My dearest B.
I have no idea if I’ll be any good at this. And that does scare me. Because I’ve always had a fear of not being good. Of not doing great. I don’t know where it came from, because when it comes to childhoods I had a good one. Always loved. Even when I felt I wasn’t.
But I turned on Clair de Lune by Debussy, God, I forgot how much this piece of music makes me feel. I always wanted to learn to play it. Always, it was like my grown up Feur Elise. Feur Elise was conquered as soon as my fingers could stretch enough to reach the octave. I was probably 9. I never played it right. Because I played with feeling. That was something Geraldine never got about me. She was textbook, I was emotive. That… is a story I will maybe share another time.
Da, da, da… maybe put Clair de Lune on while you read this.
I’m in a bubble of warm. My hair is a mess, and my mouth feels like I swallowed a shoe, specifically a tennis shoe. I should brush my teeth. Nikki is at my feet, basking in the sunlight streaming through the half open curtain. She always gets really coppery when she lies in the sun. I know that outside my window it’s cold. The type of cold that takes your breath away. The type of wind that is supposed to promise a change, to promise something new, but instead it steals your breath, and it tears your hair out of place and it hits your cheeks and you get bright red.
I have a test tomorrow; in all likelihood I will fail. I’ll be blunt about it. When I finish writing you this letter I will try and study for it. Or Pondak, my chakra meditation guru person, and I have come up with a new mantra – everything I create is gold. But I don’t feel very gold right now. I’m 21 going on twenty – something and I feel like I’m having an existential crisis. But these days… who isn’t, right?
I remember watching the last summer Olympics, I really enjoy the games. I do. But they also make me feel horribly inadequate. Completely average. I believe I was 17, madly in love with Dean. – oh my god, Dean. And I remember seeing 15-year-old gymnasts winning gold medals. And there I was, sitting on my couch, so mundane and average. I thought “what am I doing with this life?”. 4 years later I’m still thinking that. But there’s also a part of me that thinks those gymnasts might have peaked. Its terribly morbid to peak at 15. Maybe my peak is still coming.
Sometimes I feel like all my edges are coming undone, and its only self-control that is preventing my insides from spilling out. I don’t know what my insides are made of. Who knows. They may be liquid gold, but again I’m filled with fear that my insides might be black tar and I will bury the people around me and make them sink.
I once read something about the Cherokee Indians, and how their women were not allowed in during their rituals while they were on their periods. And it wasn’t due to a rudimentary belief that they were unclean. It was because the tribe or whatever recognised the raw feminine power. Their rationale was that, they were so powerful, so magical, that they could fuck up their sacred rituals just by like sneezing. Why are we as women so afraid of what we are? Maybe that’s just me.
I truly wish the essay I had due on Monday would go as smoothly as this letter. I realise I am all over the place like a toddler running around. But I’m just spilling myself onto a page like I haven’t done probably, in my entire life.
Last night I told you about the baboon story, and you seemed to like it. So I thought I would share an elephant story.
I was 12/13, on holiday with my mama, tatus and babcia [from my dad’s side]. We went to the Kruger Park. The Kruger Park… is a wild game reserve, it’s like a national heritage site, you know, its probably the size of a small country.
From a biological point of view, it’s a fricken hotspot. There’s like 3 different ecological biomes within it alone. – probably more. In any case, the speed limit is like 20 km/h? and there are several campsites within the park. The idea is you head out in the morning and spend the course of the day driving to the next campsite. Or you stay near the one you’re staying in. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and see lions hunting, or elephants playing in the river.
The last time I went it was so dry… it broke my heart. They had to fill up the waterholes with water for the animals, as it was smack bang in the middle of the drought. That, coupled with the rhino poaching, made for a heart breaking trip. I… I didn’t want Dylan to have a bad experience of one of my favourite places on this earth, but we did. People are awful. Have you ever heard a baby rhinoceros cry? Probably not. It sounds like a human baby. Truly. The hyenas were so hot they waited until the hose pipe switched on, and started lapping up the water and then collapsed into it, lying down like dehydrated dogs and closing their eyes, oblivious to predators. Although, not much would eat a hyena.
But I digress.
When I was 12/13 my parents and my babcia and I woke up early at the very bottom of the Kruger Park at a campsite called crocodile bridge. We packed up our car and we began the drive. It was about 110Km to the gate we needed to leave the park through [we were going to spend the night at a different resort]. So it would take us about 6/7 hours of driving. With the majority of the actual driving in the middle of the day, when the animals most like to hide. Seriously, if you ever book a safari trip, don’t take the 9 AM drive. You’ll see fuck all. Animals come out at dawn. Then they hide in the trees, they could be 10 metres away from you. You could smell them having a poop, or hear them, but will you see them? Nope.
So we spent the morning watching the animals, we stopped for lunch, we kept driving, dad pushed the speed limit a few times where we could… and suddenly it was 4PM and the gate to the Park would close in an hour, and we still had 50 KM to do, and we can only do 20KM/h and fuck. And the animals are all starting to come out again because its finally a bit cooler, and if we don’t get through the gate we will be locked OUT of the campsite, but locked IN the big park, and a whole night in a car with wild animals around you is not OK. None of this is okay. At 12/13 I do not like breaking rules, I do not like this one bit. My Babcia has taken out her holy rosary and she is beginning to recite some or other prayer. My mom is driving now. Because father dearest thinks he is a big shot photographer and needs to get photos of this shrub and this meerkat and this bird and this –
Suddenly, right in front of us. Right in the middle of the dirt road, walking ahead, a massive, a gigantic and colossal African Bull Elephant. He’s alone, which means he’s highly territorial and will be aggressive. We don’t get too close. Fuck. He’s so slow. The gate is gonna close. We made up some of the distance but there still half an hour and fuck. He has his back to us, we see his ears flapping – commonly thought (in error) that he’s gonna attack, nope, not yet he’s just cooling himself down.
“What do you want me to do Jacek?” – Mom.
“We have to overtake him” – dad.
This is where I begin to panic. There are so many horror stories of people who piss elephants off. Cars usually get flipped, but if you’re aligned badly, you could get impaled by those tusks.
He stops.
We stop.
This fucker is in the middle of the road, but he’s eating grass on the left shoulder of the road. There’s no way to pass him.
He begins moving, we follow, slowly.
Oh God, I begin praying seeing this only end badly. I don’t want to die a virgin. So Maybe I was a bit older than 12/13 or I’m muddling my stories now.
My babcia says “maybe we don’t have to overtake him” – but we really, really have no choice.
This elephant keeps doing that stopping in the middle of the road thing. He’s seen us now, out of the corner of his eye. He’s taking joy in fucking with us. You can see it in the flick of his tail.
He does it probably 15 times. First winding left, stopping, having a bite, flicking that tail, shaking his head, then walking and stopping on the right. Then the left, then the right, then the left.
And suddenly, he has made a fatal error, he has stopped on the shoulder, with his back towards us, and we have enough space to overtake him.
So we do.
“NOW, Hania”- yells my dad.
And my mom floors it, my babcia and I close our eyes, and then my dad lets out a successful yell.
The elephant is behind us, pissed. He lifts his trunk full of grass and smacks the grass down onto the ground. He stamps his foot and lets out a yell. Or a hoot. We laugh. We’re alive, I’m most happy that I’m still very much here.
He half heartedly tries to charge at us, but we are too far away now. So close to the gate, we have 10 minutes to get there.
We do.
And that’s the story of an elephant who could have fucked us up, but didn’t.
I don’t know if this was okay. I don’t think I’m a good writer, which is counterintuitive to attempting the blog. But you make me happy. So I hoped I could make your day brighter by writing a letter.
If you want, you can write back, if you don’t want to that’s okay. I wish I could commit to being your new pen pal, but honestly I don’t think I have the discipline or the time.
But I will try write when I can. That is – if you want me to.
All of my love,
Justyna.
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