The other day I found myself calling “coming!” to my ringing cellphone, just like my grandmother used to. Unlike me who can’t remember a time without a telephone in the house, my grandparents had a telephone installed in their late 40s, had to learn all the new that came with it, and unlearn what was before. Had to learn that the “coming!” wouldn’t reach the other side of the telephone the way it would reach a neighbour calling to borrow some salt. Reaching over long distances also means that you sometimes forget how to reach for the short ones. I remember my grandmother calling to the telephone and me laughing at her and now, years after when I’m 23 and she is dead I wonder if that was deliberate, a forgetfulness feigned to make a granddaughter laugh. I wonder how much of that memory is a myth, how much of forgetfulness is passed down in the blood, how much of her I really remember and how much of the rest I have made up in my head, like a story, a fiction, the words of which are blurry and the image flickers and fades. 

the last day of the year. a sonic boom. a silent night, a song. an empty wrapper of a chocolate kept for the sake of memory. the memory of beautiful things that never happened. coffee. a poem that makes me feel. something, like warm honey at the center, warm to the fingertips, a ringing in the ears. in a dream, lovers' limbs, a promise. an angry kiss. the night is cold and empty. a melody stuck in the head. a song, each word of which is an explosion. an universe on its own. who cares about what happened before, or what will come after. somewhere deep in history, a mistake was made. and so the lovers never met. or met and fought, with angry kisses on the mouth in empty apartment rooms. one left the other for dead. and then a bird pulled out a tooth from a box buried in the ground. the bird was red and blue.

The period following the demise of rock n’ roll music was a black hole, my country was at war with it’s own self then. My country was at war until it tore itself out into three, we pretend after seventy five years so long the wounds have healed but the barbed wires across the river on the east side still bleed sometimes, silently, at night when no one can hear. No one does, but our soil is red with the blood of the land and the blood is in our mouths when we speak in a language we can no longer call our own, our mouths that long to kiss the soil of our fathers from which all the songs sprung up, songs without any words to them and words stripped of melody. When the Beatles broke up there was a riot. There was a famine on this side of the barbed fence and 300,000 died in the Liberation war, but what good are numbers for the dead are dead and words never mean anything except what they say. The songs of the land are forgotten, you forget things when you have no one to say them to. We are a people estranged from ourselves, when Nietzsche told us God had died, we believed it. It doesn’t matter either way, what are borders but shadow lines, barbed wires are imaginary, countries arbitrary, places exist only in our heads. Nothing really mattered anymore after the day Buddy Holly’s plane flew over the lake and crashed in a cornfield. 

My father was still a child when Bob Marley shot the sheriff. My father was a child but the land beneath our feet is old, older than time, time doesn’t feel real on either side. The sheriff was shot and our land still bleeds but it is an older blood that rises from the under the ground, crusty blood around fisherwomen’s ankles. The blood lines their wrists and the comes out of their mouths and the middle of their heads. In the middle of the 80s my mother got her first period and her sister had a poster of Michael Jackson on the wall. My mother taught me how to bite my tongue inside my mouth and swallow my screams back inside my stomach, but the blood seeps out from between my lips and I don’t know how to stop it, I have been speaking in a language that is not my own. Our mouths ache with unspoken words, the bones of strife are buried deep in our soil. Our soil is red with the blood of the land and our mouths bleed, but time isn’t real and has been buried for so long that we have forgotten, we only know of love from arthouse films and of death from fever dreams. I wish we didn’t have to think about dying all the time but our land is lined with dead bodies from the great famine of '43, it must be terrible thing to die of hunger but we were born on the wrong side of the world, you see. We never learned to measure time on this side. But what does it matter, time isn’t real and the world is going to end anyway. I will live a good life and die like Elvis, a heartbreak on a bathroom floor.

Once when we were 14 my friend gave me her favourite pen to write with because I was sad. That was when our skins were still golden brown and all we knew of sadness was broken hearts and broken bones. These days, the city feels like a swamp and this empty house that did not birth me, did not shelter me, only swallowed me whole, gave me a gaping hole inside, black as night. Is emptiness something that is given, passed down as a gift, as inheritance, as a disease, as a curse from the house to the housed? This house that has no history. This house that I long to leave, this house that longs to die, when my friend calls I don’t know what to talk about. My heart is a black hole. My heart is a black hole that only knows how to forget.