Requiem for J

This is the year that I think will force the changes.

J, the friend we all worried about, who was often fixture in our homes and lives, the dependable listener, the inadvertent matchmaker, the soothing pick-me-up who never it seems was able to cheer her self up.

I wonder about you now. I know you have gone to a better place, and are now free of all those ghouls that haunted you on this earth. I catch myself wondering still, two days later, about the depths to which those demons chased you and caused you pain and fear. You withdrew from us, I think, in the last year. I sensed it and I told Swee'pea that you were shutting your self in.

Should I have knocked harder on your door? I think not. I think somehow this time you wanted to be left alone, to interact with the world at arm's length. To deal with humanity in smaller doses, in the dead of night, by slipping them tiny signs on Facebook for them to discover when they woke up in the morning.

I think you were slowly letting us go, my friend. Maybe subconsciously, it was your way of helping us stand on our own two feet without you around to fall back on.

In the end, your passing accomplished the finest moments of your best ability. People whom you love and were afraid to face, who had fallen out with you because of disappointment or frustration, who had not spoken to one another in a while, who had distanced themselves from each other on purpose or by circumstance, all came together.

You became the balm once more, that soothed the old wounds.

I know I will still miss you and shed tears. Part of me almost expects you to re-appear once more.

I love you, J. We all do. You saw the chapel. It was the biggest party of your life. I hope you liked it.

I also like your new home. I hope you do too. It's that pretty place you always imagined, with a serene view and a peaceful breeze. We piled all the flowers on top before we left. It was a pretty sight.

We're not done yet, not by far. We will remember you always.

Men

In all my life, I have known you. And yet the ones that put me to sleep at night are those I hardly know.

F, the oil man
Sometimes, in my aloneness, I wonder if our story is yet unwritten, set for some distant future when you and I are in the right place to contemplate one another.

I wonder about you once in a while.

New York
Ah, New York. The beautiful boy in the subway. I thought of you last night and how we seemed to see the universe in each other's eyes across the crowded subway train. Both of us were trying not to laugh at the two big mommas yakking loudly for all the world to know their biznes.

And then you came up to me, almost careful and conciliatory. And half of me felt like it walked away with you for a coffee, a random chat, a stolen kiss in a park that would have been left at that since we probably had lives half a world away from one another in reality.

And then there is the New York of my dreams. This man of my origins with long hair and a deep tan, whose New York affectations were tinged with the exotic residue of your heritage. The perfect man for me?

It's not that I'm not content. But a girl likes to think about what ifs once in a while. It helps me stay adventurous and not stray.

The Prince

In the swirl of dust that continues to saturate our capital, one figure stands still. His outline is visible only if you care to look through the veil of grit and grime that confusion has stirred up in the aftermath.

He is quiet. He speaks selectively and in broad terms, words clothed in the fine fabric of history and evangelical leaders of the freedom and emancipation movement. He borrows from the closet of the history of mankind.

I have never been one to accord any respect to royal lineage until now. I think princes and kings or queens are not born, they are made. This one, this one seems to have come out shining, sans armour.

If you come out to play, and shake our hands, and tell us that you will lend your powers to empower us, I too, the silent majority, will meet you half way.

16

Last weekend was a belated gift in some ways to my former 16-year-old self.

It was to say the least, a bizarre experience. Me, enjoying the moment, hugging my old self inside like a proud mother, and telling my older self to be joyful, and dance. Around me, the aged faces of yesterday's party scene also I suspect, doing the same.

Let's be honest. I had a blast. I wished I was young again standing there.

M

Hello M my sweet,

Your aunt says maybe I should acknowledge you. I wonder what that means.

It has taken me more than ten years to come to terms with your presence in my life. I think I have, although the fundamental purpose of you has yet to become clear to me.

I know that you have been the most difficult test of my mettle. It makes me wonder why I was put to that test. Whether I have yet to undergo another one - an epic battle of battles that will either undo me or see me barely surviving.

Sometimes, I feel you are a validation of everything I know about me. My strength, my weakness, my tendency to throw myself headlong into whatever catches my fancy at the moment.

Surely you were not there just to help ease my separation from him. That would be too small a purpose for someone as central as you are to my life.

Mother says now that she thinks I should have been a parent. Should have been as if it is already no longer a possibility. I suppose, it is. Or she presumes it is because it is my will. And I suppose she wouldn't be wrong on that count. Because there is nothing really, stopping me from being one if I so chose.

What did I dream for myself that has not come true? I used to wonder a little about having a husband and maybe a little less about having a child. I wasn't a teenager who could even tell you how many children she wanted to have. Maybe it is my self-centered nature. My dreams were always about me. Becoming a rock star or someone famous.

That has changed with little regret.

I realise now I have regressed, back into the chambers of my childhood when I dreamt alone and played alone, content with my own company, too busy with my own thoughts to bother with other people, other playmates. There are few who tickle my interest enough for me to reach out. I make friends with difficulty now. Acquaintances easily, but friends, no.

Friendship is such a messy thing. Full of obligations and layers of intrigue that complicate life. So much so that often the rewards are very easily forgotten.

Family, is a different thing. In fact, I have found in my older age, that family is an easy environment in which to make a friend. Maybe the very premise of it is the reason. When you start off a relationship on the premise of forever after, friendship develops with fewer presumptions and more ground rules. It provides parameters of trust on which you tread more carefully.

I am beginning to wonder whether the only places I can absolutely be myself is here and with the dog.

Miss Thang

Sometimes, during the inbetweens of thoughts, I wonder about you. When I see you've added new pictures on your Facebook page, of you and her and people who are no longer part of my life. Like you. And her, somewhat.

I wonder.

There has always been something about you that has never quite sat right with me. Your intent and your motivation. Towards her in particular. Maybe it is my residual protective instinct surfacing.

Then I realise that you can only be to her what she allows you to be. Same as when she was with me.

And my thoughts then turn inwards to you and me, and what you allow me to be, and vice versa.

And the images of you and her, of a symbiotic pair turns to that of a rock beneath a small waterfall that is constantly beating on the hard stone surface, relentless but not quite brutal.

Is that what I am? Brutally relentless, or relentlessly brutal? Some days I think you see me as the former, and some as the latter. It wavers, I feel.

Some days like recently, I find it is I who is feeling more disconnected from you than sensing your distance from me. And I wonder what that means.

Whether I am really drifting away. Or whether I am becoming numbed to this lack of feeling or opinions from you beyond the occasional grunt.

There are lots of moments when I really, truly feel like kicking you. Physically kicking you just to get a real reaction, one that is substantive. Not just a grunt.

That I haven't already is at least a little solace for myself, that I am not physically violent in nature.

Maybe I am just fed up and tired and need to sort myself out.

Days

From my window, I hear sirens. Outside, it is a cloudy Dubai spring day. Or a sullen reprieve from a tropical storm. The roads are still damp, the sun not yet fully persuaded to get out of bed. Days like this are for lazing between the covers in a sea of pillows.

Life should allow for luxuries like that. I've always wondered why days like this aren't automatically holidays.

Girl in a bubble

At home, you have retreated once more into your universe of silence. This opaque world where nothing penetrates, but everything swirls, dirt, dust and clean all together until it is one confusing quagmire.

Every time I look at you I come to a stronger realisation that you represent everything our discriminatory policies have shaped. A person of little personal ambition. A being that is only shuffled along by the tides and has no concept of her own ability to contribute to the decision. A powerless human being, whose shackles are mentally created by a dominant power and reinforces at every turn of the head.

You live in a bubble.

And when it bursts, it will take you a life time to recognise it.

There are days when I wonder whether I will be around to watch that happen.

The winning position

In the days that follow the surprise defeat, many questions linger.

One which I find personally curious - if asked to vote again today, would the outcome be the same?

I hope so.

There is fear now among some parties that they as a race will lose their privileges. Undoubtedly, by a slim genetic shadow, I am subsumed into that mass - unconsulted, unvolunteered, but unopposed.

I think as one of the many, that if you have nothing to fear, then you have nothing to lose. If you have always held your own life principles as personal, unrelated to race and religion, then you should have confidence in your own ability.

The problem is, many have benefitted from the skewed advantages. Many who are intelligent and cannot now turn their backs on all the gains they stand to reap in maintaining the status quo. And in today's day and age, where I am convinced citizenship does not preside over the preservation of self, survival could, if the balance tipped in the other's favour, cause those who subscribe to patron-politics to flee the ranks.

If I had a child I would teach him or her to be the best person he or she can be. Not the best person in a particular race or religion or country, but the best person he or she can humanly be. Then it won't matter. This mad scramble for power and position using everything one has to one's advantage would become white noise. Because then you will be the one who is too good to pass up despite your race, religion, gender or creed.

The one they cannot afford to lose.

That's the winning position ultimately, when the chips fall. Not your skin, your God, your lover or your bank account.

Change

We slept as the winds of change swept through the country.

We ate dinner as I palpitated listening to the results, and you, along with the other two sat silent, a little dumbfounded at my fervour. It is as if you did not understand the far-reaching impact of what was happening.

You sat, dumb-founded as we stared out to sea, wind whipping through the umbrella that shaded us, and I launched into a cautious tirade about how you need to step up your game and stop helping me as if it's a favour you're doing this mad woman.

Sometimes I realise how representative you are of the sleeping race that I am part of. And I cannot fathom how I have come to love you. You who will never take matters into your own hands but instead wait to be told. You are the classic product of political patronange.

You told me once that you saw what was happening but didn't get as upset as I did. Quite honestly, I find it hard to understand how one can not be moved. Especially when money is thin, everything costs more and the rich get richer. Despite your university degree, you are often times no better than the below-average local university graduate who has no critical thinking skills.

Human nature

It seems to me that these days, people here can no longer see the forest for the trees.

You, who won't do a woman who is virtually a single mother a favour just because she won't do one for you. You (and I) who cannot pretend to even understand what it's like to be mother of an infant. In my weaker moments, I too have judged her. But I think we need to draw the line somewhere and put our own feelings aside and reach out with our helping hand. If not for anything, because it makes you the larger person. Not someone stooped in hate and a fucked up mental accounting system that keeps tabs on who is nice to you and who is not.

Why do you carry so much hate in your head and heart?

To the nation, I ask this question: what is the real deal? Does it matter who is in power, if you know that the basis of human nature is to bend towards self-interest and preservation? All good men have their flaws and biases. The point is to keep these self-interests of leaders in check, so that they remain beholden and constrained by the populace. Otherwise, you might as well throw your vote away.

When a leader insults your intelligence, even if he's doing a good job, you should make him pay by demanding accountability that is put forth in an intelligent and rational manner befitting your own understanding of things. When that fails, vote with your feet. Make him understand that he owes you, and it is not the other way around.

There is a reason why even the most powerful person in Government is called a Government servant.

And when the next man fails, serve him the same medicine.

Until we realise that we alone hold the power over others to keep society on an even keel, we've lost the point completely.

Just as we ourselves hold the power to save the planet from deteriorating into a deluge of unlivable conditions. It's not the big Governments and businesses that will save us. It's our selves.

At the end of the day, accountability begins with the individual person who makes a choice. And it must, ideally, be an informed choice that has received the adequate amount of personal consideration and evaluation guided by one's principles and values. If we assume that people are generally good, then technically we should be alright.

But judging from the state of things, I think human nature is in essence otherwise.