blood runs through the tubey things in our bodies). Her first act in the battle against balloons is to appeal to the students’ consciences during an assembly, asking birthday girls to find some alternative, non-inflatable means of celebrating themselves. But this doesn’t seem to work and the balloons keep coming. Next, she commissions an art competition, where students design posters discouraging birthday girls from bringing balloons to school. These posters are stuck up on notice boards throughout the school. On the corkboard at the entrance to the staffroom, next to the sign in sheet, is a drawing of two sinister balloons with jagged teeth, their strings wrapping around a crying earth. Above the balloons in all caps: “BALLOONS ARE HEARTLESS BEASTS!” - but still, the birthday balloons keep coming, wave after wave of cheerful choking villains - destroying life one sweet sixteenth at a time. Eventually, balloons are banned outright, and reg teachers are given safety pins and strict orders to pop any balloons that enter their classrooms in the mornings. For a week, the morning registration periods before the first lesson of the day are punctuated by intermittent pops, echoing down the halls, plastic rags piling up in bins. The next week, silence. 

But, really though. We don’t need DSTV in our digs. But dudes gotta watch soccer, right? We drive to Canal Walk to choose a TV. I sign up for a TV license. We have to get the full bouquet if we want to watch the Premier League. So we get the full bouquet. But no PVR. Kyle and I come back from a long weekend of filming in the Karoo, assisting on the third year final project. We’re gonna have to be at the next location early tomorrow morning and he doesn’t have a car so he’ll just sleep on the couch and we’ll go to set together. The rest of the digs have gone back to Joburg for the mid term university holiday. The house feels spooky empty. Kyle has some weed on him so we smoke up in the living room and flick through the channels one by one. Everything we see must have a whole team behind it, just like the film we’re working on. Not just the main cast and crew, but someone’s gotta sort out the food, someone’s gotta get all the release forms signed. Someone’s gotta make sure all the props go back into the right box once they’re no longer needed. Someone’s gotta stand in the road in a high vis jacket and ask pedestrians to wait a few minutes until the current take is done. So much time, so much effort, and then it gets beamed through the sky into our DSTV decoders and two stoned twenty year olds watch it for maybe thirty seconds before zap they’re onto the next thing and then zap another new thing - isn’t the world magical. 

Hmm. Okay. What now? That’s always the question I come back to. What’s the least worst next thing I could do now. Now I’ve got my mind warmed up and my memory up and running, where do I want to go? It’s not always entirely up to me but I can kinda nudge myself in a certain direction. Or I can keep stalling, which is what it feels like I’m doing now. Well, how long can I keep stalling for, before I run out of ways to avoid saying anything? How long can you avoid saying anything before the avoidance becomes the thing you’re saying. My therapist lent me a book about childhood by someone named Winnicott, something to do with transitional objects. I wasn’t exactly sure what she was trying to tell me by lending me this book - but the one part that has stuck with me all these years later is the idea that you can become so attached to your own suffering, your own lack of whatever it is you were supposed to get at a certain pivotal moment, that you can start to feel soothed or comforted by your own pain, and the absence of that pain, the lack of that lack can become its own scary thing that you will avoid even though you know, it’s what you’re supposed to be working towards. I don’t really know if i’m remember his idea correctly but I think about it often and I worry about what you’re supposed to do if you think you might be stuck in this kind of psychological bind. And how do you know? Is there a kind of rapid test they can do by sticking something up your nose? But then I forget about Winnicott and transitional objects and think about what I’m going to have for lunch or whether I have enough energy to go to the mall today or all the friends I worry I’m drifting away from and Oh shit, I still haven’t decided what I’m going to write about next and now I need to head off to therapy. I remember during one of our sessions there was something really serious going on in one of the rooms next to ours and we were both trying to ignore the shouting person until it became so loud and distressing that we had to just stop and listen to a man’s voice screaming and woman’s voice pleading for him to calm down as another, calmer man also tried to explain that there were only trying to help and then we heard a door open as the voices got louder as they came into the corridor and there was the sound of people grunting and a thud against the wall and the man was screaming, really screaming, for them to let him go as the woman was saying no dad you need to get better and you need to stay here and then the third man’s voice saying listen, listen, but it didn’t seem like anyone was really in the mood to listen and then there were some footsteps and two new men’s voices and the first man’s voice screaming loud and high get off me don’t touch me don’t touch me and the woman’s voice saying tearfully dad just go with them please and the man’s grunts and screams slowly got softer and his kicking against the wall and floor got softer and further away and the woman’s voice was left behind panting and sobbing and then everything kinda returned to being quiet outside our room. And my therapist looked from the door back to me and said I’m sorry about that where were we and I breathed deeply and looked at the clock and tried to remember what we had been talking about, but I can’t remember what we had been talking about all I can remember is the sounds coming from the corridor and the fear and the man’s voice and the pain in the woman’s voice. 

I’m starting to get tired. I’m starting to hit that midday slump. This is why I gotta get my work done early in the morning. Don’t know what it is about noon ’til three but everything seems pointless and not worth the effort. I had so many good ideas this morning but now they’ve evaporated like a dream I’m trying to remember. Well… What now? Do I give in to the slumber? Do I push through and hope that even though it feels like everything I’m writing at the moment is utter trash, if I just keep moving my knuckles, fingers, wrist around this pencil, and this pencil keeps forming letters, words, phrases - that I’ll come back to type this up a few days from now and will be surprised like wow this is actually really good, it wasn’t the writing that was bad or tired, it was just the part of me that was judging the writing as it came out of me that was tired and bad. Like the first time I watched ‘There Will Be Blood’ and thought it was kak boring. Well, I guess I’ll find out in a couple of days. Well, actually, usually, I hate my writing even more when I’m typing it out. That’s the part when it seems the stupidest and I have to hold back my editorial impulses and just try typing up what I’ve written by hand without making too many typos or giving in to the impulse to give up on this project completely. So give it a week maybe, and then I can say whether all this is a complete load of crap or not.

The light comes through the window like it couldn’t be bothered whether anyone is there to appreciate it. The school day is over. I’m waiting for P to finish her extra lessons with the grade eights. The grass is thick, soft, cool, the marimba practice in the hall reaches me through subtle vibrations. On . different patch of grass, closer to the Multi Purpose Room, some matrics are working out the choreography for their entrance to the interhouse gala next week. I have to find an orange t shirt before the gala, I’ve been placed in Harveya, which, based on my students’ responses, is not one of the ‘main character’ houses. The backpack I’m using as a pillow contains a pack of marking I could be doing right now, but I’m so nicely tired and there’s only ten minutes left of P’s extra lesson. The Protea counsellors start their routine from the top, Whiz Kalifa coming out of the bluetooth speaker, a voice counting them through their moves. The sun peeks around a cloud way above me and I raise a hand to shield my face. We have to go past the shops on the way home, which is a tiring thought, but maybe we’ll get some chips from Akhalwayas as a treat. It’s still only Monday but goddamn this week has been long. The bell rings. I hear chair scraping against the floor in P’s classroom. I push myself up to a sitting position. Some nerds crowd around P as she tries to lock her classroom and answer their questions. We walk to the car together. She picks a piece of grass out of my hair and blows it in my face like an eyelash. A wish I didn’t know I had made is coming true.

While we’re waiting for our food to arrive, a woman with a trolley full of stuff passes by the open window. She has big gold helium balloons in the shape of a three and a zero. She has one kid sitting in the pink Game trolley and one kid standing next to her trying to help her push the trolley. She’s looking for something in her purse when one of the balloon strings slips from grasp and the balloon floats up into the air and gets caught in a tree. Everyone at the table cranes their necks to see where the balloon ended up. The kid in the trolley points up at the tree. The woman covers her eyes with her palm for a moment. A security guard walks up to her and says something we can’t hear from our table. We stop watching when the waiter arrives with a tray of mimosas.

After the singing is done, I stand on the couch out on the patio and thank everyone for coming to such a last minute birthday party. I don’t need to mention the thing. Everyone knows it. Everyone has been intermittently aware of it throughout the afternoon. I jump onto P’s back and she carries me piggyback through the crowd of our friends. I high five people and puff on a vape. She sets me down on the grass and I feel incongruously happy. Turn the music up. I’m not allowed to drink on my new meds but that doesn’t mean I can’t act drunkhappy. I grab the polaroid camera and look for someone whose photo I haven’t taken yet. On the top lawn Aisling and Sophie are throwing a frisbee. I sit on the swing and admire the party unfolding all around me. Oh, Re has just arrived. Someone presses the airhorn button on Noah’s big speaker and the laughter ripples out into the garden, lapping at my feet.