I drank a bunch because, hey, there is no one here but me.
Only me and my thoughts and a night that stretches to eternity with humid
notions of something profound but naught the energy with which to pursue. I
want to pass out under a fan, an infinite fan with no electrical shortages or
rolling blackouts, but I am in Africa, not the West, and so it is. I will sweat
this one out with anti-malarials making a fiend of my dreams and a pint of
whiskey with which to lull me into a calm that will at least let me move into
the morning.
4:30 is an ungodly hour, but it is the hour of birds.
I won’t wake for Ramadan, but I will wake for the birds. I will always wake for them. They are my fickle companions as I wander to random corners of random nothings in nowhere that anyone would care to think. This is what I hope, at least, but life is hardly as romantic. Drugs in the morning to prevent the disease, food in the afternoon to stay the withering, booze in the evening to keep the sanity. Not a bad life, at least not with the sun this way. Or the clouds springing up to heaven like a still-frame of the atom bomb laid across the horizon with the pink and gold of the sweetest lover in the faintest hours.
Is it so hard to forget death? So hard to ignore the fanatical musings of an unrepentant ideology? Let their bombs fly, but to desire so desperately for life instead. In its stead. They may not fear death. But we do not fear life. Which is stronger? Those willing to suffer and persevere, or those who pursue the shortest path to oblivion. We, who are willing to live with the world on its own terms, have a hand that can always be played. It is stay, stay and be here, stay and be free, stay and accept our own fate. It is not forever, it signifies nothing, but it strums the heartstrings like rock and roll, like Bonnie and Clyde. I’ll take that.