I'm in South Africa

first light of day 3 finds me on the porch of our round thatched hut looking up at the southern cross and Orion turning cartwheels in the sky. the light approaches as slowly as it faded last night- our proximity to the pole turns the ecliptic into an oval from our ant-sized perspective. Within two hours of arrival, I had gone from blue-ish to pink, and my head almost hurts as I breathe in the dry white light.

with staff aboard Argo, Pop and I are free to explore the coast for a few days, so we take off early one morning and head east from Cape Town. even on the interstate, junction points become bus stops. Over a pass and deep into quiet fields, a man is pushing his shopping cart up a hill in the slow lane. we don't ask why, we wonder how he steers on the downhill. By lunchtime we are at "the Heads" of Kynsna, eating seafood. the Heads is a natural passage between the sea and a large brackish lake- we watch a small sailboat come in, quickly between her full sail and the green water surging inland. after lunch we wander out to the point. The land is craggy and orange, clusters of black mussels cling to the rocks just at that tide line where the sea so constantly throbs. the rocks rip the sea into a white foam that settles into a filigree of lace laid over her aqua fingers. I hear my ex-lover's rumbling and snapping guitar.

That night we find a guesthouse by the beach at Jeffrey's Bay. Under the influence of three days of airplane naps and now with the ocean 100 meters away, I sleep as if in a womb. I sleep in the sea, I wake in the sea, and in the morning, I am romping among the rocks finding treasures. A black rock juts up in patches, creating the points of the bay that shape world-famous surf-breaks. The uppermost surfaces are eaten by the blowing sand and biting salt. closer to the tide live the limpets and barnacles. Then there are the smooth polished places that my feet love, below the low tides, the soft corals, seaweeds and fishies, and encircling it all, the sands and that are flipped and crushed to make them- iridescent oyster shells, pink and purple and sunyellow shells, and I, a little girl with my Pop.