lion park

A few days after my mom had left me in South Africa to continue with the second half of my study abroad journey, I found myself in an apartment building that was strangely empty, as it was spring break from studying at UCT and all of my friends had gone on spring break trips to impressive places like Victoria Falls in Zambia, and scuba diving with dolphins in Mozambique.

I had gone on a four day long safari with my mom and her friend from college, then we had returned to Cape Town, exploring the city, taking a wine tour, etc. But my mom had eventually had to leave, and with a few days still before everyone returned from spring break, I binge-watched Fuller House under the warm but sandy comforter on my tiny South African single bed, eating Pringles and fried rice from my favorite Thai restaurant, and going surfing each day in the late afternoon.

In a way it was a really nice vacation, though it quickly got to be more lonely than entertaining. My computer did a weird twitch sometimes and had to restart, but other than that my days were simple. It’s amazing how we can get used to living a life within such a small area so quickly, and so it was pretty surprising to me how easily I found myself agreeing to go to Johannesburg with one of my friends the very next week, to spend a few days with a friend of her brother’s who had picked up and moved there from New Jersey to work for some soccer nonprofit for eight months.

We got drunk the night before, slept maybe an hour or two, then left for an early flight carrying hastily packed bags filled with random articles of clothing. It wasn’t yet eight in the morning and yet when we got to the airport, we both went quickly to KFC (KFC is inordinately better in pretty much any country outside of the USA) and ordered fried chicken and mashed potatoes. I had never felt like more of a mess, but also more of an adult than I did that morning.

Although, doing things with my friend Gianna always seemed to feel that way—things typically would fall together in a way that wasn’t entirely by chance, but the amount of luck still would make you feel as though you deserved everything you were given. But anyway, we finally ended up at her brother’s friend (Jacob)’s apartment, tired, thirsty, in need of wifi and glad to be somewhere as a final destination.

The first day wasn’t really very eventful, but there was a certain kind of magic attached to Jacob—he seemed so cool and both put together and messily young that I trusted him immediately. Even now, the memory of him comes to me as striking. I really didn’t want anything more than for him to like me, just in the most general sense.

One of the most fun days of my life was the second day Gianna and I spent with Jacob. We went to a lion park a few minutes away from Jacob’s house, and, ready to spend money, paid for a package that included an interaction with tiny cubs, young lions, a cheetah, and random other safari animals like a baby giraffe and some meerkats. Not entirely the most ethical place, I guess, but it is absolutely one of the top things I have ever done. It felt like Gianna, Jacob and I were a tiny clique, getting our pictures taken with animals, basking in the sunshine, and all clearly having exactly the same level of enjoyment in the afternoon. I never wanted it to end, but of course it did.

goodbyes

I think the first time I really understood the difficulty of goodbyes happened a few weeks before I had to leave Cape Town. Things had already begun to change, relationships had developed themselves in a way that inspired separation, and I realized that if I wanted to climb Devil’s Peak, I would have to go and do it on my own.

It was in taking an Uber blindly to the start of a trail up a mountain as the sun threatened to set before I was done that I realized the gravity of making meaningful friends in a temporary situation. I guess we all have those experiences that give us endless moments of clarity, and for me, those moments started when I moved abroad to live in South Africa for a semester. On my solo hike up Devil’s Peak, I realized how quickly I would be moving home, but more importantly, how far away some of the friends I had made would then be living from me.

I guess what I’m trying to convey is the fact that I’m starting to learn that goodbyes don’t ever get easier, and the more you travel and meet people and understand the way that difference can become similarity when you take the time to understand the context of people’s actions, the more goodbyes you have to say. I came home from Cape Town, and I missed friends in that way you ashamedly miss people you know you will probably never see again.

I don’t want to think that for the rest of my life I will need to constantly say goodbye in order to keep myself sane, but I can’t think of a life in which staying stagnant will keep my happy. I prefer to understand the world as constantly in motion, and this life as unabashedly short. It makes it easier to justify having to move on from being close to people.

07 August 2017 nonfiction, guitarist

It’s dark and I’ve walked carefully into the sleepy orange light of a little bar called “Naked Lunch”. I look at the bar menu, enjoy the way my hands fall gently to the bar’s counter, and ask for a glass of something labeled the house white. The glass is iridescent, a white wine seemingly lit by a carefully crafted bar ambiance.

I finish my glass, walk back outside, and let the cool breeze slip through my jacket and behind my ears. My cousin is on a hill that has been cut into to make stairs. We stand there awhile; his friend has been picked up by his mom, and we have time to kill before an Uber arrives or we decide to go home on public transportation the way we came.

In this waiting period, two guys that can’t be that far from my age set themselves up in front of Naked Lunch, one of them holding a guitar gently like it’s something soft, and the other pushing his hair out of his eyes, and setting down an old hat to collect money. At first glance, I can only notice that across from the guitarist is a girl and her two friends who can’t take their hands off of each other. She sways and pushes her eyes right onto the guitarist, generating an enthusiasm blended with a feeling of longing so deep I can feel it myself.

He ends his song and she claps quickly, then makes a show of putting several dollars into the friend’s hat in support of the performance. She leaves with her two friends and I start to feel a little uncomfortable; my cousin has gone inside Naked Lunch for a glass of water, and I’m now the only one on the street who has been present for the music and has not offered anything in support of a young musician just out to make it in this world.

And then he starts playing a song that I know. It’s old, it’s not a song I’ve heard in a long time, and to be honest, his rendition leaves some of the best parts of the music to the imagination. But in this moment, I don’t care about any of that. I picture myself on this same street, but with Max. I picture how different my life has been over the last six months, then I picture how different my life has been simply in the last week.

And finally, I realize something—this boy on the street corner in front of a bar called Naked Lunch, with his dirty blonde hair, and his douchey-looking friend with the hat, and his guitar, and his subpar voice, he really is no different from me. He’s here, in this city, and he’s doing something brave, just sitting on a street corner playing music that he clearly loves.

I used to think that all I really needed from this life was sunlight that made my skin glow orange and gold and pushed my eyes to feel green like a one dollar bill. I used to think it would be enough to simply exist, waiting for people to realize what good I’d be. I would have beautiful pictures in my imagination of elephants and whales or a sky more full of stars than any picture I’d ever seen, and I would close my eyes and believe wholeheartedly that the beauty of the world was contained right there in my imagination, and if I pushed my mind to think of things hard enough, they would appear right before me.

But in this night, I realize that the beauty of dreams isn’t everlasting, at least, not the way I used to think. What’s more beautiful than the total uniqueness of reality? I’ve been to Africa now, and I’ve seen the way it looks when elephants cross the horizon, and it doesn’t look anything like the pictures I’d created based on episodes of Planet Earth, with time moving in slow motion and the moon and stars rotating in a circle perceptible to the naked eye. The real earth creates beauty that we can manipulate to look like traditional art, but at the end of the day, what is more beautiful than the dirty fingernails strumming a mediocre version of a song I used to listen to when I was fourteen? What is more real than that, right?

Elephants and whales are endangered, and it’s nothing within my imagination that prepared me to look at the scarred old skin of an elephant with crooked tusks, gently chewing on leaves while I watch from under a scratchy old blanket in the bed of a safari jeep in the arresting cold of 5:00 in the morning. Life can be beautiful, but I’ve begun to learn that it’s the scarred, intimate details that matter the most to me. Those are the ones with a story to tell.

I ended up giving a couple of dollars to the aspiring musician. It makes me feel good to coexist in a city where people are showcasing their dreams so trustingly.

tattoo

When I got my first tattoo,

I was nervous

though not as I had expected.

Having shifted back and forth between

words for weeks,

I surprised myself by choosing a font

in minutes.

After entertaining the tickle of

the pre-needle stencil,

I was unsure at the stillness of my hands

when the first needle poked.

I had been afraid of the discomfort,

though I knew I could handle the pain.

Afraid of what I’d started

still trying to digest the idea of

permanence.

it was strange though,

in the moment it happened

it barely felt real.

A year passed and I found few people

asked what it said

fewer wanted to hear its story

Today I tell them the simple words:

it’s my favorite poem

wonder if I’ll start saying was.

Easy to hide, I tell the timid ones

it is addicting I explain to the fellow

ink-afflicted

It didn’t feel like forever at the time

I forget to put sunscreen on it

and it still doesn’t

I doubt it ever will

I’ll take another taste soon

but I don’t think I’ll ever

really know what it means.

a piece of something

We’re born completely white, you know.

And I don’t mean the color, I just mean white in the sense of purity, complete freshness; an uninhibited surface.

We’re new and fresh and beautiful, like pages in a new notebook, or the white walls of my bathroom.

But I don’t think that’s beautiful at all.

I think the most beautiful things come when we’re tattooed,

with ink,

Or kisses,

Or scars.

After all, you can’t go through this life without starting a collection of something,

Whether its photos or leather jackets or lipstick

Or even something more strange like teardrops.

I think the most beautiful place is the ocean, because it’s a mess of things. It’s sand and it’s salt water, and it is filled with things that are big and small and ugly and beautiful and it just makes me feel wonderfully full to understand that no matter what coast I stand on, I am connected to the same little drips of seawater. It’s like sunshine, because everyone bathes in it. But it is more realistic because the sea isn’t always happy and yellow. And no matter if there is a storm or not, the sea is always there to watch.