Said the Spire

There’s a church across the road from my apartment and its bells have been ringing for a thousand years. Like a demented and determined time teller, it wants me to know that it’s 12h00, that I’ve slept through half the day and that, if I just open my eyes, I’ll see the midday sun creeping over my paisley sheets and I’ll stumble towards my blinds, yank them up to glare at the offender and she’ll stare back as a rust red spire standing proud under a candy floss sky while seemingly saying:

“Congratulations, you’ve survived the night. Your heart is beating in your chest, you have enough air in your lungs and that fire in your heart, those flames you’re wasting standing there fiendishly fuming at me, that’s the stuff you’ll need to survive today and tomorrow and every day you have left on this rock. So get up, get going and stop wasting what’s left of a day that promises precipitation.”

I speak to that spire more often than I speak to anyone with pulsing flesh and blood. She comes a-calling at 12h00 and sometimes she finds me on Facebook looking into other people’s lives.

Sitting there scrolling over hurts and heartbreaks, happy moments and holiday snaps while my earthly existence ebbs away as though I’ve been shortchanged and shot and I’m dripping scarlet on the sidewalk.

When she does, I remember that I’m not dead.

I recall that I’m not a ghost or a ghoul haunting posed and perfected lives and suddenly I’m enflamed by the feeling that instead of being mesmerized by miscellaneous moments, I should go out and make some of my own.

So I grab my camera and my bowler hat and I bound out the door seeking existence, adventure and everything.

I skip down the stairs and beat a lady who took the elevator to the ground floor and I grin at the woman in the coffee shop downstairs who must be starting to think I have some kind of condition because I’m always rushing and grinning, grinning and rushing and running out into the rain without an umbrella.

Even when the doorman tells me it’s going to pour.

For a while I walk, I even whistle. Past the Puma service station, up Sam Nujoma and towards the Theatre School, buoyed by adrenaline, good feeling and the galvanizing reminder of mortality.

But it’s one of those rare days where I’m acutely aware of being alone and I feel phantom rings in my handbag and in my pocket depending on where I’ve tried to hide the hideousness of being unwanted, unloved and uncalled.

In intervals that grow shorter between every glance, I check my phone but the only thing it has to tell me is the time and I sigh a little because I’m a big believer in letting people be themselves.

Even if that means they get to glow and grow in my unwavering attention while I wilt and wonder why most people insist on loving people who’ll run them as ragged as a sewage plant mop then still insist you dust away the dirt left by some other lovers leaving.

And then there she is.

Surrounded by a school, a scattering of streets and the bright white of my building, the church spire smiles up at me and says:

“Well, isn’t this a pleasant pity party? Didn’t you just leave here content to be alive and well and endlessly able to be alone and now you’re sitting on a hill clutching your phone like there’s someone on the other end just suiting up to save you?

How long do you think they’ll be? Do you think they’re putting on their cape and their boots or do you think they’re so busy saving themselves that you best go and do the same in the name of novelty and not drowning?

In this life you get to be you and they get to be them and then, someday, if you’re lucky, you meet some people you can stand and you stand by them whenever life allows. The rest of the time, your cape is in your closet and you gotta put it on, do what you have to do to be happy and fly home a hero held high on your own shoulders.”

She makes sense that spire.

But I can’t look her in the eye so I look at my building instead. The building where I have a big, soft bed and food in my fridge and where a few hours later I will be writing this to make a living that will afford me a big, soft bed and food and my fridge and I look down at my phone.

This time just to check the time.

It’s been an hour. The spire has turned a duller shade of red, the sky is about to explode and a tiny rain drop falls on my phone and distorts a portion of the screen.

I get drenched.

So drenched that I pour cupfuls of water out of my shoes and into the sink when I get home, past a doorman who looks at me as I splutter and smile and make a mess for the maid.

And as I step out onto my balcony to see the spire being washed clean by the clouds, I thrust my tongue out under the sky to taste the world and think: It’s been a great day.

Ticking and teaching.

– @marth__vader on Twitter or martha@namibian.com.na