Them's Fightin' Words

It’s funny how ‘the real world’ has this way of catching up with you sometime in your 20s. One minute life is kinda breezing along like it always did, and the next you’re elbows deep in bills, car insurance, medical aid, deadlines at work, traffic, grumpy co-workers and then what? Marriage, children and a whole other heap of stuff I don’t really want to think about right now.

Sometimes you’ve just got to leave all that shit behind you and go for a walk. That’s what J-Rab and I decided to do on Saturday. We packed a backpack with a couple of beers and drove about 15 minutes to the Jonkershoek Nature Reserve where we had lunch and took goofy pictures of each other.

After lunch we entered the reserve, excited as kids at Christmas and got a killer picture of us getting ready to hike the SHIT out of that place.

The road we took meandered round in a wide circle past a huge dam and through a pine forest. The smell of pine needles, the cool, fresh feeling of winter’s edge biting through the dappled afternoon sunshine.

We talked about a different life for us, a different future where J-Rab becomes a rich and famous model and I become an award-winning novelist and script-writer, and we pose on magazine covers together and holiday in exotic places that we sail to on 500ft luxury yachts with all our friends.

“It’s on the cards babe,” I told her, “it’s fate, you can’t fuck with fate.”

All around us, mountains stretched up to the sky and I wanted to climb the highest one and stand on the top, my arms outstretched in the sunshine and shout down into the valley below in my own invented language until my voice got horse and the people listening all chuckled and, shaking their heads said, “Crazy fucker…”

I know Saturday is probably going to be a day I’ll remember for a long time because it was simple and easy and filled with laughter, J-Rab’s and mine. Days like that you lock away somewhere deep inside and, when times get bad, you take them out again and hold them up to the light and remember that life was better once, and it will be better again.

-ST