Stone Poem - July 2025
Leave the fire to die out on its own.
Leave the clean up for tomorrow morning.
Leave a voice mail and trust that nobody listens to voice mails anymore.
Leave the party before it stops being fun.
She’s falling out of her dress but no-one seems to notice. She’s falling into the arms of every tall enough man at the bar. She’s falling over doing karaoke in Melville. Between the five of us we take it in turns to hold her bag, and watch where she’s left her coat and try to get her to drink some water. But she doesn’t want water. She doesn’t want to sober up. She’s earned her money and she’s earned the right to do what she wants with it. She spits out the water and hands the bottle back to me. She grabs a glass of red wine from in front of a man standing at the bar. He and his friend pause their conversation to try and make sense of what she’s saying to them.They crane their necks to get down to her height. They nod and smile obligingly. She walks off with the glass of wine and starts to sing along with the person on stage doing great violence to Elton John’s legacy.
In the age of whatever age this will one day be called.
In an era of such obvious but nonetheless normalised obscenity.
In this economy.
In those jeans.
In a time of such times such as these times.
In a decade desperate to be different.
In an accent it would be offensive to try and recreate.
In an apartment in Killarney we never should have left. Dotty slides off the counter like liquid and lands on the parquet floor, meowing impatiently as I bring his bowl down to him. Channo, who has already finished his dinner, hops down off the counter and pushes Dotty out of the way to finish his brother’s food and Dotty lets him. I pick Channo up and Dotty hesitates for a few seconds before he starts eating. Channo wriggles in my arms trying to get free but I hold him tight, flipping him onto his back and pushing my nose into his soft warm belly, inhaling the comforting stale saliva smell of a clean little tiger. He indulges me for thirty seconds and then the claws come out. I set him down on the chest of drawers and he starts to clean his butthole with the fastidious vigour of an unimpressed sister in law unloading the dishwasher.
Big stepper. Meal prepper. Joburg repper. Sunday driver. World class sigher. Bring the bibs to soccer and collect the money after. Never angry, always trying harder, keep a lock on my feelings and I always got my guard up. Who’s counting? Never me, I promise. Unless you mean the tally of every bad thought I’ve ever harboured. I’m not that special, everybody’s gotta have them. Maybe don’t write them down if you don’t want to be spotted. Little little, drop them at parties when I’m on one. People seem to laugh and that’s all I’m ever after. Is it hollow? Maybe superficial? Nobody’s gonna say if you keep them all in stitches. And ultimately who gives a fuck about an ultimately? That shit only matters if you believe in an ever after.
There’s a message waiting for me in the wobbly faces of the mountains in the distance. I’m reluctant to decode it. Something scary about the clouds if I watch them too closely. I look away when I hear Fran’s dancing laughter coming from behind me. She’s trying to get Jamie to come out into the sun and swim but his trip is not going great and, currently, he doesn’t trust any of us. Fran falls back into the rock pool mumbling ‘models and bottles, models and bottles’ to herself and giggling into the water. I turn back to look at the mountains and they’re pretending to be normal but I see through their act.
Luke and I share a cigarette outside the bar. He tells me about his thesis. He tells me about living through lockdown alone in London. He tells me about the frustrations he has with his dad, which turn out to be similar to the frustrations his girlfriend has with him. I ask him if he knows what’s going on with Benji these days but he’s not really sure - last he heard he was in a clinic somewhere in Cape Town. We go back inside to have one more drink and really get into it. For Ben’s 30th Benji had sent a video to go with the ones Luke had put together. I can’t remember the last time I saw him in real life. Probably at Angus and Fiona’s house? I remember his head was shaved. No more big blond curls. His dad was there. He was sober but only just. He seemed to be in good spirits - but I’d never really known him to be otherwise. And sometimes, it’s those good spirits that you’ve gotta watch out for. Still see his dad at the Market Theatre every now and then. Always a bit of a shock. He’s always very nice to me. I never know if being nice back is somehow betraying my mom. Wonder where Benji is now? Don’t really want to ask but I really want to know. Want to know without the effort of having to ask. Hope he’s doing okay. Would it be nice to see him? Probably. Probably hard too. Sad. Feels like one day I’m gonna hear from someone that he died like a year earlier and then I won’t know where to put that feeling. Next time, I’ll ask Fiona what she knows.
How many coffees is too many coffees?
How much porn is too much porn?
How many bad thoughts is too many bad thoughts?
How much fun is too much fun?
How many friends is too many friends?
How much potential is destined to remain unfulfilled?
How many promises to yourself can you break?
How many cheeky cigarettes can you sneak before you have to call yourself a smoker?
I’ll wake up and go for a run no wake up and meditate first, then go for a run no no no run first, then shower, then meditate but wait what about nutrition okay so I’ll wake up, eat a banana, drink a glass of water, then go for a run, then shower, then meditate then do some journalling then no but it’s cold today, and I’m still tired and shouldn’t I actually walk the dogs first but there’ll be traffic coming back from the park this time of day and sitting in traffic is not how to start the day if I can avoid it. And I can avoid pretty much anything I want these days. Okay wait shit I know there’s a solution lying around here somewhere maybe if I just -
I roll out of bed, and the room keeps on rolling. Slurping from the bathroom tap. Putting my head under the stream to try and wake myself up. The coffee at the language school isn’t strong enough. This Saturday, our last class, uTisha takes us across the street. We cross Empire as a group and get a booth at the Wimpy attached to the Engen. She makes everyone order inZulu. We make basic conversation. “Mina, ngithanda icoffee. Wena, uthanda icoffee, na?” We walk back across Empire, uTisha leading us in song,“Masingesabi, Nkosi khona.”
I bite my nails until the blood comes then I bite some more. I’m just trying to get them to bite back.
I run the tap until it’s hot and hold my finger under the stream and it stings and it sings and I stick my finger in my mouth and lick it better and worse with my caressing tongue until the whistling feeling stops. I put a bandaid on my finger, then a second one for good luck.
I always knew there was a secret addict just below the surface and I’ve always been too afraid to let him out unsupervised. Well, actually, I didn’t always know, but my mom was always pretty certain and I’m starting to agree with her. Rather have none than just some when some makes you want a ton. Because, like, really though, why drink if not to get drunk? Why smoke if you’re not gonna do it ’til it’s no longer fun? Dwelms for my darling? Yes please. I mean is there anything better than a chemical entering your body and knowing exactly where you keep the cutlery? Your face goes warm and buttery. There’s an extra layer of world on top of the world. The peeling off plastic covering you’re used to replaced by bright and sparkling and oh no just when it’s gotten really good it starts to fade and even while it’s still really good there’s some undeniable sadness about the fact that the goodness has to go home at some point the sleepover can’t last forever.
And I say, oh em gee ja I would always be so happy when I got injured playing soccer because my mom would have to strap my ankles nice and tight and I felt so safe. And she says, oh em gee yes I never felt so close to my mom as the first time she told me I was getting too thin and that she was worried about me. The others don’t really know what to say but Zanele and I laugh and lock hands like just because nobody else offers up their own thing doesn’t mean they don’t have them they just don’t yet know how to turn that coal into content.
Shit. Maybe another coffee is exactly what I need right now. There was a time last year where I wasn’t having any caffeine and it was super calm but super boring too. It lasted maybe one month and then I went out with Andy and Meg and Jordan and got home at three and the next morning I walked down the road with Jules to get a coffee before the lunch guests arrived and shit hey that coffee was like real proper drugs hey like omg let’s start a band let’s open a bar let’s get matching tattoos type drugs. Like the first cigarette after you’ve given up smoking for a couple of months hits so good but then the second one is sort of just like, meh, like a pillow that slinks away behind the bedframe and gets sweaty with your sweat, like how the tenth game of FIFA is just patterns repeating with more and more frustrating results, like once you’ve seen a cock that big enough times it stops being sexy and just becomes someone else’s skin that you can’t touch through the screen even when there is no screen or the screen is just yourself and the brightness won’t go up and the keyboard is sticking and there is nothing left on the internet that could ever surprise you.
We left her lying on the picnic blanket in the garden with some cushions and a glass of rosé and the music still playing softly from the speaker propped on a branch in a nearby tree. We walked down the street to Brian and Tanya’s birthday tea. When we came home she was still lying on the picnic blanket. She smiled at us. She’d slept a little bit but mostly just lay there listening to music. I rolled myself a joint. P opened another bottle of wine. We talked her into staying for dinner.
Nobody. Nobody and nothing. Nobody and nothing and no way and no chance and no really I’m telling you it’s just not gonna happen. Not today, at least. Not this time. But the flight attendant who can’t hear my thoughts smiles as she walks down the aisle with her arms raised. One hand is holding the phone to record us. The other hand is holding the imaginary baton to conduct us. The boks need us! They - or I suppose I should say ‘we’ - are playing France in a couple of hours and they need a plane full of people flying from King Phalo to OR Thambo to sing them the national anthem. Saint Rassie will play it for them in the change rooms before the game, promise. As she gets closer to our row, the singing gets louder. Retti and I lock eyes across our row and start singing, despite everything. P shakes her head, refusing. As voices from rows further back join in I peer down the aisle and recognise people from the funeral. Some sit stone faced, some mouth the words with far off eyes. There is a weak round of applause when the singing ends. Later that night, while lying in bed not sleeping, we hear cheers coming from the bar in the park. I go to the loo and check my phone. All that singing must have worked. They - I mean we - are through to the final.
Simon says come to Royale, and so Kats and I say what the hell. Starting to feel a little bit too old for this party anyway. We gotta say bye to Julzy P first. It is her birthday party after all, and she has given us these drugs for free. She’s not in the lounge downstairs. She’s not part of the group sitting on a blanket in the dark garden. We head upstairs. There’s laughter coming from behind a closed door. I knock, no response just more laughter. I open the door. Bodies on the bed, someone is fixing someone else’s make up. Julz is looking for something in her bag.
“Who wants food, guys?” but nobody answers. Julz gives the bag to Nicole and wraps her arms around me and Kats.
“Guys! You’re still here!That’s so awesome! Do you want some more drugs?” Thanks but no thanks, still good on this pinger. I do the jol croissant phone hand thing with both hands like I first saw Ronaldinho do in a youtube video and have copied ever since.
“We gotta go, gorl.”
“Ah, that’s okay. That’s cool. That’s cool. Where you going?”
“Well, we told Simon we’d pop into Royale for a bit, and then probably just give Kats a lift home, and then ja, head home to the pets.”
Nicole cuts lines on the phone in her hand and shrieks when the phone starts ringing. “Guys, the phone is ringing, someone is calling, Bibi is calling, whose phone is this? Guys!”
TK takes the phone carefully, does a line, wipes her nose, then swipes to answer the call, and puts it on speaker. “Bibi, baby!” Are you here? Lovely! I’ll come let you in”
The table keeps wobbling but I will try not to focus on that. Who am I to judge anything for being a bit unstable? I look around the cafe at the other people looking down at their laptops. Is whatever is going on on their screens as pointless as what’s going on on mine?
That dog looks like my dog.
Looks like a good dog.
Looks like a cross between a sweetheart and a demon.
Looks like a cross between a pothole and a jacaranda.
Looks like someone forgot to close the taps when the water was off and who knows how long its been running running running.
Looks like rain.
Looks like rain, for sure.
No ways man!
You lying!
I’m telling you!
If we climb onto the roof we can see into the neighbours’ bedroom window.
Luke says he once saw them sexing.
Sexing! In real life!
We sit on the roof until the sun goes down and we start to shiver.
I go to therapy. I walk the dogs. I smoke a cigarette. I drive down Jan Smuts and park next to the Goodman gallery. I cross the street and join the crowd on the corner of Bolton Road, opposite the garden shop. I chant along with the crowd, I listen to people give speeches, passing around the megaphone.I greet Zara, she gives me a big hug. People drive by, hooting and raising their fists out the window in solidarity. People take pictures on their phones. The megaphone is running out of battery, words and phrases go missing amidst the traffic.There are children and old people. There are t shirts with logos. There are watermelons painted on signs. There is not enough space on this stretch of pavement and a group of people go stand on the raised island separating the lanes of traffic. People sit at the sports bar across the road, watching, raising their glasses, raising their voices over the chants and the speakers’ passion. I stay for an hour, trying to catch some of the emotion of the crowd through friction, or body heat or airborne transmission or bluetooth or osmosis or something. Anything. But it doesn’t come. I leave the crowd as cold as when I first arrived. I roll another cigarette as I walk back up Jan Smuts to where my car is parked. Her death doesn’t feel real. Doesn’t compute. And trying to fit the pain of thousands into a space overfilled with the pain of just one special beautiful frustrating doomed person is like - what exactly? I try to think of a good analogy. Is like dividing by zero? Almost two years later that’s still the best I can come up with. I drive to Simon and Rebecca’s house where we make plans for Friends Who Draw. I tell them I still want to go ahead with it, that I need something to do with my time. I want to fall apart but I’m scared the shards will cut anyone who tries to pick them up. We order pizza. I watch Jack and Simon play X box.
On our second last night in Zanzibar, I go back to the room early. Kats and Ben head out in search of some kind of party. I find a joint on the floor of our room. So damn, that guy on the beach wasn’t trying to scam us after all. We just lost the joint he sold us. When they return from their night out, I show them the joint. They look embarrassed. Ben says, we bumped into him outside this bar gave that guy so much kak.Kats laughs and says oh no now we’re those fucking asshole tourists.
It’s a beautiful chair. I do have to admit that. But whether it’s worth that much money is harder to accept. How much, exactly? Well, I don’t think they’d want me to say, but if you come find me at the back of the book, after the acknowledgements, I will give you a clue. But yes, it is a beautiful chair. I haven’t sat in it myself, personally, with my own personal butt. But I hear many good things from people who have. They says things like ‘very nice’, and ‘good chair’, and ‘ it makes you feel like the world is a safe and happy place but then that feeling evaporates the second you get off the chair, and the howling pain of no longer being on the chair, and the haunting knowledge of what it felt like when you were sitting on the chair, is a bit too much for me’. So, ja, mostly good things, I’d say.
Remember.
Remember when 9/11 happened during the first season of Big Brother SA and someone chucked a newspaper over the wall so that the people in the house would know what happened? Remember when Idols came to SA and those recording booths popped up in all the malls (not you, Killarney) and you could crowd in there with your friends and sing or goof off for the camera and maybe someone from school would see you on TV? Remember how hyped everyone got around the sixth of June 2006 because it would be 666 on the calendar. Some kid set fire to one of the two big fir trees on either side of the archway leading into the quad and everyone still waiting to be picked up stood in the parking lot and watched the fire’s feeble attempts to spread and the firemen’s unimpressed faces as they stood with their hoses. The fire didn’t last but bits of black ash floated into the air and dropped like confetti onto the sports fields for the rest of the week and everyone would stop during PE and shriek if it landed on them.
Time to start doing something, right. Can only really get going on the hour, so I kinda have to just sit here for another three minutes until it becomes eleven in the morning.Then I’ll really get going.
Wow. You’re not even ready for how much going I’m going to get. Just you wait. Let me warm up a bit, first. Stretch a bit. Okay. Here. We. Go.
P kills the engine and grabs the bird book from my lap. We watch a group of brightly coloured bee eaters dart from bush to bush, their wings flashing in the morning sunlight. I open the flask and pour a cup of tea. I hold the cup close to my face and feel the steam tingle against my cheek.
I leave the apartment and walk towards campus, trying to figure out if I’m going to make it to back to my side of town in time for soccer. My phone didn’t charge during the night so I’m gonna have to take a Jammie Shuttle. I wait outside Marquad. With nothing to soak up my attention I watch the clouds moving around the mountains above campus. I feel like dirt but also like possibly the coolest version of me that’s ever been. This is what you’re supposed to do after a break up, right? Right?
It’s a computer game - an online computer game that James showed me, where you microwave a cartoon hamster who swears at you as you increase the settings until eventually he explodes. James thought it was hilarious, and eventually I tricked myself into thinking it was hilarious too. And so I showed it to Luke and them the next time they were at my house. They didn’t get it at first, but soon we were all copying the hamster’s squeaky sweary voice.
Walking around upper campus between lectures. Changing the music I’m listening to based on what I’d like to be listening to when I bump into someone I know and they ask what I’m listening to and I’ll take out one earphone and let it dangle across my collarbone and say all chilled like, oh, just some band that I like that I really hope you like too.
Send it again and see if it works this time around and if it still doesn’t work you’re gonna have to come in in person and speak to one of our consultants. Our office hours are from seven in the morning until fave past seven in the morning. Mmmm. Ja. Ja. Ja. I know what you mean. I mean, I can see where you’re coming from. But see, from the chair I’m sitting in there’s very little I can do about anything at all, really.
The policeman’s grip on my shoulder loosens as he walks me away from the festival. People walking into the festival pause and watch. I see their faces figuring out what’s happened as they pass. Some shake their heads. Some chuckle to themselves. I feel my own face going very red but I can’t stop myself from smiling. The policeman walks me all the way to the road and tells me to call my dad.
He tells me I’m lucky, and I might not be so lucky next time. It feels like there’s more he wants to tell me. He stands there while the phone rings. He takes the phone from me and tells my dad about the fake ID, the beerfest, the son waiting for him at the side of the road outside the German school. My dad comes to collect me. He’s not angry. I tell him how I tried to make a fake ID on the photocopier at home. Alone in my room, I lie on my bed and text Katlego to explain what happened.
Alone in his studio, my dad keeps working towards the next exhibition.
What can you do in twenty five minutes? It’s not enough time for a proper nap. It’s not enough time for a proper read. It’s too long to just sit there quietly and observe the world around you or the chaos within. If you’re quick about it, it’s just enough time for sex. If it’s the last lesson of the day you can count out the seconds with your tongue against your teeth, trying to count slower than the clock on the wall, looking up each time you reach sixty and working out how many seconds you scored with your slowness.
We show up at the bakery, but the place is closed on Sundays, so we make our way back to the hotel, croissant-less. A man sweeping outside a shop stops us to ask where we’re from. When he hears we’re from South Africa he gets excited because he’s from Algeria. He’s curious about how the ‘blancs’ and the ‘noirs’ get along these days. Is it ‘dangereux’? Is there ‘beaucoup violence?’ We summarise the first decades of democracy in passable French. The DELF syllabus doesn’t have a section on spatial apartheid or white privilege, but we muddle through, unsure how much of what we’re saying makes sense to him. As he returns to his sweeping, he seems a little disappointed that the picture we paint is not so apocalyptic.
There’s an abandoned truck parked down the road from the club. We pull the back open and find a pile of paper that we just have to climb on top of. Someone in the building next door starts shouting at us from their window ledge. Who left this truck behind? Who needed all these tubes of thin paper? Should we head back to the party before something bad happens? Where’s Sophie, anyway? This night was supposed to be about her birthday.
If I keep this pencil sharp enough, maybe my thoughts will stay sharp too. If I keep drinking strong coffee, one day I’ll be strong enough to finish this book or save the world, whichever comes first, whichever comes more naturally to me, whichever has the shortest commute from my bed. If I choose to finish this book instead of saving the world then I better make sure it’s a pretty fucking amazing-ass book, right? So, what’s it gonna be, then?
The first time I take ritalin I start talking to myself, encouragingly, excitedly, describing the workings of my mind with ease, one thought slotting clink clink into the next one like the satisfying pop of knuckles. Is this what some people’s minds feel like most of the time? Steady and smooth and brilliantly clear. I am delighted but also a little disappointed. I had come to believe that whatever it was that made my consciousness so corrosive was like really deep and dark and complex and gnarly.
This intense suffering had to in some way reflect an intense specialness, right? And so to have one little pill fix everything was a bit of a let down, an anti-climactic boss battle at the end of a long level. And if this pill took away some of my suffering, did it take away some of my specialness, too?
Did my mom really let me ride around the hospital on a Razor scooter while she wrote reports and saw patients in her office? I remember the shiny linoleum floors of the Joburg Gen, the crowds of people sitting and standing on the edges of the long wide corridor going past my mom’s office.
Was that a dream? Or did that really happen? I’ll have to ask my sisters.
Fucking Finn, telling me that acid is a good party drug. Why did I believe him?
It’s already hard to tell what’s meant sincerely in Cape Town, and the LSD is really not helping.
Is this just a really cool house party or is everyone legit about to start fucking any moment now?
I can’t tell what’s innuendo and what’s just regular language. I call and uber and head back to the AirBnB by myself. I listen to the new FKA Twigs album and cry.
I grab a t-shirt off the floor to clear up the mess we’ve made and lie back on the bed, feeling my body cool and my sperm dry and become waxy on my chest. I close my eyes and yawn. My heart is still racing. There’s that smell in the room (you know that smell). A phone buzzes on the bedside table - the world trying to pierce this bubble. Not today, satan. I pull the blankets up to my neck. P walks back into the room with a glass of water.
We push our way through the crowds; following the line of people in front of us, hopping on their momentum, hoping it will carry us more or less in the direction we’re wanting to go. People let us through, mostly happily. Sometimes less so. Each moment is not in itself unbearable, just focus on making it past the next few people, and soon the crowds will thin and the bar will be in sight.
The group chat has grown cold. Long since muted. I haven’t opened it for months. Pushed further and further down the list into the depths of a chat history that has never been backed up. I know I’m taking a risk but I haven’t lost of phone in a long time now. There was a time when one person’s phone would be lost pretty much every weekend. Left behind in an Uber, lifted out of a coat pocket on the dance floor at Great Dane, snatched from a hand while standing on the sidewalk in Melville, trying to read the license plate of the cars creeping up and down Seventh. These days, I have to wait for the phone to retire itself.
We go to the beach with a bottle of gin taken from James’ parents’ holiday house. We take sips and make faces. Why do grown ups like this?We run into the waves and the world is tumbling all over me before the water reaches my knees. Oh, I see. This is kinda fun. This is maybe more than kinda fun. James shoves me in the back and I fall into the water. Salt in my mouth but it’s really funny salt and I push myself up onto my knees just as the next wave arrives and I fall back laughing, letting the ocean tug me closer to the beach until I feel the sand against my back. I lie there, squinting up into the clouds enjoying the water trickling tickling out of my ears and it sounds like a close up of fizzy water but louder than real life. I sit up and chase after James, my thighs pushing hard against the water. I turn a trip into a spin and flop gracelessly gleefully into white foam. I push my hair out of my face and spit ocean out of my mouth and swim towards James. I jump onto his back and we try to drown each other because it’s the simplest game we both know how to play.
It’s a Monday morning in mid December so technically it’s still the weekend for a couple more hours. Luke, Matt, and Jakob haven’t been to bed. A laptop on the veranda table is playing one of the Godfather movies with the sound muted so that Jakob’s work will think he’s still online. Almost empty beer bottles with cigarette butts floating in the shallows. Zanele wakes up and starts making coffee. They’re ordering Nando’s for breakfast and drunkenly squabbling over who gets to tell me the story of what happened after we left the bar the night before. I roll myself a cigarette and sit back on the couch.
When I go over to his house, we play in his room, we look at his toys, we avoid his younger sibling, we answer his mom’s annoying questions about whether we want something to eat. I sit on a yoga ball and watch him play Age of Empires. I sit on a yoga ball and watch him play Sims. I sit on a yoga ball and watch him play Counter Strike.
The day before my surgery, I play soccer, I go to a movie to have what I think will be my last ever taste of popcorn. Everyone watches me closely, with big concerned eyes and unconvincing smiles. When we say goodbye that night P cries because I can’t muster any tears of my own. After, in the ICU, she brings me my phone so I can listen to music. Vampire Weekend’s lyrics make even less sense than usual. It’s too much. I stop the music and watch the bright lights swaying above me, the dimensions of the room constantly shifting like a a series of stage sets. None of it makes sense. None of it feels real. The physio wants me to cough so I do my best to cough. One morning he takes me on a walk out of the ICU. We go again the next morning and this time we make it out into the parking lot. Before I can leave the ICU I have to drink this horrible liquorice-y goo and go for an x ray to check that everything inside is sealed shut nice and tight. Lying flat hurts so bad but I do what I’m told. I really want to be a good sick boy. The best they’ve ever seen, even.
So, down the hall, on the right, in the bathroom there’s a calendar on the wall above the toilet. I’ve been visiting this house since I was a kid, right, and peeing in this loo with sometimes greater and sometimes lesser degrees of accuracy since I first learned how to pee standing up. The calendar has never changed. I mean, it’s always been turned to the same month, October, with the same day circled in black pen, the twelfth.No other days have been marked, and nothing has been written in the square that represents that day, and over the years the sun has bleached this page pretty much blank and you wouldn’t be able to make out the month or the year if you hadn’t been looking at October for about thirty years now.
There are too many books in this bookstore. They all call out, wanting to be read. But who has the time, really? There are the books I’ve heard good things about from people whose taste I trust.
There are the books I feel like I should read so that I can walk through life feeling calm and confident about my understanding of the canon. There are the books that sound fun and juicy that I can’t let myself read because what if I enjoy them too much and my taste turns out to be less avant garde than I’ve been pretending for my whole life. There are the books my parents read for pleasure that I could read in an attempt to get closer to them. There are the books I need to read as an act of penance or in an effort at deprogramming. There are the books my supervisor has put into a google drive folder with my name on it. But most of those books seem to bore me. What does it mean if I struggle to enjoy books that are similar to the kind of book I’m trying to write? That can’t be good, right? The more I write, and the more I try to read the recommended books, the more I’m drawn to, like, a classic book type book, with characters and a plot and a story that moves in a single direction and stakes and tension and scenes and all that. I mean, what hits the spot better than a real book type book like that? And if I can’t write a book like that? Is that because I’m not trying hard enough? Or is it because that’s just not the kind of book I have inside me at the moment? Stick around to find out more.
I jump in the shower and moan and close my eyes and the intensity of the feeling is pleasurable, even if the feeling itself is not. I leave Jordan and Andy sleeping in my old room at my parents’ house. The march is supposed to start at eleven. I drive to the Caltex to get a coffee. In the few seconds it takes for the automatic doors to notice my presence I catch a look at my reflection. Good god. Is that what I look like in real life right now? Red glassy eyes, the lines of my brow drawn in with permanent marker. When I get home P is making coffee for her friends who slept over after the movie. I pack slices of watermelon into a cooler box because we don’t have a flag to wave or a sign to hold. Later, I watch the drone footage of the march on Instagram and gosh wow that’s a whole lot of people hey.
One, two, three, and four, five, six. Break it down into sets and reps. The numbers don’t really matter but they’re all we’ve got to cling to at times. And now, if I can tick that box, and tick another box just like it tomorrow, at some point that transmutes or transmorphs or transmogrifies into a life, right? An ad on the Guardian tells me to go ‘ghost mode’ for twelve months and re-enter the world a monster man with military grade muscles. Drop out, become unrecognisable, transform yourself into a weapon that you are forever sharpening through pain and protein and power lifting playlists. It’s scary how something so stupid can still tug at me. Become unrecognisable. To who? Others? Myself? The picture in the ad is a figure in heavy military gear with a mask over their face that looks like a skull. It seems so lonely. And I always feel embarrassed at the faces I pull when I try to lift heavy things. What’s the opposite of going ghost mode? What’s the opposite of becoming unrecognisable? Sign me up for that work out programme, please. Maybe I should start posting stories on Instagram again?
SMS ‘STOP’ to opt out.
