I could write about the bombing at Planet Hollywood, in the Waterfront, when I was in my twenties. I still remember the night it happened. And I wrote a poem to memorialise it.
In case you’re confused ‘round about now…
This post is for the Silver Bloggers #BOM prompt for September:
Where were you when…
I could also write about the day Nelson Mandela was released.
I could write about waiting at the Parade in Cape Town city center for hours on end as he took forever to arrive. A part of the crowd losing patience and getting drunk, or getting drunk and losing patience, and breaking into a bottle store just a few meters away from where I was standing to loot it in broad daylight. The cops opening fire and me and some friends ducking and running for cover as we heard the gun shots.
I don’t even remember being that afraid.
Perhaps growing up in such turbulent times made us youth more resilient back then. We never knew if they were real or rubber bullets. Violence was hardly a foreign experience in the eighties and early nineties in South Africa. We were surrounded by it for some years although too privileged to be much a part of it. But there was a constant threat of eruption at any time for some years back then.
The heat of conflict at the borders of our affluent white suburbs and more often than not on our daily news.
We hid behind some food stalls nearby during the scramble of the panicked crowd when the shots rang out. We crouched behind a stall watching the ensuing pandemonium and left pretty quickly when things had quietened down again. We left before Nelson Mandela even arrived, knowing things could escalate quickly as the crowd was bored and restless. We were also pretty bored by then.
I also thought of writing about the Twin Towers.
I still remember exactly where I was sitting in my lounge on the day it happened. On an oh so retro second hand navy blue sleeper couch. CNN on endlessly in the background. I seem to always have had it on back then. The news. The radio. The newspapers.
I have a photographic memory, by the way. Both a gift and a curse. I remember that particular moment with absolute clarity. The cream carpet. The pot plant in the corner. The sun shining through the windows. The lounge bright with its rays on the white walls of the flat I was renting and living in all by myself. I preferred it that way.
I still do.
The place still not decorated because I’d been moving around for some years and had hardly stayed in one place long enough to make it any kind of home. Bare. Barren even. Most of my stuff lost and abandoned en route. A badly resprayed coffee table a just too low blur on the periphery. My eyes fixed on the screen of the enormous old sliver box T.V. Gods those old models were huge, huh?
I sat there, staring at the screen trying to make sense of what I was seeing for a full few minutes.
I sat there wondering if an unexpected movie had randomly come on, as the footage of the plane hitting the tower played out in front of me on daytime television. Then the explosion. Yeah. I thought it was a badly filmed, blurry B-grade movie until I saw the replay and realised the CNN banner was at the bottom of the screen.
It was fucking surreal. Burned into my memory surreal. I don’t remember feeling anything but stunned disbelief and a shocked emptiness. Back then events on the news used to move me.
Back then I still felt as though I was somehow a part of it all.
I hear the Queen has died.
I barely follow the news these days. I turned it off around 16 years ago or more. I stopped watching the news and television in general. I stopped listening to the radio as well. I just shut the whole lot down.
I couldn’t bear it anymore. No news is good news, they say. But mainstream news is the worst. Pandering to human obsession with the macabre. Playing off our fear and otherness. The worst parts of humanity. The car crashes. The train wrecks. It began to turn me into a train wreck as well.
Especially hearing local news on our local talk radio.
The things happening in the not so privileged, not so affluent, still not so white suburbs. To those that couldn’t defend themselves. To those who would probably never find a way out. It became too much for me to weather mentally. The magnitude of the fallout of a traumatised society left divided, angry and suffering.
And the still willfully avoided consequences of our history.
I helped where I could. Small random acts of kindness. But I couldn’t stay daily news informed of what was going on in my country, or in the world beyond its borders, any longer.
I do still stay vaguely informed of what’s happening though. I still read headlines while I stand in queues. Or catch a post when I pop onto Facebook for a couple of minutes (now really a couple of minutes) to check messages. Or I hear a someone talking about another someone. And this still strikes me as odd.
The way we think we know these people, or that their lives have any relevance to ours at all, simply because they’re famous. Because we read about them or see them on screens. Or hear them on air waves. While there are people we know far better, who are suffering and dying under our noses, yet we barely make any deal of it at all.
I didn’t feel anything when I heard the Queen had died.
Once I may have felt something about this. These days… and I don’t know if this is a bad thing or just a really honest thing… I feel very little about such events at all.
Death happens. It's a part of life.
She lived a long life. And she lived a far, far better quality of life than many other people are living. So grief for her passing no. It was inevitable. And grief for her passing because she was supposed to be some kind of icon to me?
I no longer believe in icons. These days I know full well we’re all just decaying flesh surrounding pretty fragile, but pretty remarkably resilient, bones. Only human. I don’t believe any one of us is better than any other one of us. In any way at all.
Most certainly not because someone chooses or is expected to wear a crown.
Only human.
Only human constructs.
And I’ve had to let a lot, if not all, of that kind of social bullshit go…
to survive.
Because the day I eventually found myself writing about for this prompt, was the day I metaphorically let go of the hand of the man I loved by accident.
And it became the day we never found our way back from.
It was the day we heard we were going into lock-down in South Africa and I haven’t seen him ever again in person.
We did see each other one last time. We tried to have dinner together on a Skype video call, but I think by that time both of us were almost out of our minds with grief. I never ate any dinner at that meal at all. In fact I didn’t even cook for it. He didn’t eat either. Although he'd made a spectacular meal, as always, and candles were lit in preparation on his table.
We abandoned our attempt at normality before we even began to eat.
But then our normality had been torn from us a year or some before.
We’d been apart for some months by the time COVID hit and lock-down, and the resultant isolation, became a reality for everybody else.
I’d seen my was to be life partner two or three times in about seven months up until this point. Painful awkward occasions when once we’d spent whole nights staying up talking. Listening to music. Dancing. Making love. Sharing our stories and weaving dreams of our future.
It was not our own choice to separate.
You can probably tell by now.
We were actually just about to move in together after two years of dating. Two years of clearing the rubble of past relationships. Two years of really getting to know who we were. Both ourselves personally and who we were together. Some relationships do this, I guess. The ones that are well considered and intentional. The ones that are “awake”.
Or the ones that are an “awakening” as things would have it.
Regardless… we hadn’t chosen to part ways.
Rather we’d decided, at last, to move in and formally commit to a life together in full. To commit to our carefully chosen and nurtured family.
Eight days after this rather momentous decision for us both, a false criminal allegation was made against him by an insecure jealous ex of mine. An ex with a brother who had been in the South African Police force. An ex who made use of his brother’s old contacts in SAPS. Contacts who were now as high up as Colonels.
No. We didn’t choose to part ways.
We tried to part ways to protect each other.
I say tried because it has taken me almost four years to fully accept that I’ve lost the man I loved and I still struggle to believe this has been not only allowed to happen, but facilitated by members of my own government.
A government who seems little interested in amending their mistakes. Swept under the rug. Ignored. Forgotten. Discarded. That is our love. That is our carefully chosen family. Apparently not even worth answering an email for. Or acknowledging receipt of one.
It seems common courtesy has died along with our hopes of a new South Africa.
I lost everything trying to clear the name of the man I loved. Trying to protect him and our family. And then trying to help others I met along the way whose stories were alarmingly similar to ours.
For two years I fought.
I fought until I was too ill to fight anymore.
I still haven’t fully recovered physically and some days are pretty hard going now. But I stay positive and I keep on rebuilding with my focus on the future. But I fought as hard as I could until I physically couldn’t get out of bed some days. Until COVID hit and going into court became life threatening.
I have COPD and had long since lost my private medical aid. The staff in our government hospitals are superheroes, you know. But the system is overwhelmed and you can literally die waiting your turn. I’ve been in there. If you haven’t yet had this experience you're… well… are we still afraid to mention the P-word? I’m not anymore.
I was privileged as fuck.
What a wake up call.
Still… I fought with everything I had. Really. I gave it my all.
And for another two and a half years after that I’ve waited.
I’ve waited for an email to be answered by the mayor. By the Democratic Alliance. By the Department of Social Development. I’ve waited for the feedback promised on their investigation of the events. I’ve waited for years now.
I’ve waited for a response from anyone who could’ve fixed this. For someone with enough authority to step up and make it right. But it seems I’m just a single mother. And a woman. And now a broke woman who knows full well that entering the courts without decent legal representation in my country is dangerous.
It doesn’t even matter who's innocent or not.
All that matters is who has the money, the best lawyer… and the police and professional contacts.
This is the way things work.
One thing my father was incorrect about apparently.
The truth does not always come out.
After seeing the lack of ethics, corruption, racism, gender-bias and total disregard for human rights on a daily basis in our social services and courts I could not remain silent.
I couldn't not "fight the good fight" as my dad used to call it.
And the result, for me personally… was total devastation.
But the other, far more interesting, result of walking through this situation and standing my ground despite everything…
was total liberation!
I can only explain this by saying I lost everything but in doing so I inadvertently found myself.
In full.
After many years of trying to figure life out in so many different ways, I only wish I'd walked away from the shackles of societies fears, stereotypes and expectations sooner.
And I only wish I’d stood up and said no to the things that weren’t in accordance with who I really am years ago. Perhaps I’d still be with the man I loved if I had done this sooner as well.
But a part of me believes I'd never have had to meet him and have had to walk through and out of this experience if I’d already been the me I am today.
These are the kinds things we can never really know, I guess.
But that day…
the day the news arrived that lock-down was happening the next day…
I look back on that day at times and I wonder… what if I had said yes.
Because I called him that day, you see.
After months of us hiding from possible retaliation, and from each other because of the crazy reaction of my ex, I called him. Or he called me. I honestly can’t remember which. I do remember sending him a song that night. I remember lying in bed and listening to it with tears in my eyes. But I had no idea that would be the night the end of our story would really be cemented.
“Come and stay.” He said.
A choice to go and live with him for the lock-down. A commitment to the impending fight and our shared future, I guess. Us together against a corrupt system and the end of the world as we knew it.
“Come here.” I replied.
I had a child and if I’d gone to him I would’ve lost custody of my son with the false allegation clouding the air. And I had an elderly mother on the property with me. I couldn’t leave her alone to whatever was coming.
And none of us knew what was coming.
He had a pet he didn’t feel he could bring into my already full, and really small, two bedrooms with a cat and a dog.
So we stayed in our respective homes.
And we drifted away, and forever, as all around us things fell further apart.
But that was the day...
that day before lock-down.
That was the day
our world
ended.
Original post for the Silver Bloggers Community
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Eternal Seeker
Hardened Dreamer
Mother
Warrior
Determined Dancer
and Stargazer
still...
Beyond fear is freedom
And there is nothing to be afraid of.
To Life, with Love... and always for Truth!
Nicky Dee
Featured image photo taken from my twenty-something year old angst ridden journal
