Maybe I don't love this place.
Maybe it is that I do not love this place. Maybe it really reminds me of how unhappy I have always been in Guyana. The memory at first brought much melancholy. I took that melancholy like a heavy coat with me to London like a faithful travel companion of my childhood and it seems ever after.
All the familiar the smells, the sounds of music is wafting in from somewhere else all of this takes me somewhere, where I cannot say just deep inside with voices and darkness. Familiar and strange but not depriving me of my comfort even. Yes the smells of garlic burning, rice boiling, sorrell and nutmeg, cinnamon and clove. These are the smells of my childhood but really smells of caribbean culture and cooking. The music anything from soca calypso reggae dancehall anything even rock music weaved in.
And the greenery not lush just green sometimes ravished by the sun and bad soil. Mosquitos relentless. And water ever present ever near like divine guard promising food and protection, tourists and infections. The wind up Here is ever present cooling, soothing, singing songs of lost lives and generations long gone only their song left on the wind and nights haunting whistles on the tops of trees blinded bats missing their radared call and crashing unwontedly on concrete.
What brings me back here? Love and hate bathes in ugly and pretty. Beautiful and ugly people beautiful and ugly things. I would rather languish here than any place in the world. For it was here I ran to broken and crushed and cradled in that crater with music pulsating in over the sunrise was where I found her, that stronger being who became my good friend.
The sun shines down shy at first not strong and harsh but sweetly shy warming. Is this my Tara my strengthening place I retreat to and gain strength? Jah knows. I have said if it I feel close to God here is it so or am I well advanced in my delusions I retire here I retire here I surrender here.
What all do we toil for and end up with no control over even the hour in the day. We strive cutting down as we proceed only to be labelled lovers of money, What next I sit here bathed in blood deluged in clots losing life gaining life, ebbing to and fro are great pains great wars fought inside and out. What is real what is imagined what is?
The year in review, not one minute worth reliving. It began it bursting pipes amidst murduring suicide and continued in it bitter painful axis all the way to the end. Just when j had a moment of reprive San Antonio. I sit unwontedly on a course wooden homemade bench fanning off ants mosquitoes and bees, in the distance music wafts in from those happy souls who sing in and ring in the new year. I envy their joy, I now older and cautious not young and reckless like they, life having written it's ugly messages on my book of life, my pages marred with ugly stains and black tears.
Yes I grind my teeth at their joy when I am miserable. My eyes roam the horizon in search of one redeeming object to remove me from this hopelessness. Finding none I look within and pray, and by divine origin a steady voice says in just a little while longer....
Comments