My eyes burn, the heat of something intensifying with every slow and painful shutter.
It's nighttime and I'm outside.
Is everyone really sicker in the Daytime?
Are we all safer humans on the Inside?
The Daytime when shadows are temporary. The Daytime when nothing hurts. We are ailing in our own day. Our own time, our endemic antibiotic daily schedules.
To be sick, indisposed and so medicated when there are worse things,
Makes us terrifyingly worse than those things.
Basking the suns rays does not maketh the man.
Sensitivity to the nights darkness does.
_______
The month is June, the year is 2017 and it has been one of knifelike change. The air I breathe does not warm my lungs instead it pierces them. The humidity is gone, the safe sweat of routine is gone. The clammy calmness I felt for many years prior to this night of June is gone. Replaced with a startling freeze, the kind that eventually passes the threshold of pain to become numbingly present. Accepted, a blanket of reality heavy enough to ascertain that you'e alive. To fight for breath and hold on before the exhale. At this moment I've come to realise it's not the air I'm holding onto but the repossessed carbon dioxide that I don't recognise as my own.
____
Her name is Satisfied. Picking me up on the side of the road in the night so I can prolong my Daytime. The car is actually warmer than the house. Perhaps it was the few steps I took from the house to the car that reminded me again I am not home. We're strangers of the worst kind. You see this when you buy something at a shop, order a meal, avoid a beggar, drive on a busy road and look at lights on in houses you pass. All within reach but other worldly.
The choice to stay distant and to stay a simple customer overwhelms me to tears. She's a single mother of two, Zimbabwean and working two jobs. One of the first things she tells me is that when you are well you keep going. You push a little harder that day and get as much done as you can because tomorrow is not promised. She recently lost her sister to TB. We then get into a conversation that I would have with a best friend. The Uber trip is through dark, winding and narrow roads. Turning bright lights on every now and again to navigate the horizon, we're in this together. But she is driving. My life in her hands. Same hands that make your meal, that full your petrol tank, that give you a receipt. I want to hold all those hands. Instead I got her number in the promise I will give her my hands at the salon she works at in the Daytime. Bright lights are off during the day and we're not in it together most of the time. I saved the number as Sati, hoping that I don't forget this after I've said goodbye, wished her well and ordered my cocktail 5 minutes later.
__________
It all falls down. Eventually the walls are chipped and you look at your nails broken and bleeding. You've been the one hacking at the wall. There's dust in your mouth of old promises, loves and losses. Taking one step out of the rubble, that which was caged chaos, you look up. Dust off the remnants and see what you're made of and for.
Vast and green, made to move better from. It's the same field that was always on the other side but it's vibrantly different. There is not a particular person to meet you there, only yourself amongst everybody else. They too have nails broken and bleeding. The field is life and while it seems safer on the inside of the walls it's a lie. The safeness is inherently inside the people on the field.
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