Antithesis (2019)

Old White Man

You sit across from me. Striped white and blue shirt. Pale beige oversized jacket. Black trousers that rise half a metre away from your ankles. Blue socks. Brown shoes that like they’ve walked with you every day of the years your face betrays.

Your hair is white. Wispy like half-eaten candyfloss. Your blue eyes close together survey the cultural festivities around you. From time to time I raise my eyes and catch them surveying me. I can’t work out your expression. what is it that you want to know when you look at me? All I can do is surmise and guess. So I manufacture your story. And this is it.

You are here by yourself sitting in front of me because it is better to be surrounded by strangers, life and materials that hail from another reality, than to be alone surrounded by the opiates of a modern life. The things they tell us we need to be happy, content and fulfilled.

You are here alone because either you need the solitude, or solitude has chosen you. As you look out over the balcony I see glimpses of a kind of peace, a peace that centres around knowing in that very moment, at that very point in time, you don’t have to account to anybody for anything, you are free to sit in that singular chair, at a table with no other seats, watching the world go by and not having to utter a word.

But then your eyes cast down and away from the balcony, and in that split second I get the keenest sense that you wish there was someone you were sharing this with, someone to hold or touch your arm and laugh at something silly and insignificant.

I pay more attention to your face and I realise that your mouth is naturally aligned downward. You look tired, a bit hopeless, a bit lost, like this place, this time, is you attempting to find some kind of meaning for your latter days. You’ve reached the point now where the years ahead will be less than those that are gone.

Do you regret anything? I don’t know. What I do know is that you still love life. That is why you are here amongst the sea and kaleidoscope of colours, all the assorted cultures. It is why you just got up to lean over the balcony and look at it some more.

As you lower yourself slowly back in the chair, I am reminded that as far apart as we are in age, one day sooner than I think, there will be a day when these youthful bones will no longer dance among my muscles as they do now. There will come a day when all I will have the energy to do is observe too. Maybe with others, maybe alone too.

The truth is watching you, watching me and everything around you is probably the most poignant lesson I have had in humility in a while. The kind of humility that recognises that these proud days of youth do not last. One day I too will be weak, frail, a husk of the pyramid I used to be. I too will find myself watching the world go by, speeding at a million miles an hour, and no matter how much I want to slow it down, it will not, and no-one will care whether if I can keep up or not.

You slowly pickup the plastic bag you came with, you slowly rise from your chair, and you slowly hobble away taking your world and my illusions with you.

Young Black Girl

You sit across from me. Motifed black t-shirt, black leggings, khaki trainers, and a khaki jacket. Your ginger hair sprouting up from your head like an unruly pineapple. Your face looks like you’ve just finished in education, but something about your eyes tells me that I am attributing less years to you than you’ve lived. Maybe even less lives.

I caught your eye once, and now it seems that you can’t stop looking at me, although I make sure that I never lock eyes with you again. It seems to me that I have become a jigsaw puzzle you are attempting to find all the pieces for and put together. My dear, if only you knew. I am still trying to locate the pieces of myself that have been scattered in this life.

Sensing you watching me as you furiously scribble something in that notebook of yours makes me feel uncomfortable. I can’t explain it but I feel like I am being stripped, perhaps of my humanity. I am not your project. I am not your project. Let me be.

Who are you to judge me? To see me, to look so brazenly at me, at even the spot between my eyes, my God is there nowhere for my eyes to escape to?! Is this how I used to be in my youth? That arrogance, that assurance that precedes any sense of sensitivity or privacy. A confident disregard of personal space. I came here to take in the sights, the people. To distract myself from my weakening bones, my failing mind, the diminishing of my sight from colour to grayscale. I came here to absorb life in its fullest most ornamented and indulgent regalia. Instead I am pursued by small black eyes that refuse to waver/falter.

I am sorry. I am sorry that you caught me looking at you. I meant no harm. I was merely appreciating another representation of the era of life I have long left behind.

What is it you’re writing? I can’t stand how much I suspect your scattered scrawls are in some way related to me. I came here to live do you hear? I came here to live and not die in the ink of a pen and the lines of a biodegradable page. If you write of me, write me into life. Say that I was bold unlike many of my peers. I am out here appreciating what makes this society so great. I am here paying homage and respect to a continent my ancestors looted. If you must write of me, say that I am repaying my debts, my ancestor’s debts, in the only way I know how. I am showing love and appreciation. Write that I am going out strong. See me as I rise to peer over this balcony. Yes I am not as nimble as I used to be, but I am strong, dammit I am still strong.

Have I stood long enough for you to see me? Yes I can feel your hungry glare bathing me. And now I can sit. Ever so slowly I sit. This feels dehumanising, degrading, depressing…but at least I can still do it unassisted.

Don’t you ever pity me. I have lived. I am still living and I have not given up. My bones may creak like old stairs any time I do anything, but there is still might in my mind.

Don’t you ever pity me. I am your future as much as your past. I am Everest. I am the aim, the goal, the very thing they teach all of you to work towards at every step of your life. I reached the top. I reached the top. I played my part and I stayed alive. And once you have reached the top, inevitably there is nowhere to go but down. But I did it in order. I was young, and now I am old, but I am still alive. My descent is graceful, this is my reward.

It’s time for me to leave. Your attention is disturbing my tranquility. I know you think my plastic bag is sad, but quite frankly I have no need to carry half of my life around like you because I have realised that life is more that things and that powerful drug your earphones are currently attached to.

I move lightweight now. Sans unnecessary burdens. And it feels so free, so damn free. I am so damn free.

I wonder if you are free.

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