Day 5: The things that remain
How far does one have to journey to hear one’s own thoughts? I keep coming back to this very same desire. For the first few days in Tankwa town I thought it was only until the edge of the music’s audible fading. Until the sweet spot where humanity’s techno, base-heavy beat dwindles and the morning call of nature resumes her gentle presence. It was the place where I could sit on the edge of both worlds and tap into their dichotomy. No?
Then for a day or two I thought it was perhaps further. Today I walked twice as far. Until I had reached the hill on the horizon I often stared at from within the Burn. Another few steps and I was lost in the desert, the tallest structure amid the shrubs. But I can still hear it — the beast. The deeper the roaring grumble, the ever present purr that is Afrika Burn intrudes into you, the further I feel I have to grasp to find old-me. Me and the things that mattered before the Burn.
Also, to find you, my heart. It’s an inundation so brutal and strange and wonderful that anything within that wasn’t anchored down to your fundamental depths, weighted with relevance, all those things will be forced from your immediate mind, giving way to the cluster-fuck of peculiarity and nitty-gritty assimilations in this oddly entrancing, strange space in the desert.
It’s a strange place. Yet with not one stranger in it. The longer I immerse into it, the more aware I am of it. For every single person in every chance encounter, every wave, every greeting, is one of warmth and genuine presence. Only you and their energy in that moment exist and it’s the most relevant thing in the world — in that moment. Nothing else with blinking lights or time sensitive urgency and fading batteries requires your attention but the person in front of you with an open smile and kindly intrusive questioning eyes as if to say “Hello, what’s your story — I’m standing in front of you with ears only for your answer.” It’s breathtakingly raw. You’ll stumble over your words the first time because of it. Tongue tied at having all their focus. All of it. Likes are acknowledged with words, smiles, fist bumps and catch-you-off-guard, tight hugs — the kind you thought only friends you’ve known for years can give. Replies are sincere, expressed by crinkles on the face, not riddled with emojis. And because this true connection exists in every single direction, beneath an array of thought-provoking art and astonishing skies, ever more beautiful than the last, everything — anything — not threaded to your heart with a fish hook will simply blow away like a fine orange dust into your cobwebbed recesses.
I sit here, perhaps 1km from the pulse and feel — ashamed. I haven’t thought about Piccolo, my cat, in 6 days. Does she miss me? I haven’t thought about one of my two dogs — I have thought about the other — what kind of a parent does that? Not one deadline or project has filtered through, not the renovation of my kitchen, and barely one blink in the direction of a friend back home.
You haven’t left my heart, of course. Like the credits of a movie, your last words roll into view time and again. Over the cascade of brilliant morning light poking through the black canvas tent sails while I brew my morning coffee, like a filter over every conversation with these un-strange strangers in their billowy skirts and even while crawling inside great wooden structures assembled by wooden 2x4’s the credits read ‘you would love this art work’.
You are the perpetual wave that rolls top to bottom over my heart. I can recall you in an instant, even in the very centre of the captivating beast.
And here I sit just over the hill on the horizon alone in the desert, marinading in the stark truth of life without you, at once totally bearable amid distraction yet also such a compelling bland, otherness, that I stitch you into my heart a little deeper. You are the things that remain.
