Obituary

My arms hung limp beside my body, my boots dug deep into the earth, with my eyes cast down I could barely make out where I was but I knew that it was raining. The rain surrounded me like an ocean of tears and water from inside flowed out from a hollow so deep not even sound could escape.

Somewhere someone…

There is a kind of pain that sits on your chest and that pain I associate with death. My dream revealed a face and a name, Uncle Billy is dead it spoke from under my arms. But he died a good few years ago, I argued with my dream, so whose death are you showing me? My arms were still unable to move as if gravity itself was pouring me down. Then came a sort of clearing in my mind as the answer was revealed and in that same second the pain crouching on my chest dug its claws in deeper. It was Alan. He had died; I fell to my knees and began speaking. At this point I woke up but the voice in my head would not let go. It was now 2:30am, raining outside and the tears streaming down my face dampened my pillow, I knew I would not sleep tonight.

Somewhere someone was taking out his last change to pay the taxi driver to take him to his last day of work. Not sure what the day will bring he sits with clenched jaw waiting for his lot to change and hoping that come night fall tomorrow will have rearranged itself for the better not just for his sake but the sake of his brothers kids.

Somewhere someone lost hearing in her left ear from the beating she suffered last night, she tongues the hole where her teeth were knocked out, a harsh pain throbs in her head she fears the pot holes and speed bumps for they serve only to remind her of the unattended wounds inside. She smiles anyway, you see, she is still alive and can stand to fight another day. Her wounds matter little – her little ones were protected.

Someone somewhere got up from his desk and started walking, yesterday they took his car, they took his furniture and now they threaten to take his house, his wife’s accusing stares guts him and each day he drags himself home but the solution seems to moves further and further away. So he got up and started walking – he has not stopped since. All his belongings in a cart in front of him, what they can’t see – they can’t take he mumbles over and over again his mind broken, his family forgotten.

I look at the clock its now 3:14am, when will these images, these words leave me? Alan died.

Many died with him. His death heralded a new era of hope for those same deceased now resurrected as a unified WE – the forgotten have now begun to remember. WE remember Sara, the Hottentot Venus and her sisters whose breasts were cut off and turned into tobacco pouches; they abducted her and poisoned her beautiful body with alcohol and syphilis. They did not deem her human enough for a burial so cut up into tiny pieces she sat in containers on dusty shelves in the Musee de l’Homme in France until just the other day. We the forgotten start to remember. Ashley Kriel, forced removals, colored affairs, slegs blankes, pencil tests, families torn apart – divided amongst pigment lines, walking in the street, houses made of asbestos – just the other day and they took our ancestral land. REPERATIONS!

At 4am I began to tackle this pain, to question its position in space. I pinched together my thumb and fore finger and an invisible string became visible, the harder I pinched the more visible the string, I attached that creature of pain to one end and holding on to the other began to rise filled with hope, above my mattress through the ceiling I rose, still pinching this string starting to lift the pain.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw my neighbor rising too. I looked around me and more and more people were rising. Floating above neighborhoods, suburbs and townships. We floated in a ball so aflame with hope we rivaled the sun. Pain cannot survive in the light so those creatures were burned off our chests. We remembered who we are. We remember why we came, why we chose to be here.

We have just begun to realise that we are all a mere collection of someones somewheres…