As I Am Now

(I apologize for the initial, incomplete post. Being unused to this site I assumed one could save a piece for later edit without it being viewed by the public)

As I tell you this, my dear reader, I'm sitting in the Geology Building lecture theater 1 of the university of Witwatersrand. The air is muggy and filled with the congestion and seeming heaviness that only a drawn out english lecture can create. The English lecturer a short, rotund man continues his garrulous discourse on Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. I hear mention of manchean binary as the pretty girl next to me starts as she wakes, muttering under her breath as she shifts her head to rest on my left shoulder. To my right a bored, odious revolutionary Marxist (as is popular on campus these days) taps his Doc. Martins to some song only he can hear, his long greasy black hair falling onto my shoulder. Thus entrapped my mind starts to wonder. For all intents and purposes, comrade, I am in a lecture hall redolent of an age and class which is either lacking or dead. And yet; am I here? My mind can leave this lecture hall, travel out over the library lawns which have finally bowed to the hand of winter and into the city.

Hillbrow. A place that all South Africans know and yet few seem to have been within spiting of. It is the den of thieves, rapists and drug addicts. The face South Africa shows to the world, its stereo type, its selling point. There is a Synagogue in Hillbrow, one which the honorable president Paul Kruger opened, "in the name of Jesus Christ". It's windows boarded up, a plank having being nailed across the large, mahogany doors which hearken back to an age in which Hillbrow has a bohemian place full of roadside cafes and oppression. Now it stands in a crime capital of the world. And yet the windows are boarded up, the door sealed, this is not an act of desperation but one of optimism. Why protect the contents of something which you cannot reclaim?  A hobo lives in the shelter provided by the archway over the door, professing the world of Jesus Christ like Kruger before him.

My mind moves, traveling thousands of kilometers over the highveld, through mountains and down onto the medetarainean coastal plain where Cape Town makes it home. The town is a strange place, filled with all the people one would expect to see but seemingly living in some parallel universe in which time has lost all meaning or perhaps become to much of an inconvenience. A love of mine lives here. As we speak she may be sitting on a beach, one hand idly twisting a strand of her auburn hair as her grey unknowable eyes stare out to sea.

And yet, no matter how enticing this thought may be it is not reality. In an instant my mind is back in the muggy lecture hall, the sound of ruffling paper and the noise of rusty chairs being drawn back tells me he lecture is over and that I can finally escape.