‘Nearly every morning, a certain woman in our community comes running out of her house with her face white and her overcoat flapping wildly. She cries out, “Emergency, emergency,” and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed. We know she is making it […]
1. He tells me that before – for a good few years – he could not talk about her without crying. 2. She tells me that the grief she went through when they divorced, the feeling of the end of everything prepared her for when her father died years later. […]
I stand on a rooftop looking down at the street. Waiting.my heart,an ache,pulled taut, there’s a hundred roses that daysuspended from the sky.
‘I could only reply that I think – I theorise – that something – something else – happens to the memory over time. For years you survive with the same loops, the same facts and the same emotions. I press a button marked Adrian or Veronica, the tape runs, the […]
One evening in Durban, F gave me two letters. One from Aisha and the other from Zeeshan. Written words for me, down the mountain in a bag, on a plane. And I, stunned, opened them, read them, my heart bursting, the pain so strong I could not see anything but […]
I walk up the hill, walk along a winding narrow street and at the top I find a mosque (later, I tell myself the mosque found me). I wrap a scarf from around my neck on my head, climb up, remove my shoes (hide them low on the shelf – […]
‘How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about […]
Sitting under a tree on the sidewalk at night in the French Concession, the Italian women, who work for a designer, dressed in heels , bright red lipstick, laugh loudly, smoke cigarettes from small silver cases, tell us about their friend who is getting married, how they are taking her […]
The orchid fell now. Right in front on the desk. The ending of anything is sad, I find and more so when it’s life. Today we passed a dead cat. A policeman, smoking a cigarette was looking down at it. I wanted to take a photo, fumbling for my phone, […]
‘And I cried. For myself. For this woman talkin’ about love. For all the women who have ever stretched their bodies out anticipating civilization and finding ruins.’-Sonia Sanchez
