It seems that the idea of being in absenture has always been likened to a form of absence. Somehow not being there translates into a notion of not being there. This seems relatively simple to many minds. Most people have imagined that somehow presence is a body and a broken promise; forgotten that the place of presence is not only in being but in being there with.
The key, you see, is in the with.
What is it to be present and engaged? To really exist in the moment that presents itself?
*
Soon, there will be many many ways to confirm the existence of bacteria on the soles of our feet. Science, you see, has found a way to reduce all matters (affect or otherwise) to the physical. There is not really a way to check for the signs of the times if you don’t first begin by getting an x ray, two cat scans and an MRI.
She is lying down on the cold surface. Around her the magnetic pulse can be heard banging its way through the still silence.
*
Have you ever coloured the consciousness of a rainbow while dancing under the drops of a forgotten past? Most likely. More often than not the pieces of the jigsaw puzzles that we have created in our minds fail to fit together in the abstract and ordered way that we have decided to use as a guideline to plan our lives. The ideas of walls has very quickly been replaced by a pack of wolves that seems to be unable to survive on your diet of ugali and bitter herbs.
Still we continue to invoke the names of people whose stories we barely even knew. Was it Mekatilili or Kinjintikile who had the magic water (all the while remembering the stories of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X). This, of course, is no fault of our own. Having forgotten ourselves we are forgotten. Having been unimagined we can’t imagine.
*
Does she remember, or is she now romanticizing a past that never existed beyond the boundaries of her body?
*
I remember recklessness. I remember playing football barefoot on a concrete floor. I remember hurtling down a hill on a brakeless bike praying to the gods that I can stop before the rocks stop me. I remember learning that gods can be unreliable. I remember kneeling down on a mat, scabby knees itching. I remember freedom, but even that is a cage within itself.
*
I’m trying to say something. Still the words have found themselves stuck in the space between and idea and a history that was never written. How do we uncover stories of ourselves if we do not know how far back we have existed?
How are we here if we never were?