The suitcase has been packed, Christmas tree watered (oh how I would love to cart one home with me, they don’t make them like this near the equator and I find that extremely disheartening), carry on stuffed with raspberries and dried mangoes, passport safely tucked away. I am going to finish up Super Sad True Love Story and start on 1984 because you can’t read Murakami without having the original at the back of your mind.
I have said my goodbyes, leaving this city is never easy but I suppose that the prospect of returning to someplace warmer in time for the holiday season provides a slight element of respite to the soft sinking feeling that comes with turning my back on this land. This land, this earth, the roots I am slowly but surely creating. My body was made for a life of displacement, but in wrenching my spirit from the motherland it has been allowed to dissipate and fluctuate and cry out for a new kind of tomorrow.
The past couple of weeks have been marked/marred by death, riding on the back of a winter chill and piercing through our best defences. And so we read Bukowski and hold each other tight as the haze skims over our heavy childlike heads, our spirits burrowed beneath a blanket of loss and longing, everything is ephemeral and I cannot be here to hold you forever. But as the words morph into movement and your hips limbs wrists sway to the beat of the breath of this very generation, I am reminded of the beauty that comes with the shock of being alive, of living.
There will be a day when love will be enough.
