the gravity of our joy
prose for the beginning end beginning
Woke up1 wading through my woe. Crawled to the porch to find dusk or dawn, I don’t know. Low dust barely covering feet performing a sacred dance far older than words like “soccer,” “football,” and “dribbling.” Sweat. Screams. Smiles. The way the day’s last light falls off a black boy’s skin. I am ashamed to admit I hated this place when I first moved here. I need not list the struggles of being an unemployed student living alone in this hellscape of a city, lest this blogpost go on forever. The unfortunate targets of my dismay were the masks that the oppressive systems wore within my situation. (The enemy knows how to adapt, that’s how he’s been around so long.) This blinded me to the myriad ways in which joy and beauty also adapt and find ways to persist no matter the milieu. Now I can’t wait for the day’s end to set ablaze the 8ste Laan horizon.
Woke up no light. I call to my past, and my godmother answers from the kitchen. She is doing the dishes by moonlight. I ask why, and she explains, “My eyes have already adjusted to the dark. It would just be a waste to turn on the lights at this point.” Her cousin died last week, her feet turn blue from carrying around grief all day. She is a lifetime away from her lastborn, trying to insure he has a lifetime after her. I move to the kettle by memory and turn it on to make us some tea. She recognizes what I’m trying to do and immediately becomes undone. She knows that I know that no one knows the colour of a Nama woman’s tears.
Woke up wilting. The oppressive heat forces me down to the floor, where I lounge around all day like a lost leaf on a lonesome lake in summer when it is far too hot for moonlight’s embrace. I crack open a book or two, but all the words mean the same thing when you’re sad. My friend asks me to come over and help her teach a magician how to ride a bike into the sunset. The wheels wobble as we inch closer and closer to the horizon / to happy / to hope in cupped hands. Our scraped knees only fear time wasted. Trepidation is a luxury. None of us know what we are (doing here), only that we are (here) together. So we ride until the world proves itself to be bigger than the inside of our rooms / bodies / hearts. Until the future yields and the ground rushes to form beneath our feet. Until the sky opens wide enough to hold all of our being. We leave the world with no choice but to spin to the gravity of our joy.
This format was partially inspired by a poetry collection currently consuming me, “Woke up no light" by Leila Mottley.