At 2am, the magnificence of the night was defiled by unholy shit spewing from the house five doors away.
She stuffed the comforter into her ears and began to think really loudly.
But there was this one note.
Tag: journal
Shift
Lately I’ve been thinking (oooh, I channeled some Henry Ate* there) that it won’t be such a bad thing if it happens that I never make it as a serious writer.
Yes, it’s been this dream; this full-on burning, for so long, that the acceptance of this possibility does feel a bit like cutting off a thumb.
Digitectomising (not a real word) aside, I will not stop writing. I just need a bit of space to figure out where I see myself ascending professionally. I’m hoping our time in Egypt will bear some revelation (Inshallah Ameen).
I’m rather rudderless right now. Stagnant qi and mosquito-brained.
The freedom that freelancing affords me, now seems to be the very thing that’s frazzling me. I’m a dabbler of note, a doyenne of nada.
I am loving the layout and typesetting gigs though, and am keen on upskilling that. I don’t quite know where the papercrafting is heading, but I have learnt that hobbies-turned-jobbies are not all about the glitz and glue-buzz.
Was it not reasonable for me to believe that by the time I reached this age, I would have had it all figured out?
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*really lekker now-defunct South African band
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Fascinating bit I hope I understood correctly from Arabic class: The words Binte (Daughter of) and Ibn (Son of) have at their root, the letters Baa and Noon. The arabic word transliterated as “Banaa” means “to build”, implying a notion that your progeny build you (and your legacy perhaps?).
Roots
This is daddy and I on a novelty photo badge we got at the Rand Show when I was five-years-old.
You can tell from my chewed-on smile that I wasn’t feeling particularly photogenic that day.
Today, I’m grateful my parents made me sit for this photo. It reminds me of all the things that link me to him; beyond personality, phenotypes and the fact that I love to wear hats just as much as he did.
Some Muslims have a tense relationship with photographs, especially those of their dead. I don’t.
My mum used to keep a songbook in High School. She’d listen to Springbok Radio and write down the lyrics of her favourite songs. I used to do something similar, except I had Google and printed out the words to stick into a plastic folder. Her method definitely had more romance to it. Her writing is also almost exactly the same today as it was when she was in Std 8 (She wasn’t sabotaged by keyboards). I didn’t inherit her legible penmanship.
These are my memories manifested; a badge and a notebook weighted with all the imagery and associations I osmositise into them. They’re just things though; easily lost or destroyed because of this tangibility. Short-lived signifiers. But their signified is tatooed straight onto DNA.
Note to self: stop wasting life playing Bubble Shooter.