The weather in Grahamstown today is chilly, but not predominantly. It is also melancholy and tired, but very satisfied. It is as if the bones of the world, after an achingly hard day’s work, are content in the knowledge that they will soon rest, and be stretched out across the seas, over all the beauty that is the world itself.
That is how I feel today – I feel a nostalgic sadness, a pleased sigh of contentment, a resignation to the day and the week and the month and the year and the life that is mine and can never be changed with anything else, and I am happy. Upon arriving at my modest residence room at 5 o’clock in the glum afternoon, I was struck with a sudden rush of wistfulness that bubbled in my nostrils and fizzed in my brain as it whirred past my eardrums. This weather, the light in the room when I opened the door, the smell that is finally my own, but still my mother’s...
It all reminded me of being young – taking duvet days and listening to the rain outside, taking in the smell of the new earth – and of being older – falling asleep doing an art assignment and waking up to find the house submerged in the half-dark of such a late afternoon hour. I remember thinking that I had never felt so cold, so lonely, and so utterly small. I had also never understood life so easily.
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