( Hope Floats )

Your kings are not righteous. Your heroes are not strong.
Their empire is crumbling. We're being sent to save your children.
Everything is going to get better. It's written in the stars.
We're not who they think we are. You can't fight what you can't see.
We are scandalous.
Stop holding on to yesterday, you had your chance, get out the way.
It's our turn now.
You have absolutely no idea what's about to happen...
The future is ours.
moon love - max normal.tv

I’ll say one thing for our South African plight: as a citizen of this country, you’re never quite allowed to forget what a hot mess it actually is. This month of love has hauled us all out of our comfort zones and into a place where we are desperately seeking answers. The sense of tragedy underscoring the last few weeks has resulted in a mixed bag of emotions: cynicism, heartbreak, anger and unrelenting despair, paired with a numbing fatalism because, in our context as a country, this is not a new feature. Tragedy weaves its shining thread through the tapestry of our history - in the journey to reconciliation and our jagged, broken dream of a country that will be great, tragedy and heartbreak have been our companions since the beginning.

For my part, I have been a wreck. Events have chipped away at my composure, leaving me little more than devastated at the end of each day. My struggle to come to terms with the things that have happened meant that little by little, my day to day life began to become less important. Get up in the morning. Go to work. Come home. Watch TV, try to write, hang out with friends, read, discuss and debate - all of it began to seem so artificial, so very constructed, when compared to the bigger picture. I have often said that our focus on the bigger has a lot to answer for when it comes to how we feel. I sometimes wish I could ignore it altogether, but that often seems so self-defeating. But how do you stop the bigger picture from defeating you anyway?

A blog I follow is doing an installment on star signs. While I don’t set much store by astrology (I think it’s all a bunch of codswallop, to be honest), the particular installment I was reading was about the pisces sign and since I am a pisces, I did the obvious thing anyone does when reading about their sign and tried to match up the characteristics associated with pisces to my own nature. Needless to say, it wasn’t quite the pairing, but there was one quality described there that resonated with me: hopeful idealism. That no matter how bad it gets, no matter how dire, that idea of something great and amazing is still clung to, no matter how much it looks like an ideal set to live nowhere but in faith and feelings.

It speaks to my character somewhat. For reasons I can never put into words (but probably still nevertheless involve a dangerous mix of patriotism and idealism), I just cannot give up hope for South Africa. I like (emphasis on this part for it implies a complete lack of objectivity and realism) to believe that things can and will get better. That one morning, I’ll wake up and the sadness will be a bit less. That things will begin making sense and looking up and becoming a little something like the country the vast majority of us have been dreaming about for years - with education free for all, a justice system and police authority we can actually trust and leaders that we can look up to, who inspire us to become better versions of ourselves.

Despite the overwhelming amount of misery that floods my channels of communication on a regular basis, I have to hope that it will get better. Doing anything less would be a gross disservice to myself and the belief that you can say what you like about dreams, but if it weren’t for dreams, no one would have gotten anywhere in the first place.