outside the walls of my bedroom, in my mother’s room, lies even more junk. more organised than mine, she knows where it all is and what it’s all for but it’s junk nonetheless. on the balcony lies junk that hasn’t been touched in almost two years and in the kitchen cupboards are various forms of literal trash—old ice cream containers and jars that were once sticky with assorted jams. most of them have not been touched since being washed. we continue to add to the collection.

i’ve always been this way and clearly so has she. all this collection is encoded in my dna, a message i speak to myself without ever knowing or understanding. perhaps she passed it down to me. perhaps it’s human nature and we all display it to differing extents. the earliest of us could count all their life’s possessions on their two hands yet the bulk of everything i’ve ever owned is no longer mine. even worse, i no longer think of them. what you would throw away, i would keep. and what i would throw away would be kept in a room of its own and televised on tlc by the next person. after all, junk is decided. anything can be treasured because it all is.

i’ve been in such a horrid way the past few months and it’s all been a mess. i haven’t had an idea of how to even begin cleaning up after myself but i’m aware of the belief that a cluttered space creates a cluttered mind. i can’t say with certainty how true that sentiment may or may not be because i’ve never had either clean enough for long enough to notice each one’s impact on the other. there cannot be an experiment without a control.

i would like to take control of my life by putting this practice to the test. resultantly, i’ve reviewed the things i own—my artefacts—deciding what junk is and is not in the hope of setting myself free of sentimentality. these are a few of my things:

artefact #01 – braid

this is not the only braid in my possession but it is the most relevant; this is one of the braids from the last set of braids i had. earlier this year, i had grown tired of the associated labours of ‘appropriate’ black hair, especially as a woman. i was struggling with the daily managing of my unbraided hair and the reprieve for which i first began having my hair braided showed itself to be nothing more than that. the rest between sessions where i didn’t have to worry about the pain of my appearance was simply postponing the arrival of the dark hours when i would be punished for my sloth with a gruelling takedown and subsequent detangling session. not to mention having to endure the next hair appointment.

i remember reading a sticker on the mirror as i was having that last set installed; it seemed to have been promotional material for some hair product brand or the other. amongst the logos, it read ‘beauty is your pride.’ i was the humblest woman in the world.

i wore those braids out for four and half months—two and a half months longer than my usual—and just before i was due to begin my second year of film school, i decided to cut it all off. but not without making a film about it. this particular braid could also be considered film memorabilia as it is the one featured in the poster i designed for the film and i’ve made a habit of keeping one item from each film i create.

artefact #02 – jupiter belle (any pronouns)

jupiter belle is my babe and has been for the past five years. my childhood best friend won him for me in an arcade claw machine on a day we went out with my parents and my now best friend. we don’t speak anymore which is largely due to my actions or lack thereof which is sad but jupiter remains. i named him after a character from the sims 3: late night. growing up playing that game, i always felt something sadly maternal for that child; he lives with his mother, the most famous person in the world, along with her gold-digging younger boyfriend and her fitness trainer. that is not a child’s home. i guess this was my way of putting that part of me at ease and righting some wrong in the world.

jupiter belle is the first and only teddy bear i have ever had and when i first got him i would sleep with him every night because that’s what i always saw people do with their teddy bears on television and in movies. i stopped doing that three years later. i figured i got bored but looking back at it now, i needed to hold him all those nights. that period of my life was far more cruel to me than i like to remember and i was able to cope the way i could pretending to care for something not knowing i was the one being looked after.

jupiter belle has not ever had a wash. jupiter belle will not be having a wash anytime soon.

artefact #03 – half a bottle of dark and lovely neutralising shampoo

i still have this from the first time i relaxed my hair in the december of 2024. i remember being so excited; i thought straightening my hair was going to be the answer to everything. i had assumed that the coils in my hair were what made having it so tedious but i was only half right. relaxed hair certainly alleviated some of the daily pressures but it came with a lot of its own too. it was necessary for me to realise that, unsurprisingly and as usual, it was labour itself that i wasn’t fond of and so long as there was hair on my head, i would always be at some type of work.

i’ve not since reopened it but i’m sure the smell is just the same as it was that day with my head bent over the bathtub at my aunt’s place. my sister’s fingers running through my hair as the pink turned to white. us girls having a hair day. in a way, it made up for all the years growing up when i would watch my sister and my mother and aunts bond as they would wash and style her hair. if i had had agency over mine at an earlier age, perhaps i would have arrived at this conclusion far sooner.

artefact #04 – nintendo switch oled

i grew up with nintendo consoles. when i began primary school i lived with my cousins and they had a wii. my childhood best friend who lived right nextdoor had a ds lite and another one of my friends had a 3ds and a wii u. the ds lite had all sorts of games on it, all loaded on a single card. my friend had said that they bought the ds lite at toys r us and one of the employees just asked her what kind of games she liked and gave her the card. more than a decade later, i see that it was an r4 card and that that employee seriously put her on. i later got my own 2ds which came with a free copy of mario that i’ve probably played more than twenty times over.

it figures that the next stage in my progression was to get my hands on the next generation. i asked my parents for years with no success. i eventually stopped asking when i realised i could pirate games on my 2ds so i satisfied myself with that for a while until the pandemic started and the new animal crossing came out. i watched videos every day of people playing and i even had an account on twitter where i and way more people than you would expect would pretend to be the different animals. it wasn’t all desperate pining though; it helped that i was able to pirate the version of animal crossing that was compatible with my console which is widely considered to be the better game anyway. i played and pretended and lived vicariously through others all year long until things slowly reverted to the way they were before and everything the lockdown allowed me to put off had be dealt with. i no longer had the time to play as much as i did so i put it all out of my mind.

almost half a decade later (the tail end of last year), my request was finally granted and my father got me the switch i have now. i was excited, but not as excited as i would have been five years ago. i almost immediately made the purchase of animal crossing and set to playing. it’s great fun but i quickly remembered why it was so popular at the time. it’s really not something you can play unless you have large chunks of available time, at least not the way i like to play it.

as the months go by, there’s always more dust to wipe off than the last time i played. i haven’t lost interest in it at all, but i’ve gained interest in other pursuits and so videogames seem like they should be the least of my current concerns which saddens me but i know it’s the way it has to be.

artefact #05 – ipod touch fifth generation

another remnant of my consumerist inclinations. i’ve always been fascinated by technology and so i’ve always wanted some gadget or the other to play around with before inevitably developing an appetite for an even newer gadget. my ipod is no exception. as a child i, like many of my peers, was of the belief that an iphone was the most elite technology available to the average consumer. to me it was virtually science fiction. being twelve, i didn’t have one of my own but one of my friends had an ipod touch which, for a twelve-year-old’s intentions, is essentially an iphone. i became fixed on making it my own and set about conducting negotiations that lasted several months before the transfer was finally made. my mom paid hers in several equally-sized instalments, the last of which i’m not sure ever did happen..

it was no matter to me at the time though, as i had something new to play with. i all but abandoned my actual cellphone in favour of the feeling it gave me to conduct my usual business on my ipod. i would have it for about two and a half years before i got my first actual iphone. as it goes, the older toys get forgotten. to this day i don’t recall the password i set for it but i still keep it around with the firmest belief that i will one day manage to find my way back inside so i could be twelve once more.

artefact #06 – cambridge badge

i somehow fooled people all throughout primary school into believing that i was intelligent and capable. i don’t doubt my intelligence but my capacity for handling certain things could definitely be called into question. ever against labour, i seldom did any homework and i never studied but i would almost always come out with the top results because at the very least, i actually paid attention in class. in the year of my eighth grade, i was able to keep the ruse alive long enough for my parents to have me begin the cambridge igcse. this was still at the same high school so they gave us the badges to differentiate ourselves.

the next five years were a hell of labours worsened by my newfound freedom. we didn’t have classes the entire day, let alone every day of the week. we were allowed to use our phones and other devices during lessons and our exam season came once every year. where i previously ignored incentives to work, i now had none. i stumbled through the rest of my high school years, barely making it out alive. i do not relish the time i spent there but it happened all the same so i best make sure i keep it tucked away in the back of my closet, lest i lose my teenage years.

artefact #07 – a pair of boots

this is the first pair of boots i ever bought. i got them to wear out to a social with my friend in highschool and from that day, they were the only pair of shoes i ever wore when i wasn’t in uniform. my choice of colour was unfortunate because my love for them made itself apparent in the black scuffs that marked their cream bodies.

the last time i wore them was in the december of 2022 when i was a plus one at someone’s eighteenth birthday party. i had spent a lot of that year skipping school and taking half a bottle’s worth of shots of russian bear in rapid succession so i was under the impression that i could behave similarly that night. i also wasn’t too knowledgeable about the best ways to consume alcohol to maximise both enjoyment and safety so when i saw a bottle of bacardi on the kitchen counter with the rest of the drinks, i filled a plastic cup to the brim and drank as if i were drinking water. i joined everyone else as they danced to ‘party in the usa’ and before the song was over, i woke up in the dark of a bedroom on a beanbag chair with a blanket draped over me. i could hear people making out on the bed next to me and i pretended to be asleep as they finished off and left, taking the blanket i was wearing with them.

when i reemerged, i learned that i had painted the entire bathroom. i didn’t remember that at all but my white dress had become orange and my feet squelched with each step. luckily, it was a sleepover too so i had packed a pair of pyjamas that i changed into for the rest of the night as we tried watching a horror movie and played those sexually charged games teenagers always get around to playing after having a few drinks.

in the morning, i walked to the taxi rank in my pyjamas and those same boots and got a ride until i was close enough to home that taking an uber was feasible. i left those boots caked in vomit for weeks at the bottom of my closet before i finally washed them until there was no longer a trace of that night but i knew that we were done. these i am throwing out.

artefact #08 – adidas track jacket

my second and most recent ex gifted me this jacket sometime during our two week long relationship. that may sound strange but there was a level of familiarity between us that we achieved by having found our way back to each other. we first met online years before we were in a relationship and after an enjoyable back and forth, he told me that he lived in cape town. i soured. i was not in the market for a long-distance relationship. i told him that i wanted to stop speaking and explained why, to which he replied that he would be finding himself in my city sometime and that i just needed to wait. i laughed it off as a nothing musing. men often say things. i figured that to be one of them.

i forgot about him over the next few years as i went on with my dealings. i even entered and exited a different relationship in that time. about a year and a half after that relationship ended, we got back into contact and he told me that he was now studying in my city. i knew he wasn’t back for me specifically but it was enough of a callback to inspire within me a faith in his word. so when he spoke of what things could be like for us with distance removed, i saw no reason to object. our two weeks began.

the first day we met, we fumbled around each other not really knowing what the other would tolerate but this rehearsal paid off. from the second day, we’d been in love for years. we played house mainly, spending entire days together at a time and behaving as i would assume people in long term relationships do. we slept together, we slept with each other, i cooked for him and we went on walks. one of these days, as we were in our usual routine, he presented this jacket which i adore. i broke up with him days later.

artefact #09 – origin wristband

this is what was fixed to my wrist on the night i went to a club for the first time. december 31, 2024. i had been staying at a friend’s place for the week and a half leading up until new year’s eve and we had talked ourselves into believing that clubbing our way into the new year would be the ultimate rebirth. we were both about to start university and we still felt that our teenage years owed us the kind of experience they freely handed to what looked like everyone but us.

we discovered that a local club was holding a new year’s eve event and got our tickets in advance. as soon as christmas was over, we spent hours each day scouring instagram for pictures from people who had been to the club. none of them looked happy despite their drunkenly upturned lips. what was the appeal? we had to investigate.

the night of the crossing arrived. we got dressed up and took a ride to the club that was shorter than i was expecting it to be. the line to get in ran out and around the building and it took about twenty minutes before we were finally let in. they scanned our tickets at the door and wrapped green bands around our wrists before allowing us to go further than the foyer. once inside, i lost each sense but my hearing by way of my ears. the only thing else i was capable of perceiving was that i didn’t want to be there for much longer. we made sure to visit each of its several floors on the off chance there was something inside the racket, just out of sight, waiting to be happened upon.

the only things we found were the same people who had occupied the street with us although it took a while to recognise them as such. they stood, sometimes bounced, in place with loose grips on all sorts of bottles. the few who danced were not moved by the room’s vibrations; each one of them turned and jumped and gyrated and clapped to sounds out of time to sounds not even they could hear. it was no place to transition energies. we were back home almost as soon as we had left and we vowed to never go clubbing again (we went to that same club for halloween the next year (we had an even worse experience)).

artefact #10 – a copy of julia fox’s memoir

one of my good friends gifted me this for my birthday last year and it arrived at a very strange point in both my life and my artistic journey. i always get depressive during the months surrounding my birthday and last year was no different. i had just published my first two short films and was feeling accomplished but i could not dispel the air of fear and inadequacy that had settled about me. i wondered whether my art was of any value to people other than myself—in the abstract and sentimental manner but also in the fiscal sense. the thought of making my living doing anything other than expressing myself is one of the great fears of my life but so is the idea of being able to do that on the condition that i alter my expression to make myself more appealing.

i wasn’t writing and i wasn’t making films. the muzzle i’d fixed to my mind left me in silence and with time. time i decided to use going through julia’s memoir. in it, she spoke of the countless beauties and sorrows of her life, all of which i identified with in different ways. i saw myself in her lowest moments, thinking back to times i found myself in situations doing things i can’t yet admit. however, what took me most totally was her journey as an artist. the way she wrote about her artistry, it never seemed to be so ultimate. she would let out what was was asking to be released, and the world would respond. always. she just had to make sure there was something to be replied to.

i’ve sat with her teachings for almost a year now. i’ve had moments of writing and making films and i’ve had moments of silence. it works out the same, though—for as long as i speak, i will be spoken back to. there is value in my voice that lies beyond financial security and the way it illuminates the lives of others. i’ve been in conversation with the world and i’ve been told a few things. when they don’t make sense, i’m simply to ask for an explanation and it will be given. i’ve got so much to say. there’s so much i want to know.

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i have 4c hair. or so the media would like me to believe. every time i happen upon someone talking about their ‘4c’ hair, it is always looser than mine.. less coiled and less coarse. i resent the image of ease they construct around their hair because it’s hardly ever about their hair at all. but more about our hair. how our hair is just as ‘manageable’ as the next hair type and should be treated as such. ‘everyone has to wash and brush their hair’ is a favourite argument. it comes right before i’m told how my personal struggles with my hair are evidence of a weak connection with my racial identity; it couldn’t possibly be that my aversion to labour extends to my outlook on hair. no. it’s that i wish i wasn’t black in the first place. no one has ever, in this life, made me feel worse about my own hair than the people who look like me. in their attempts to ensure that the higher numbered of the textures have the same cultural legitimacy as those on the lower end, they make the mistake of ending at numbers. how is a thing to be widely lauded as one of the most spiritual artefacts of the human body yet have it’s divinity snubbed by a shunning of qualitative analysis? my hair may be but a number, but i am most certainly not. i sometimes wonder if i’ve not been driven mad by the situation. they are either lying about their textures or i am 4d, if such a thing even exists. perhaps i am mad. the true class of my hair is irrelevant anyway because the practice—not the theory—of possessing hair of whatever class you would like to call mine, is a soul-crushing labour of maintenance but most importantly care. which i do not. there is no allure to its higher class and my being beneath my hair is purely a physical thing; i am no servant to the crown.

i was five when i first lost control of my hair. up until that point, it had been but a thing of my body—a biological trifle. same as my nails, same as my earlobes. rifling through my mother’s belongings is how many a tale of woe in my life begin and this time was no different. bored and curious—the same thing at that age—i mindlessly browsed the room i shared with my mother and happened upon what i now know to be a disposable razor. i fingered its form; a light, bright-yellow plastic housing a metallic interruption at its head. i had never seen this kind of a razor before but i was familiar with the naked blades that were sold in singles and wrapped in thin sheets of folded paper. my mother would use those to cut my nails. i recalled how smoothly the blade would run through the husks of my fingers and my mind dullened with fascination. i thought of nothing in particular as i moved the razor to the top of my head and swept it forward. the motion was not as silky as those of the standalone blades but the result was the same: a shedding of my trivial extensions. i reset the room as it was and travelled to the bathroom where, in the mirror, i saw the bare patch as i felt it before returning to the rest of my day’s activities.

by the time my mother had arrived, i had completely forgotten about what i had designed to transpire only a few hours before so it came as a shock when i welcomed her back with a smiling greeting and i was met with a snarl and my future laid out for me. ‘now i’m going to have to shave all of it.’ i remembered what i had done but felt it to be an overreaction. as i wondered how ridding me of all my hair was the most logical next step, my question was answered unprompted. ‘you can’t go to school like this.’ from then, how my hair looked would continue to be governed by what people other than myself would think when presented with it. sometimes, those people were my mother. consequently, i was balded on a regular basis and told just how ‘handsome’ i looked in a way that was reminiscent of ‘[my] father.’ two further points of contention when it came to a bald head that increasingly became points of repulsion as i aged and began to reckon with how my hair affects my gender performance.

i existed at different lengths from my scalp over the next few years—but never enough; my hair was never allowed to go past a certain length for reasons i am still unsure of so i would go have it severed by a strange man some sundays on the way back home from church. however, as those few years went by, i eventually managed to negotiate the usage of a higher guard even though it meant more frequent visits to the barber. upon reflection, i realise that avoiding this extra cost may have been the primary reason my mother wanted me bald. no matter, for she eventually picked up her own clipper and started shaving me herself. i used to marvel at how she managed a gig we used to pay professionals to do but as it turns out, it’s not the most difficult thing in the world to do. even more shockingly, it may even be easier to shave your own hair than that of another person. i cannot verify that assumption as i’ve only shaved my own but if i were to judge this world by my feeling, as i so often do, then the melding of my body and the machine should serve as enough qualification. but this was three months ago, there were still many years before i would take control of that aspect of my body.

as i grew, so too did my wariness of being at the whim of another person’s blade. luckily for me, the seasons of life bring in their vicissitudes circumstances that somehow seem to always align with my placement within them. highschool arrived along with the development of my pubescence (and my hormonal defiance); a cosmically appropriate combination as my highschool did not allow clean-shaven heads. there’s probably something to be said about how that policy, among several others, weren’t in favour of students with my hair type and similar but i’d rather not investigate that. at the time, it was the greatest source of my elation. my post-church trimmings became increasingly infrequent to the point where i would go months at a time without so much as a discussion about being barbed. the occasional offhand remarks about how ‘untidy’ my hair was when it wasn’t extremely short remained, but the actual suggestions were limited. i would rhythmically give in of my own volition when the daily combing became an activity that wasn’t worth the choice it represented. not that it made too much of a difference as, to my chagrin, coupled with its slow growth, without fail, my hair failed to continue growing past a certain level.

this game of highs and lows continued until halfway into my highschool experience, when the world shut down. counting the months leading into it, that year at home was the longest my hair had gone without intervention. the lockdown meant no church.. meant no clippings. it also marked the arrival of one of the two great depressions of my life, so attending to myself was the least of my concerns. my hair went without manipulation that entire time, with nary a wash nor a combing. that, i believe, is the ultimate care you can provide an untamed beast; to let it roam at whim and twist without trim. when the lockdown was lifted and it was time for me to reenter society, i was rewarded for these nonexistent efforts of care with a jungle atop my head. greened with the most violent shrubbery; black clumps woven into each other and burrowing into the bed of my scalp. my head an african wild, home to the most exotic, the most dangerous of creatures—my thoughts. and they ran amok as i traversed the biome, combing through each wayward vine first by finger, then by pick. each rip pulled closer to the surface of my skull thoughts of my ill fortune. how unlucky was i for that hair to call me home? i had done nothing to deserve that punishment.

i managed to clear the forest out in time to head back to school, but my hair was not the only thing that had changed during all that time i spent sequestered in my room. i had undergone an internal transformation or more aptly labelled, a realisation. i emerged from my house to enter the world once more and in tandem, so did my wings lick outwardly, lapping the sides of my cocoon and wearing it away. where i had previously been annoyed by the lack of control i had over how my hair looked, i was now also unsatisfied by what that same hair represented. it was a very sour taste as possibility washed over me various images of what could be. some were the fabrications of fantasy and others were memories; dainty visions of my sister getting her hair done on weekend afternoons flowed alongstream rippling portraits of every woman i had ever known. hair of different shapes and lengths but common amongst them being the choice to present that way. i wanted so badly for myself to be able to explore those options. however, the same rules that had inadvertently given me more freedom over my hair when i first started highschool were now standing in the way of my experiments with gender expression.

i silently resolved to grow my hair out until i was done with highschool. i planned to endure each labour that would present itself as necessary because it was all in service of the day i reclaimed what had long been conquered. i figured that two years was enough time to grow my hair to a level which would be a good jumping off point for my first set of braids. unfortunately, i was at an imprudent time in my life where many of my plans tended to fail. as i previously mentioned, my hair always seemed to stall at a certain length. today, i suspect the cause to be how poorly i kept it, but, living in that moment, i believed that it was completely normal to shed a moderately sized clump of hair everyday. it had always been that way so i assumed it to be the logical trade-off of having well-groomed hair. the pain an obvious companion. wincing as i tugged at my scalp each morning, i did not immediately notice when the clumps doubled in size in my final year. the year of the second of my great depressions for reasons unrelated to my hair. though the hair did not lighten circumstance. the pressures of that time had my hair slipping directly from my scalp at the slightest of touches. there was nothing else i could do but endure, as i had promised myself, so i watched myself shed over months. watched my hair thin out into sickly patches that could only be disguised by applying the same trauma that aggravated them; a few pulls through my dry hair every morning did the trick. the only thing that kept me rooted in that ritual was the distant sight of the end of the year, when i would leave school and its restrictions. this made it all the more delightful when to everyone’s surprise but mine, i failed the year and had to do the same thing all over again.

i did eventually finish the second time around and i was more than eager to finally conduct my experiments. i was desperate to feel like my hair belonged to me for probably the first time in my life so in my impatience, i indulged yet again in imprudence. it’s almost a joke the way i did things back then. i typed ‘salon’ into my phone, clicked on the first result, and was there before i even knew that i was. it was one of those salons that had tens of thousands of followers on instagram and made its business out of people who went because they had seen someone else who went, even though that person had also seen someone else who went. i’ve never once heard the name of that salon in a sentence that didn’t also include the word ‘instagram,’ and if you know anything about social media and or salons, that should be enough of a testament to the quality of their work. i got an installation of faux locs that day, units of which were already falling off my head from the moment i got back home. to this day, i have never had any kind of style done that my scalp hasn’t rejected.

issues aside, i felt feminine. i felt beautiful. all the things i told myself i would feel, i did. so, i continued to get my hair done every so often. but there’s no world in which my hair exists without demanding labour. i was initially prepared to look past the hours spent sat in one position as someone pulled at my hair. i was prepared to disregard the time and effort required of me to undo their labour in preparation for the next temporary fix. in the end, i got bored. i loved having my hair do things for me but i wasn’t at all interested in doing anything in return. i watched my college friends switch their hairstyles month in and month out. i thought of them as warriors, decorated with the scars of battle. seeing a woman with her hair freshly done inspired in me both a subtle pity and a deep respect. whenever i would ask them if they didn’t tire of the process, hoping to find company in my misery, i was always met with the same response: they didn’t like it either but they were at peace with the fact that it was just the way of things. that’s where my problem was; i have never been one to be at peace with the way of things. i was angry at my hair for refusing to submit to my will and angry at my friends for being able to endure as well as they did.

i endured alongside them, albeit not as quietly, up until the beginning of this year, on the night before i had to begin the new school year. i was up late, scrambling to undo the last of my braids in time for the next day. my sister had given me one of her wigs that i was planning to just throw on top of my hair after sorting it out as i had lost all interest in feeding it salon appointments. when i finished undoing my braids, i began to detangle the mess. not even three minutes into the act, i ran into my mother’s room without thinking and searched for that old clipper. surely enough, it was there, as if it had been waiting years for what felt like an inevitable moment. ‘how to shave your head’ is what i typed into my phone and 22 seconds later, i was already making contact. it wasn’t as difficult as i thought it would be. as my hair fell gradually from my head, i caught glimpses of my full face in the small mirror i was using as a guide. when all the hair had fallen away, i examined myself more closely. i had been running from an image of myself that others had constructed. staring back at me was not a handsome little boy who looked like his father, but a beautiful woman who should have done this way sooner.

now, my hair is growing. from within, out toward the sun. i am sweet and the store of its life. when the top of my hair meets the bottom of the sun, that’s when my job will be done. until then, i look toward my brightest phantasy: the day i put i before c.

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years passed and thoughts of the key retreated further into the rear of my mind as the forces of age pressed against them. however, my desperation to reach adulthood remained and grew alongside me. my motivations had also matured; i wanted self-determination and to never wash another dish. i declared as much, often and loudly, and the adults around me assured me that my bids would be satisfied upon joining their ranks. they spoke of patience and appreciating my current moment, warning that i would one day yearn for the ignorance i unknowingly despised. i didn’t believe them; to speak so insouciantly about matters as grave as the forward motion of time marred what little credibility they were afforded by me being in their care. just they wait, i thought to myself. soon my youth will be yesterday’s charge. just i wait.

now 21, i possess a key of my own. the key to my temporal phantasies of a world within our own, the entry to which cost me my youth. that world i did discover for it does exist—right here on this earth, right here in my mind. what was unlocked was the furthest reaches of my mind and with them, a growing sense of my mortality. i am suddenly keenly aware of myself as a human being and as i’ve always known, but now know in a way that lies front of mind, i shall die. tomorrow morning my stirs will be none as my usual struggle out of the unconscious does not play out. what rest will i know dead that alive, i failed even to acquaint myself with? i would like to rest but sometimes even to rest is a bit much. i meditate upon my life, the very quality itself, and wonder whether it would be better for me to die or to not have been at all.

the life i possess—the quality within, not the thing that is led—consistently fails to convince me of its purpose. the thing that is led was given a purpose by me and i spend each day doing my best to pull it in the favourable direction. however, a greater purpose unattached to the physical has yet to be discovered. if the case is such that there exists no grander plan, i’m not sure i can content myself with material pleasures much longer. my every waking moments dusken under the cover of my ruminative misery. my brightest hours appear tinged as i experience them from before the thin veneer of melancholy behind which they lie. it could simply be my depression or it could be that the light from above is transformed as it passes through the translucent spectre of my unbecoming. cast in uncertain figures, i cannot be sure what it is that i feel at any given moment. the despair, however, is unobscured as it exists where the light does not. the jagged edges of my illumination give form to the most macabre of my desires. a wanting to cease wanting.

the last time i felt joy untainted was when i was a child. of course children aren’t unaware; i understood that i was alive and that all living things come to an end but i had yet to internalise the concept. i’m not comforted by ideas of life after death. i do not believe in such things which only worsens my case. when i leave this realm, i will be sorry for it. as sorry as a dead woman can be.

to this day, i have little experience with death; i’m still young—and fortunate—enough that the only friends i’ve lost still walk the same streets as i do. there has been familial death but all it’s done is served to prove that family is nothing but a label until applied, then exercised; i wasn’t close with any of them so i remain relatively undisturbed.

what little experience i have with death i owe to my first ever pet. i’m told we had fish during my infancy that died during a move but, as i can neither recall the life nor the death of those earliest of years, i count the true reaping as arriving in the second grade. my mother and i lived in an apartment building that overlooked a small flower garden. after the walk home from school, i would pause to watch as the colours wove through flowers and fluttered haphazardly above the grass. they were always there in the afternoons but never in the mornings or at night. i wondered where they came from and where they went. i wondered if they existed solely to be witnessed by me. this fascination grew wings of its own and my thoughts took flight, steering me closer to the flowerbed each day. the building’s management was rigid in all its dealings, including how we were to interact (or not) with the garden. when the day arrived that i stood with my toes at its edge, all that flew through my mind were thoughts of touching the colour so that i could know it was real.

the next day, delirious from the heat of a weekday’s walk home, i shuffled along the path leading up to the building’s entrance when suddenly, i stopped halfway there. on either side of the brick-red walkway were small stretches of green interrupted my irregular bursts of colour, some still and some changing in position. i looked ahead at the sign next to the door. ‘no hawkers.’ far from that, i still paused to consider my behaviour; as far as my fear of authority led me, the sign functioned as a blanket declaration of surveillance and policing. no hawkers meant no loitering meant don’t touch the flowers meant don’t walk on the grass. i had no time to ponder residential law and the morality of what had yet to take me; colours were happening. a sharp turn to the right reintroduced to me the objects of my weeks long study. where did they come from? where did they go? an academic in my own right, i decided to conduct a more thorough study, born of equal parts curiosity and selfish desire; before me was life and beauty and i just had to control it.

the particulars have since been lost on me but i somehow managed to capture a colour. flapping in the dark between my clasped hands, a bond blew out the spaces i had left so as not to crush the life i held, and in my heated mind i recognised the bond as that between a girl and her insectile ward. i rushed up to the apartment and housed the orange in an old cotton bud container. when my mother arrived home from work i proudly showed off my captive and explained how it was that an insect came to be on display in our home. now that it wasn’t going to be coming or going, i felt satisfied that i had done what i set out to do and saw no logical continuation in the plot until my mother offered to bring back a flower on her walk home the next day. so life must be sustained.. of course.. food and drink for the tri-tone.

the next evening, its confines were decorated with a pink trumpet vine flower and a small pool of water to drink from. however, despite these accommodations, my observations revealed what could only have been declining health. although flight had ceased the instant confinement occurred, i still used its absence as an indicator of poor condition; this flightlessness felt different than the previous day’s. it was duller. the next day arrived and it got duller still: the next evening’s harbinger. a dead insect and a shrivelled flower were not the decorative piece they once were so i threw it all out. there it went. where had it come from?

exactly a decade later on a night of my own company, i found myself thinking of that life that once was, but at that point was nothing. how can nothing be? a god, the face of whom no man has set eyes upon; neither those of the flesh nor those of the mind. but it is. nothing, that is. there is nothing then there is life then there is nothing. life is nothing for from there it comes and to there it goes. eyeing my month’s bottle of citalopram i started on a calculation that i hoped would lead to my demise and after scouring forums and medical journals i had finally determined that i had far more pills than were necessary for me to wind up dead or hospitalised. i closed my eyes and gave a silent prayer to nothing in favour of death. i would kill myself if i were hospitalised trying to kill myself. i emptied the bottle and counted the pills, did the math. 40 by 30. i was sure to be dead. i thought about saying goodbye to my boyfriend but decided against it, not to spare him but because i refused to make my end more of a labour than it already was. for the same reason, i decided not to alert the friend whose house i was at while she was away. the dead have no concerns.

one after the other in rapid succession. i was surprised by my lack of hesitation but again, i saw no meal in expressing my live emotions. how brave i was to leave home in the dead of night. washing down the last of my last supper with the cup’s remains, a muted fear received me as i digested regret. already off the ledge, there was no use screaming on my way down. i spread out my limbs, bracing myself for impact and closed my eyes once more. the next morning i awoke with a severe headache and a soft, static buzz in my heart. alive, i knew had died; there is a way about myself that was no longer present, one i was only able to recognise due to its absence. even so, i was still whole as what was left of me contorted itself so that all my shape continued to be bathed in light, although more subdued in its lustre. i’ve since revoked my diagnosis and taken myself off of all prescriptions without consulting any medical professionals.

my ideations persist at present and although dimmer than before, so too persists the nowhere nothing from where the light shines down on me. i am not resigned. when i close my eyes, i am in focus; all light hits a single point in my being and i reflect it back at nothing at twice the speed. twice the intensity. for this resistance i am nothing like the butterfly but i know the day will come when i close my eyes to reflect and i am nothing, like the butterfly.

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a routine is fixed and so are traps. to school and to home and to school and to home to work on my school and then work on my home. the day was the same. the day was infinite. and when night fell, the day began. of this infinite day were only four hours; one during which i worked at school, one during which i worked at home, one during which i distracted myself from perpetuity, and one during which i sometimes slept. i felt i had very little time to distract myself let alone continue any creative work—work—so i retreated from my artistic pursuits so that i would have more time to distract myself, priming myself for the routine, readying myself to give to the kind of labour that never reimburses. it felt a great sacrifice at the time, this thing i was giving to work as i sunk into the routine but writing these words, i’m yet again made aware of the fretting emptiness resultant of neglecting self-expression. i’m not sure i had anything to be giving.

my barren mind and bare hands at the feet of their potluck ethic. i’m rude to not feel as they do and a fool to only be working half as hard. it’s absurd to me that most everyone around me has it. that something to give. whether with ease or much struggle, there exists a capability in everyone but me. i can’t be sure i have the capacity. each day they rise and fall, seemingly unaffected by the occurrences of the in-between; they work, laugh, play as if it were biological instinct. have you ever seen two animals in union and wondered how they knew to fit together? i rehearse their rituals then perform their natural states. only my act is another work to not give anything to. i fall behind and short of actuality in my strain for verisimilitude. they know i pretend or they smell i cannot and instinctually, the herd isolates the dissimilar. it is mine to catch up on what is not mine. it’s difficult to keep pace when you’re being left behind.

my mind still roams the places i’ve long since left in the physical. apart, my body lighter, faster but that is merely consequence; my mind too struggles to keep pace with my body as it chases the pack. i struggle to keep up with myself as i chase the pack. unfettered by community and the demands of my material self, my mind creates a new kind of experience for me. it’s tactile, leaving me always two places at once. i envision myself standing in a nondescript room. this room is the kitchen, i know this. i’m stripping away the flesh of my face with a blunted peeler. i angle my next stroke just so, such that as i pull my skin away i hollow my right eye. a viscous goop compacts itself as it slides through the thin slits of the peeler’s blade. all red, the rent mess. what i am is only blood when i am separate from myself. a field away, i feel the the way i ought to if this were to happen. i think i do, at least. what little thought the body alone can muster. it is nothing at all to whittle my mind into the pointed form of phantasy when reality draws blood just the same.

however, my bipartite existence is just as old as my adolescence. before then, we were all young enough that we had not yet left and the markings had not returned with us. to the untrained eye as well as ourselves, we were of the same cluster. when i was seven years old, my teacher from when i was in grade nought came to us with a margarine tub, holes poked into the lid. she removed the lid to reveal several worms inching around each other. all a pasty shade of grey, some plain and others with black stripes. ‘who wants silkworms?’ she asked, to a few tentatively raised hands. ‘you have to have a mulberry tree because they only eat mulberry leaves,’ she continued, as if to weed out those not pure of heart. my hand, previously unraised, shot up without my consent. i had remembered that my cousins who lived nearby had a mulberry tree in their backyard that we used to pick and eat from when i lived with them. to the few who were able to provide for their young, she asked that we speak to our parents before an exchange could be made so that i did and before i knew it, i too had my own margarine tub, holes poked into the lid.

no day resembled the next that month. knowing i had life at home i was responsible for transformed the way in which i interacted with the world. this is not to say we had much fun with each other; they provided the same benefits as a bowl of fish. i did enjoy watching them, however, in the evenings when i got back from school. the two more plump ones i was told were girls and the rest boys. the girls were unmarked and for years i held the presumption that all female silkworms were plain while the males were striped. a nostalgia imbued internet search revealed that a man could be unadorned and a woman marked. anyone can be anything. they would move about their confines with a sluggish fever, their thick rounds pulsating with sinful appetite. sin is inherited and there is only place their gluttony could have come from. all they ever did was eat so all i ever did was clean their excrement. i liked to examine their filth. oddly odourless.

and of course what composed their droppings was but a single thing; the leaves of the mulberry tree. i had felt the situation divine; a teacher from school with free worms to bestow, the only prerequisite, access to a mulberry tree. it was too specific a happening for me to ignore the attached message. those worms were my destiny, and i theirs. they were described to me as being siblings which i accepted as fact and still choose to. ‘orphans,’ i thought, without thinking the actual word. it was more spiritual, our connection. i knew immediately that i was to mother them and i took that responsibility—that work—more seriously than i took myself. as often as i could, i would make the trek to my cousins’ home where i was allowed to harvest the leaves of their mulberry tree before i would sit, chatting with everyone for a bit before i left as women responsible for the the lives of others do. at home, i would remove the punctured lid from the container and marvel at the life in my hands before cleaning their space and allowing them the day’s rations.

we continued like this for about two weeks before, one evening, i removed the top of their home to find that they had gone and in their place were the finest yellow pods. i did not know what happened but i felt it, they were changing. i tucked the box away so as to keep them safe in their new fragility. i did not know if they were coming back but i knew what they needed from me. at school, one of the other children who had adopted their own children told our teacher that they were sad because their worms had died. our teacher smiled widely as the event of their demise was relayed. ‘those are cocoons!’ she exclaimed. ‘they are turning into moths and when they come out, you can set them free!’ so that was where they went. they had ventured into themselves to find their final forms. i couldn’t wait to meet them. really meet them. two weeks later, they emerged wet and weakly. i was able to recognise that transformation had cost them their energy so i minded them until they were fully embodied. it was time to say goodbye. i walked out into the night and flung them up into the air. instead of using the advantage and taking flight, they plunked down to the earth. i worried that there was something wrong with them but i thought it best not to interfere. i now know that silk moths are purely domestic and their bodies are too heavy to take flight. i had thrown them out to their deaths but even worse i had judged them for not being able to do what isn’t in their nature.

more than a decade later, i had somewhat forgotten about these worms who changed me by changing themselves until, on my way in to school two months ago, i noticed a plant on the street corner. green, spotted red and black. there was no mistaking it; though i kept the same unmotivated pace, i walked towards it with an added purpose. a sluggish fever. towering over me was a mulberry tree, not unlike the one from my old home. i climbed onto the sandy bank on which it rested and, tall as i am, struggled as i reached to harvest once more. all red, the fruit in hand. with the index finger and thumb of my right hand, i pinched the plumpest of them and delighted as a bright streak of red ran down the length of my arm. ‘this looks exactly like blood,’ i thought to myself before squeezing the life out of more and lapping it up. i walked into school where i washed off the stains of my past and continued my day. i made a stop at the tree every day before and after school in the hope that i too would cocoon and emerge, not a beautiful butterfly but a plain moth in my own care, held in my captivity so that i may remove the ceiling of my confinement and set myself unto the light. so i will wait for night. and i, the fluorescence, will call home the homely.

now the twigs are bare. i would like to think the tree let its blood in preparation for its next harvest. the kaleidoscope has been eclipsed. we have all gone and come back. as i watch them take flight in the colours they are i stay in my box. i stay in my arms. i could not survive a day apart from myself.

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burdened with the weight of carrying god, i sought to relieve myself by asking to share the load with others. ‘if god made me, then who made god?’ i would ask people older than me, not knowing that they too had no answer. ‘satan is putting thoughts in your head’ and ‘don’t ask such questions’ often stood in for ‘i don’t know’ and ‘you don’t have to keep asking, i will hold him with you’. their replies were of no sense and went unlabelled as such because how little they knew was, to all including me, overshadowed by my juvenility and its accompanying assumption of how little i knew. i was naive to believe that i was naive for not believing them. i would only realise their ignorance later in my life which multiplied the burden—i had thought that we were all carrying god but in actuality only some of us do, the rest are carried by him. countless unanswered questions and misanthropic preachings did little to assuage my suspicions but i so desperately wanted to feel that ease again, to rest in the palm of an explained existence and find power in doing so. so i sat on the edge of my bed nightly giving verbal from to my desire. had i scared god into silence? no matter. he had heard me.

there was a day in my childhood, in this period of performed spirituality, during which i sliced my thumb while i was cutting an apple in the kitchen. frozen, i flowed outside myself and saturated the flesh of the fruit. when both my thumb and the apple were swollen with red, i wiped myself away and discarded the parts of the apple that were also me. i took in the rest and went about my day. later, i was shocked to find that when i looked down at my thumb, the cut had not remained. in it’s place, a red stain. the blood of jesus. it was everything they told me was possible; there i was—child, anno domini. a contemporary miracle in the quiet afternoon of an african suburb.

that was the first example of his favour in my life; although also not asked for, he had finally given me something that i wanted so i saw myself in his debt in the way they taught us to be at sunday school. the way that i was supposed to have been seeing myself my entire life. unworthy, incapable me.. the only way i knew how to repay him was evangelical. i ran to my mother with the word of my divine healing. she didn’t seem as excited as i thought a person hearing about a miracle would be but she expressed a kind of surprised delight nonetheless. satisfied in my chosenness, i went back to the remainder of my day only to later look down at my thumb in the same careless fashion as i had before and find the red peeling away from the surface of my skin. i helped it along, anxious to witness his work with my own eyes. there, where the stain had been, was a line across my thumb. as i pressed down on it, the mild pain confirmed what i was thinking. nothing had happened, the blood i shed had only concealed the wound, rendering me delirious in the process. i was chosen, but to suffer and not recover from it. that was the furthest i’ve felt from god. i knew then that my spirit would not be moved by anything other than my own effort.

magic. is a force wielded by man to affect her and her environment. one needs not pledge one’s fealty to a higher power but simply move one’s hands about oneself, incanting ‘magic words’. there was a show, at the time, that would play on one of the government funded channels in which a magician would perform various tricks then reveal the nature of their illusions. i was not disappointed to learn that magic was an illusion, god had told me that himself. instead, i was curious; i wondered if i could learn to warp reality just like the mage in the television. i told my sister my plan and we were off. we watched the show as it played for a few days until, finally, we came across something we were sure we would be able to perform with what resources we had at home. necromancy.

in the day’s episode, the mage had seemingly brought a dead fly back to life by resting it in the palm of his hand. nothing in this world being real, he proceeded to show us how he had placed the fly in a freezer to trick it into hibernation (how long do flies live that they can afford the luxury of temperature induced slumber?) before warming his hands by rubbing them together and laying the fly on one of his palms. upon warming, the fly rose and flew off. we were immediately captivated and set out to capture a fly of our own which proved just as difficult as we imagined it would have been. we weren’t sure how long to leave it in there for as he neglected to include that detail in his breakdown—a magician never reveals his tricks i suppose. we decided on an hour and when the time had arrived, we rubbed our hands together and took turns attempting the revival. nothing. i’m not sure how the logic finally caught up to us but we realised that the fly was dead. not in the way that rises later. i was disappointed but not despairingly so; my spirit had already been broken. like countless others before me, i had killed in the name of magic’s illusion. i felt powerless. did all spirit feed on idea or was there something more manifest that could serve as nourishment?

magick. is a force wielded by man to affect her and her environment. one needs not pledge one’s fealty to a higher power but simply move one’s hands about oneself, incanting ‘magick words’. witchcraft had always been presented to me as the work of satan, practiced only by his idolaters. i was unsure of the truth in that rhetoric as i had been exposed to plenty of witches, good and bad, in books, films and television shows. it seemed to me that witches were simply the rest of us but with power. the same power i’d spent my life yearning for.

in the eight grade, i reckoned with the concept of witch. our school musical called for performers from other schools. amongst them was a witch. she was a queer, vegan, online activist and was very vocal about her new age beliefs. i knew she was a witch before i had even been acquainted with her which i assume was usual for her. intrigued, i became conversational with her. i learned that she considered herself an ‘eclectic’ wiccan—this is to say she did what she wanted, when she wanted, how she wanted. she spoke of the fact that anyone could possess the power she did by simply choosing to do so. i had heard enough; i took to the internet to begin my studies of the occult. after a day or two of research, i had come to the educated conclusion that i too would be a witch. as it turned out, there were far more gods than one and many were in the business of actually rewarding you for your servicing them. i picked them out according to what i could gain from them and set about reciting poems that i found, backdropped by pictures of flowers and semiprecious stones, on pinterest, believing that the chants granted me daily safe passage to and from school as well bestowed upon me a cosmic luck which i had been missing up until that point. in retrospect, it is clear to me that neither me nor my environment were altered. at the time, the belief was enough.

later that year was the release of the first season of ‘the chilling adventures of sabrina’, a live action variant of the several animated iterations of the life of teenaged witch, sabrina spellman. i felt that the show was arriving specifically for me; it could not have been coincidence. just as soon as i had become both a teenager and a witch was the show coming out. it was not anything the animations had primed us for; blood rituals and depictions of satan himself. i devoured every minute and took it to be my new reference. ‘if only satan were real,’ i remember thinking.

not even six months later came the second season and with it, the peak of both sabrina’s and my witchy activities. at a midnight hour, under the tent of my bed cover, i watched as sabrina was made to wear a crown of thorns and then killed only to resurrect herself. ‘i am the dark lord’s sword,’ she preached to her assailants. i was so moved by that display of power that i took a screenshot of her bloodied face and updated my status. ‘we stan a devil worshipping queen’ i believe were my exact words.

in the morning, my mother shook me out of my sleep and snatched my phone from my hands. despite having blocked her from viewing my updates, she had somehow seen my ‘demonic’ post. i suspected she had changed that setting without my knowledge during one of her routine phone checks. she raved warnings against practicing satanism and consuming such media which she explained was a result of the devil’s direct influence on the human population. i didn’t consider myself a devil worshipper so her words did little but frustrate me. i stood burning to let her know that atheistic satanists were probably some of the nicest people one could meet and were different from devil worshippers who, again, i took no issue with. deeming me unfit to handle the powers of a cellular device, she confiscated my phone for a few weeks during which she went through it and discovered the depth of my relationship with the dark arts. after enduring an intervention, my churchgoing was brought out of its infrequency and my digital activities began to be more closely monitored. i saw that there would be no fruit in defending my position so i laid down the broomstick for a few years.

however, they do say that witchcraft is a calling. the need for that command of my reality was only ignored until i had finally achieved spiritual emancipation. i had decided to fight for some of my self-determination, a battle that dragged for so long that when i had finally emerged victorious i had no interest in pursuing the very thing i was fighting for. still wanting to exercise my newfound freedom, i halfheartedly engaged with candles, crystals and even more poems. this time, the freedom is what kept me going as the belief had since waned. it went on like this until my final year of highschool when i found myself in a depression so severe i began to believe in the otherworldly.

we were in the midst of an examination season and i was spending the weekend at a friend’s place. as a result of our shared sickness, neither of us were determined to study but we were both feeling slightly supernatural. we had absolutely nothing to lose but our minds so we decided to perform a ritual we had found online that was promised to swiftly deliver an extramundane focusing that would inhabit our psyches, spurring us into motion in unnatural ways. we lit a candle to begin then spoke favour into a bowl of water and sprinkled it in a circle around the living room as we appealed to the four elements. to the north, we asked of earth unlocked potential. to the east, we asked of air intelligence. to the west, we asked of water stillness of the mind. to the south, we asked of fire strength of will. we stood in the circle’s centre and and began our incantation before blowing out the candle. almost immediately, an omnidirectional wave of ease washed over me so that my limbs were heavy and my mind too sedated to protest. i looked over to my friend and was able to recognise that they were under the same effect. psychic focus. we had moved our hands about oursleves and spoke magick words and in doing so, manipulated the fabric of the universe, temporarily altering our positions within it. my coolness notwithstanding, i hurriedly made my way to the table where my books were laid out waiting. although i felt capable, i realised as i sat down that studying was the last thing i wanted to do. we both got up and giggled knowing exactly what the other was feeling then retired to bed. i have not since attempted anything similar but i know now that magick is real.

in that moment it felt unaccountable but in the moments since, i’ve thought long about the possibility that we were feeling things because we wanted to feel things. i no longer care to find out; what difference would it have made if the effect had, in fact, been a placebo? it would not dispute the existence of magick. reality is only as real as perception; if i believe in power, and i believe that i have been transformed by its effects, then power is real. it is in this way that magick is real. it is in this way that my soul is real. they are only real because i believe them to be, so i am finished slaving after my soul’s hunger. magick is a manmade intangibility and so is the spirit, but i am material. i cannot follow that which came after me. so tell me i am soulless, the pressure will be just the same. what is in will push out. it is a miracle that i’ve arrived at such a conclusion given my background and for that i am grateful. it is a blessing. the mortal kind. the only kind

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i oftentimes feel like a wild animal captured
clawing at the boundaries of my confinement
let me out
while everyone looks on in sheer joy and amusement
in horror. in disgust. in awe. in confusion
it’s a novel sight, obfuscated view of a woman behind a man’s bars
you’ve never seen her full figure. the man will not let you

the journey to my woman, on the face of it, has been six years long but passive introspection has made it known that my experience tells a lifelong story. when i briefly saw a psychologist in the tenth grade, she made it very clear that she thought that i felt myself a woman because i was raised by them. i remember scoffing at my luck; what, other than that, was i expecting from a freshly graduated psychologist fulfilling her community service requirements at a government funded hospital? even at that age, with the difference in our qualifications, i knew there were some things a therapist just shouldn’t say to their client.. patient? was i ill and she right? i thought long about what subconscious effects my village had had on me and i never saw that psychologist again.

during my formative years, i had no concept of gender, nor of sexuality; i just knew that some people were called men and others women. that some people were attracted to men and others women. like many others, i liked men. i saw no issue with my being until i was told to. my first genuine encounter with my identity was when i got called a localised homophobic slur by a group of boys when i was in the fourth grade. it baffled me how concerned people were with the trivia of attractions and presentations. as far as i was concerned, i had not been called a slur but was merely the subject of their ignorant ire.

both before and after my sexual enlightenment, i had markers which i long ascribed to homosexuality only to later realise that they were indicators of my latent womanhood. there were the traditional clichés—i was distressed in everyday play and videogames unless i was operating as a woman or girl, i got into people’s shoes and make-up when left alone, and again, the fact that i liked men. and then were the more individual of experiences. i recall a night during which my mother and aunties had gone to church and left me, age seven, to the night. and their wardrobes. in my mother’s room, nestled amongst the cosmetics, was a pack of menstrual pads promising—like the various pigments and perfumes—to take me closer to the version of myself that laid expressed in my cognitions but my physicality denied. they called out to me in no specific way; i didn’t know what they were but they resembled diapers and i knew how to work those. once fitted i felt a familiar comfort from under. i’d like to attribute it to my then newfound confirmation of self but the more probable reasoning is that i was wearing what was, in essence, a blanket for my down below. the warmth permeated the barrier of my skin and oscillated along the lengths of my veins and arteries to occupy the rest of my body. just as soon as i had put them on was i in her bed. baby woman asleep in the cot of remnant mother. when i awoke the next morning, it was to a stern talking to and an empty bottom. i did not care, i went to bed a woman.

today, my identity is more easily shaken when challenged. i believe that’s largely due to my growing understanding of it. what once struck me as trifle, i know now, is the fulcrum about which i teeter on the opposite end of the perception of me. i know i am, i say i am; intangible aspects of my self defined through intangible concepts in our shared mindspace. i’m self-constructed under social constructs. both fragile. both changing. how can i be so sure? my foundation has begun to mirror ours and it lacks integrity. this wise, i reason the only way to fortify is to recruit the labour of others. tell me what i say i am and i might believe myself.

many would rather not. instead, insults from my youth have aged alongside me. come into themselves, pejorated and fully bodied. i know exactly why people concern themselves with the issues of attractions and presentations and i’m disturbed by their reasonings. the words lick differently than i’m told they can; i don’t care in a way but i know that i should and i most probably do. the pain lies in my attempts at rationalising this dissonance. it also shows up, unspoken for, in words denied. i’m as easily upset by a refusal to reaffirm my assertions of self as i am by their purposeful mockery. if my illness is born of the words i call myself and the words others call me, logic should prove that words are too the remedy. words of affirmation are my ‘love language’ and i love men so to feel they love me back, i need their words to validate my existence rather than dismiss me. however, i’ve come to realise that, unbeknownst to either of us, they were in fact validating me with their dismissal.

because of how concerned people are with presentations, once i started concerning myself with my own presentation, people began to treat me differently. as i became more intentional with how i came across to others, so did others with the way they came across to me. men, most notably. if you asked any other woman how she would feel about being followed by a braying group of men, yelling out to her the nature of her physique as she navigated the centre of the city in the late evening, she would probably give to you the same reaction she would have in that scenario simply for asking her such a thing. whatever reaction you’re picturing is the same i had the first time this happened. subsequently, however, i felt a strange validation in their harassment. they have to have meant well. after all, across locations and times, they all somehow knew me by my name, slender.

several such attitudes have had the same effect on me; a phenomenon i like to call ‘gender affirming misogyny’. not all cases are as severe as the town-trailing; some are less pronounced but still manage to perform just as well as their more marked counterparts. i’m still unsure how to feel about the last holiday season i spent with family; all the aunts, uncles, and cousins had split themselves without discussion into kitchen-minders and disciples of the grill. i find it redundant to mention by which quality this division was made. needless to say, i was without any understanding of my place in their binary. being the pious crowd they are, i thought it safest not to challenge their sexual framework.

acquiescing to nothing at all, i made my way to the men’s convention in the backyard and was met with a cartoonishly rude welcome. the grill masters maintained focus on the braai stand while their acolytes, my agemates, paused in synchronicity, communicating telepathically before finally casting their attention upon me. the general sentiment was confusion about my presence and a strong—but poorly disguised in politeness’ name—desire for me to join the women in the kitchen. it’s where i felt i belonged but i don’t like to be told what to do. this time, acquiescing to their instruction, i took my rightful place; cooked, scrubbed, and served, wet off the spirits of their command rather than the domesticity itself. i drank myself mad the rest of my stay, keeping sweet when they spoke to me as if i had somehow lost all my sense since last i saw them and taking delightful offense at their inclinations to discourage me from lifting fairly weighted objects. they were horrible but illuminating holidays.

although i’m only now beginning to recognise these feelings within myself, they have always been present. i had my first and only love at seventeen; he was a year older than me and the kind of man that i, today, would give no portion of my mind. then, i gave him all of it and more i didn’t have. there was a way about his speech that addicted me to his language; he told me everything i wanted to hear, just enough to keep me forgetting the times when his words took a different tone. ‘bitch’ was a recurring favourite. the only men that had ever called me that were gay and meant it with the same mindless affection my then boyfriend had when he sometimes called me ‘babe’. his ‘bitch’ was pointed and served the purpose of keeping me in cycle; ‘bitch’ for his pleasure and ‘babe’ for mine when my weariness began to present itself. the freedom center for addiction treatment’s website says ‘combining uppers and downers will pull your body in all directions and your heart may not be able to cope.’ to summarise our relationship, all directions i did go, and cope my heart did not. after a year of off and on, when i received what must have been my fourth break-up text from him, i did not reply. i took this final heartbreak as a lesson in love, the knowledge from which i still carry.

by the time i had my second boyfriend, i had admitted to myself that i was addicted to words and i was in no rush to sicken myself in exchange for the validation they afforded me. again i found myself with the kind of character i would shun today but this time around, i was aware of my situation. although i told him as much on a drunken night, i did not love him, which perhaps was the reason i was able to find him so intolerable. he struggled to negotiate the plains of my heart’s remains with his words, diluting the efficacy of the high-low stratagem with two bitches to his one babe. there would have been more than two had i not ended our relationship via text after less than two weeks. warning him after the first utterance, i had lost all patience come the second. i was free. of that man and my addiction.

i’ve aged just a year in body since then but my mind has lived more than my own life. now i’m disquieted by just the thought of a man devaluing me with his actions and, even worse, his words. i still look outside myself for confirmation despite being more sure but it’s in a different way; the same way i expect a passing stranger to greet me back. basics. not certified to do so, i have decided that i am not ill. my symptoms are merely differences.. jagged. misshapen. i am ferrous. forged from the hots of my rumination; i am what i made, they are what they were given

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the first essay i ever wrote was two lines long. ‘my holidays’. eight years old, words were what i read in roald dahl books and what usually passed the lips when they parted. we had come back from our mid-year break and our teacher tasked us all with writing about how we had spent our holidays. i didn’t think to groan at the call for labour or delight in believing we were fortunate to be given an opportunity to ‘express’ ourselves. i had no concept of language nor of literature; again, i read plenty of books and took instruction from many an adult but words remained meaningless in my perception of them. electromagnetic, they pervaded the everyday without a second thought. third graders rarely question the source of images on a television or ponder the primality of wifi; such things have always existed, they need not ever be explained or discussed even with a child.

i was not interested in recounting the mundanities of, in a literal sense, the day before. although i viewed the activity as fruitless, i complied. i wrote about the sleepover, i wrote about the foods i ate, and i wrote about just how much fun i had as a child away from school. upon completion, i felt no different. my teacher marked her approval with a red tick and a written message; something about ‘sounds fun!’ or was it ‘superb!!!’? i didn’t know it then but i know now that that is when the festering began.

that essay was but the beginning of another decade of forced writings and other creative assignments crossing various media. to my apathy, creativity was ingrained in the curriculum all the way to the end of high school along with all the other disciplines. i knew my hypotenuse and i knew my muse. on tougher days, they were the same. why do they allow us this working reprieve from mathematics and other sciences? finding an answer to my question didn’t concern me until i finished high school and creativity was no longer being asked of me.

last year i sat at home on my bed twiddling my thumbs as i waited to start film school this year. i was in stasis, school would only begin the next year—a place where i would have creativity delegated to me as a reward for my choice in academy. there was no external pressure to do anything of the sort and so i sat on my hands for twelve months assuming i would, in miracle, experience a turn of will on the first day there. i felt time rend the skin of months from my body with an increasing awareness; the closer i got to starting school, the more sick i felt from nothing in particular. what i initially explained away as back-to-school angst made itself known as a festering upon some introspection. that festering. nothing material was pushing me to create but something that permeated my being was. in pushing out. out pushing in. stretch. twist. make! say! do! they forced an artist into me and watered her for years. now unfed, she sought to ruin my life with her discontent.

it was late in the year when i met myself so i only had about two months to kick myself for ten. why hadn’t i recognised myself sooner? quintessentially me, i spent a year at home busying myself with nothing and laid awake each night wondering why i felt so unfulfilled. cursing circumstance, family, old friends, old lovers, strangers—anyone but myself—for the ‘fact’ that i had no time and no resources. one of the mornings after one of those nights, i awoke resolved to change at least one thing in my thought spiral so i began to post videos of no relation to my dilemma at the time. comedic trifle that got me on the screens of hundreds of thousands. it felt good for a time until a certain type of comment rose to prevalence. ‘is this poetry?’, ‘please write a book!’, ‘your words are everything.’ the validation lifted my spirits but their implication brought me back down just as quickly. strangers the world over recognising me through glass in the span of 15 seconds when i had spent a lifetime growing, hidden under the canopy of my flesh. it pained sweetly, like a candied blade slicing the edges of my tongue. i could taste the sugared red. subsequent videos attracted similar praise and encouragement in greater volume as i began to speak my word in blood. still, she clawed outwardly.

i had done everything i thought she wanted but i could still feel her hunger parallel to my own. again, i folded my head inwards with my eyes open and saw nothing but the tissue time no longer guarded. i did hear, however, a voice. i’m unsure who of us it belonged to but it spoke to me of my apprehensions and fear of being perceived. they’d recognised her without ever having seen her, i was afraid of the things they’d hear when i fixed my mouth to speak. i would say ‘one’, she would say ‘two’, and through their ears would ring ‘three’. i thought about what the point might be in saying anything at all if it wasn’t what they wanted to hear. i thought it better to commune with myself than publicly straddle the dichotomy and so i withdrew once more.

i am 20 years of age. the only world i have ever known is the one i was born into. the one in which i, and a considerably sized number of those who know of it, were socialised into conceiving of art as commodity before as spectacle, expression of self, information, or politics. art is made. product. art is stolen, art is sold, art is bought, art is compared, art is taught, art is shared, art is destroyed. art is made. product. it’s the way earth turns on its axis and the way i pay a small monthly fee for music and television; i am a student after all. it makes perfect sense the frequency of questions like ‘how can my art appeal to the greatest number of people while making the greatest profit?’. i’m asking.

i figure i should just say what i want to say regardless of who’s listening—if anyone. the rot is palpable and it will destroy me. i’ve practiced self-expression before; what i now realise were subconscious attempts at appeasing my superimposed presence. sketches in schoolbooks, scribblings in more schoolbooks (those that lived in my room even when i was supposed to be doing work in them. at school). interesting to see what my mind looked like and surprisingly unmoving to read what i had to say to myself. was that it? abstract doodles and personal ramblings? i did feel expressed though she hungered in no new ways. i stopped drawing because i was bad at it and i stopped journalling because it felt to me like schoolwork in addition to the actual schoolwork i seldom did. i was also plagued by the recurring vision of my mother discovering my entries and arming herself with them, ensuring her victory on the psychic battleground. the trouble of creation seemed to me to far outweigh its supposed benefits, which in my case were none.

so i took to the internet for solace. i watched the lives of others so contented with their states of being. they wore clothes, ate food, spent time with each other, spent time alone, entertained hobbies and occupied schools and workplaces. none of them spoke of autophagy. i wondered if she’d eat me for not being able to feed her the way she was used to. as a result of my fear, there are now currently several accounts on various platforms where i used to post jokes, poems and again, personal ramblings. essentially what i’d been doing in solitude except this time, i wasn’t the only member of my audience. this continued for months without question until i naturally tired of the work itself and quit, as i’m wont to. unencumbered by creative labour, i once more had the mental capacity to maintain the existence of a second instance within myself. i had almost forgotten how hungry i was. almost. what was it about the way i ran several instagram accounts and two blogs that pleased her in the same way it did for me to submit an essay to the perusal of any of the various language teachers i’ve had throughout my schooling?

spectation.

it didn’t just need letting out; it needed witnessing. i saw that i was battling again with the notion that art doesn’t have to be shared. proponents of the cause preach that one can find, should find, satisfaction in subjecting oneself to one’s own expression. it is in this way, they argue, that everyone who fancies themselves as such can rest nights knowing that they’re entitled to the label of ‘artist’. words that would have comforted me had they not been said with a malice that implies art created specifically to be shared is of zero merit. perhaps those are my own anxieties projected onto others’ constructions of art as a concept. i held a quiet shame in knowing my art best fulfilled me when shared. ‘i must love the attention,’ i thought. i did. i do. i also love to be told how someone revisits a previous work of mine; something i’ve cast out—let go—stays moored at the shore of me when someone takes refuge in it. i love to hear about how i’ve put words to a feeling a stranger tells me we have in common. i love when someone admits to having no relation to my art yet makes sure to let me know they appreciate the simple fact that i’ve shared such a part of myself. they tell me how ‘moved’ they are. i say nothing. still. they’ve moved me more than they know.

my neuroses aside, i believe art to be a language of its own and its varied mediums dialects. but unlike the languages we speak and sign, its amorphousness is how we’re able to impress upon each other concepts more abstracted than those language describes as abstract. art is an infestation of consciousness. i’m trying to get you to perceive the world as i do. unbound by the structure and convention that govern everyday communication, we’re able to say so much more to each other. it is for this reason i find writing as an artistic medium so alluring; i appeal to linguistic laws using words that exist in both our minds as meaning the same thing while simultaneously communicating to you the very essence of my being in a way only i will ever truly understand but that you can decipher within the frameworks of your own being, resulting in your own understanding of how i’ve put myself forward. the disparity between the me i express and the me you decode can be felt by us both; we’re not sure what lies in the gap but just know that it is there. like that, i have given myself unto you in a way you could plainly describe as indescribable or begin anew the process of trying to express a part of yourself in the hope that i understand.

now, i’ve been in film school for half a year and my mid-year break is over. i started the break at a friend’s place where we had an iteration of the same conversation we had on december 31 last year. a conversation we’ve been remixing almost daily ever since. my life is moving in a way that pleases those around me. i’m doing exceptionally well at school and not minding anything else but school. my results look good on paper but i’m not satisfied with my progress. i’m filled with it all yet do nothing with it. fully formed and hollow. like the cheap dolls we used to get from china plaza sat amongst the barbies for tea as we made them lead fuller lives than the one i currently do. we didn’t just say we would be doing good. i said i would live the life i know i ‘should’ be living. i thought i knew what that meant then. i definitely do now.

i am zkiaba. i am a writer. i am a filmmaker. i am an artist. i am a promise i’ve made to myself and broken more times than will do me well to count.

the past four weeks i had a sleepover at my friend’s place, made yummy food, and watched movies. so were my holidays.

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