On this porch you can sit in the scorching midday sun and enjoy a beer so cold the sides of the bottle are frosted while you sit in the shade and watch distant cars glide by on the mountainside.
It’s peaceful here, you can sit with strangers and not feel that compulsive need that overrides all common sense to fill perfectly good silence with meaningless garble.
A warm breeze sweeps lazily through the leaves of the trees to the left of the porch, but when it moves through the bushes in front of us, the leaves flash silver as their undersides catch the sun.
We are surrounded on all sides by mountains thick with wild fynbos and at night the stars pepper the sky from horizon to horizon, forming countless constellations that J-Rab can name and trace but that to me just look like random and formless shapes.
You just don’t get this in Joburg. You can search far and wide for it, but you won’t find it.
I picked my way out over the rocks with J-Rab and her friend GoffGirl earlier today, we were looking for muscles on a beach in Pringle Bay. The ocean gathered in natural pools all around us and J-Rab showed me how sea anemone have these tiny tentacles that suck at your finger when you touch them.
Some of them were powder blue, I stared at those ones for a long time, trying to figure out how they came to be, by what evolutionary turn did they form like that, blue as the sky in those rock pools hundreds of years ago.
I stood barefoot in some of the pools, wiggling my toes in the sand as wave after wave came rolling in.
There was more, starting at Barbarian’s place on Friday, and then Buena Vista and then Stikey on Saturday, volleyball at Caprice, Little Red’s place and his new kid, good times all of them.
But it won’t come right now and I can’t force it. I guess I’ve just run out of words, they must have trailed away as I was driving the winding coastal roads back from Pringle Bay this afternoon.
It’s beautiful out there.
My girlfriend has just slapped me hard on the ass.
Instead of writing one more word of this waffly shit, I think I’m going to return the favour.
She is the best.
-ST
