I’m driving with my sister on the highway, we’re coming back from Sandton, Johannesburg North. I just did an interview at some corporate arts auctioneers’ office for an internship, and I have mixed feelings about it. I want the job but I don’t actually want the job.
We go to this big mall. Something about all the lights, the polished storefronts, and the fancy labels makes me sick; not outwardly but deep in my stomach.
Something feels devastatingly out of place.
What am I doing here?
Everyone comes to Johannesburg. This is where everyone comes to “grow up” and go “somewhere” with their life.
It’s where all the best jobs are and the highest salaries, the best “learning-opportunities”…
“Everyone who stayed in that other town or back home never made it. I don’t even wanna think about where I’d be if I hadn’t come to Joburg…I’d have nothing.”
Well if she says so, this must be right. This is where I need to be to grow, to become someone.
Being in this city is for my future.
It’s loud, it’s busy. It’s overwhelming.
But I start to become brave, I start to drink more of the punch.
I expect the high or “the haze” to kick in any moment and take me up on its wings.
now. now there's no 'beyond,' 'here' is where I would want to be if I was anywhere else. there is no parallel dream, no person in some other version of this. every 'this' is this. it is fearful, it is too lofty for me to attain: each day, an end unto itself? each day, satiated? enough with the troubles of its own? each day, not a drawing closer but an arrival? for one such as I, who has never known this world what will I do? what won't I do?
There is a promise of freedom in driving on these big roads. I feel like I can become anyone. I’m waiting for the tall buildings to kneel down to me; for the whole empire to respect me like I was in school.
I’ve moved into a garden cottage in Parkhurst, a suburb I come to realise is quite exclusive even though it’s not exactly in the north North of Joburg. It’s old money and old homes, not the crispness of the money in Sandton and the likes.
I might even buy a house here some day. I start to dream. I walk to work in the mornings and I see the house workers walking dogs, pushing strollers. It’s safe. I feel so proud of myself for being here.
One lazy morning in my not-so-little, actually-very-cold-because-it’s-empty cottage I write:
bull frogs, I think it might be bullfrogs; it's too loud and continuous to be crickets the old toilet with its cracked, grey basin a distant TV, or radio pauses, once in a while otherwise; it is a white cube, entirely perfect, it will be so many things and nothing at all.
And I really do lose it, in a nasty fight with my landlord because I’m breaking my lease. I have to move downtown. This is what I see now when I stand in front of the only window of the 29 square-foot room I’ve found in a small building in the centre of town.
I've descended, more and more into life. into crowded, unmarked streets, and furtherness. further into places my mother would shudder to see me in, places my sister calls "the bad parts of town." I've descended presence after presence. where can I go where IT is not?
It’s expensive to live in Parkhurst. The woman who has hired me to be her assistant pays me my first check and it is 5 grand short of what she promised in the contract.
I didn’t work enough hours she says.
Rent sinks its teeth in.
I get another job. An internship in a marketing agency, I hate it, but I need any money I can get.
I’m up to my neck now. I realise, sickeningly slowly, that I don’t want ‘this’ like this.
But I comfort myself with my old heroism, my furriest, oldest sweater.
I am a song, or a poem, a fantasy, definitely a case study in some text book, here in this city in this continent: going into the belly of it; falling out of jobs and money, box apartment and too-big dreams. maybe I'm drunk on my own bullshit... I don't believe in it; but I am intoxicated you can't get by here sober anyway.
I feel like there is no other alternative. It’s life in Johannesburg or death, because what else can I do with my life? If I’m not here, then I’m nowhere and I’m doing nothing.
It’s this or literally, oblivion, which is a kind of death.
But I long for an escape. I want to drive home, but not actually go there.
Because being home will mean being unemployed, and having failed. It will mean stagnation and loss.
It will mean mockery. I’m the girl who won trophies remember, the head girl?
I’m already so far behind as it is, I need to catch up.
The train of my dreams is leaving there it goes, while I tarry with the sizzling oil in this pan and my sore back, and reports, and "influencers" there they go, my peers, my competition, my childhood friends...
I’m paper-thin. I am tired all the time.
I haven’t been able to keep a single job longer than 2 months.
I’m seeing death and things grow around me all at once. I get emails and calls on new writing opportunities. I get accepted into a master’s degree program with a phenomenal scholarship.
But I’m tired, even though I’m still dancing. I'm like the trees growing in this derelict greenhouse I find in one of the worst parts of town with some “colleagues” on a cold Tuesday or Wednesday morning.
Covid eventually knocks the wind out of my chest, literally. I’m lying on my sister’s floor and I get an email on my phone - I’ve been selected for this zine-making workshop in Cape Town that I didn’t think I stood a chance for.
“I can’t give up now, I’m going to make a zine” I tell myself. A few weeks and a trip home later, I’m on a plane. It’s incredible.
But I’ve been dying for a long time.
“Help me, please” I cry out finally, on my yoga mat.
this silence, like this mat, is stained and dented with reaching cries and metallic tambourines jingling like falling coins; the dying gold of sky. but I roll both out and wait for you in the rumblings of this belly - in the morning lightning, the hail at midday and the nightclubs in the evening; the city gnawing and digesting ever hungry, ever swallowing. I wait for the teeth to close around me and the small opening to pull me into perpetual murk and mixture. or your hand like a willow tree lilting and lifting to pull me and seat me above.
I’ve finally surrendered to “home.”
The geographic location, and the state of being.
I am unemployed, and I am making incongruent art.
I am not contributing anything, to anyone. I am trying to take as little as possible, but oh, how much I need, and how terrible I’ve become at enduring and going without.
But I won’t just take from anyone or anywhere, anymore.
Yours,
end-of-the-city Siphumelele.