almost a year ago

Walking the streets of Durban on some holiday, with university students stopping traffic for a festival of sorts, I’d been attempting to trace out my route to Capetown on the map I’d snagged off the tourist brochure rack at the airport back in Johannesburg two days previous.  I wasn’t looking forward to boarding yet another overnight bus down the coast but I didn’t really have another choice other than hopping a train that would’ve taken me right through the center of the country with seemingly drab views.  I suppose I’d ruled out a car rental because I figured it’d stretch my budget too thin, nevertheless, the instant I saw a sign for 1^st Car rental downtown that day I hopped a small ped gate to get a pricing on the vw rabbit in the window.  To my surprised chagrin it was a bit more pricey than the compact chevy, I went for the Spark.  I was in and out of that car rental shop, made a stop at the hotel where I’d stashed my backpack after breakfast buffet, and was ecstatic  to be soon careening down the coast in my rental, ecstatic to not have my knees in my chest on a crowded bus with sickening music videos cranking clear through the morning hours of the night.

I’m no novice in a manual, and even though I’d cruised across Dhaka, Bangladesh behind the wheel of a manual with the drivers seat on the right side of the car, it was confusion to the hilt that october day due to the fact that the side of the street also swaps in South Africa, furthermore it was bat spit madness getting out of downtown Durban on a Friday, (coincidentally a national holiday) while shifting with my left hand from the right side, turning a power-steering-less vehicle on the left side of the road, I may as well have been flying an airplane, it felt that foreign, all the while trying to figure out which lane’d be considered the slow lane.

West bound and having finally found the highway I was at last content to be solo touring South Africa.  Four days previous I’d said a final goodbye to my aunt whose cancer’d soon become fatal.  I’d sat on the floor beside her hospital bed for the last time only letting tears fall when her coughs’d throw her eyes shut.  When someone is that close to death all social cues disintegrate, holding your aunt’s cold hand is normal, encouraged, in fact, anyone in the room with hands has an auto-invite to hold yours.  Death arrests the commonality of kin, breaks down all the character we scrape into lines with our credit cards on tv trays, all our bull shit, our plastic; death takes all our veneers and warps them to the point where we can all see one another for nothing more than the particle board we are.  It’s quite a relief actually; the dishevelment of social barrier, death remains a curse,  broken relationship with creator the way i see it (horribly painful, sting lost).  Even having stopped through Brooklyn, having spent a night and a day with Will, nothing had quite leveled, my stomach had stayed high and dry and all the public transport had stifled all hope in me till i was bloodshot and hungover.  The compact rental, of all things, and the open road was a sobering rush of wind like holy ghost and my eyes came clean and hope came into view, it oft worries me how emotion can pan to polar poles and then regroup and middle in an instant.