This city is a monster created through the violent fusion of enemy organisms

This city is a monster created through the violent fusion of enemy organisms, kept together, kind of, by the fear of the even worse. An inward shameful rage is its most permanent emotional state. It is fabled for beauty, but to see it requires a blindness of the moral kind. It is not a good thing, this city.

I was born here, grew up here and will die here. I am one of its products and makers, but I scream for its destruction, as my Khoi forebears have done at the time of its beginning. The stories I tell are nothing but this scream in words.

There is the mountain and then to its immediate south, the sea, with the city squeezed in between into the shape of a wedge of cheese. The sea has water and fish and beaches with sand. There are rocks and plants on the mountain, and often, clouds. In summer the sun shines hotly and the wind blows hard from the South-East. Winters are colder with lots of rain, interspersed with mild, sunny, windless days. North of the mountain are flat, sandy lands, unprotected from the winds. To its South-West a rocky peninsula juts into the sea, forming part of the coasts of two bays. In one of them is an island.

Seven teenage girls crammed into a room by themselves are never quiet. Shrill yells and laughs are hardly muffled by the closed door of my daughter’s room. I can only guess at the objects of their alternating outrage, derision and amusement. It is a happy guessing game as pleasure in each other overlays every alternation. They continue through the night in unwitting mockery of what they call a sleep-over.

Before six the morning L. storms out of her room and announces they are going for a jog. B. tries to intervene. Isn’t it still dark? But you are still in pajamas? I thought you hated exercise? Be careful, I call after the girls as they run out into the mist. They will never be careful these girls, not when the streets are empty and still, and they are queens of a city that for all anyone could tell they alone inhabited, which would have been just wonderful.

(Photo Credit: Alexcpt Photography / YouTube)