Picking up pieces - a postscript
Storms, boxes, belongings, and the paintings we see along the way
We were all children, once. We remember when our lives were pure need and adage, our infant loneliness tasting of quinine, and the brown noise of knowing nothing at all. We were told things over and again until the language of them as well their burdens were manifest. We would hear phrases like “be nice,” “watch out,” “pick up after yourself,” “go to your room,” and, a sibling-rivalry special; “it takes two to tango.” Regardless of the actual facts and circumstances you held to like a 9-year-old on trial, you knew, once you heard this expression, you were both well and truly cooked.
It’s one thing to be sent to your room in a house still ruled by (at least one of) your parents and tidy your space, returning each item to where you’ve decided it belongs in the small space you call yours. Books: on the blue and white shelf your mom put into the wall. Speed and Sound magazines of a young tomboy: back into the wicker ‘magazine basket’ beside your table by the window that, through steel bars, looks upon the Indian Ocean. It is there too that its briny roaring is let in each night.
Stationery, toys, sweet wrappers, all put where they should go, your bed straightened somewhat, and your floor swept. A set of processes you learned and did not really ever think would end. You’re not quite sure why, but you sometimes did think you would stay 12 forever. You didn’t, of course, and there are things to do now you’ve never had to before, that you’ve never been told to do until they were routinized and part of everyday life.
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Now you’re dividing belongings, putting them in boxes for some moving guy. You’re not putting things back, because there is no “back” for them to go. You realise that all this miscellanea is the soul of a house, that it echoes a time when it was a home, and that this process is ripping all of that roughly in half. I don’t remember any little phrases from childhood that could have prepared me for this. Closest I got was “Your dad is not a bad guy; he still loves you very much. He just won’t be living with us anymore.”
I get it. These are the things you say when no-one is left to rule your life; not a parent, guardian, teacher, husband. It’s just you, the things you choose to say, and how you go about cleaning the mess. You get away from it, go to the museum with friends, dance and drink and smoke and ingest so the spinning in your head increases until it matches the world changing around you.
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Earlier this month, on the 3rd of June, a tornado ripped through my hometown, bearing down on oThongathi from the ocean and returning to the water once its power over us was well proven. It narrowly missed my childhood home where my mother still lives. Tornadoes were not, in the past, a common occurrence for us on the North Coast to think about, although steadily that is changing. Still, South Africans are generally not raised with floods and other assorted acts of god woven into our ways of life, so when my mom called me after the storm, I was moved by the scene she described: An overcast day of rubble, everything wet and still, the quiet thrum of people putting things back together “as if it’s just totally normal.”
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A crisis may not really be normal, but to clean it all up and continue living is indelibly human. For all that we do to order our lives and emotions, we are each of us little forces of nature, and both together and alone are capable of catastrophe and romance in equal severity. This, too, is okay.
I did not expect one day to experience a catastrophe of my own to pick up after, to have to exchange lists detailing which rubble belongs to whom. I did not expect to publish a messy, disorganised substack post about it on the same day a tornado hit my hometown. Nor did I expect to have to unbundle the co-collected sticks of a life and look over them, realising, once untied, they become one part document, one part biopsy. From the outside, I think, some see the storm, some see the rubble, while I, from here, can only see my two hands, picking up after myself.
I never know quite how to put the evocation your work creates into words, and it pains me that I can't, but as always, you have created something beautiful, even amongst the tragedy of it all. This one feels like candlelight and the taste of aftermath. Incredible work as always, dear Sarah