Things We Lost in the Summer

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Beginning my final year of high school this time last year was a game of beating the clock. I'm not sure when and I'm not sure how but somewhere between sixteen and seventeen I was very sure that I was going to die before I saw the end of 2015. Ever since I was six, I've been able to visualise things that were going to happen. Even if it was just an idea of the boots I'd be wearing on the date I had planned for Saturday or knowing that I was going to be very tired of my friends when we had lunch on Freedom Day. Things couldn't exist if I couldn't at the very least vaguely picture them. Now that I am still very much alive and, through some intersection of divine intervention and the sheer force of will, out of high school I recognise that as the arrogance of youth. The assumption that everything in the world was possible in relation to me, this was my world and everyone was just living in it.

The universe has since shown me otherwise.

I. When we last spoke

I've watched too many cult-classic Tumblr films because the only way I knew how to prepare for my completely ridiculous death was to avoid it and "live in the now". But "living in the now" looked a lot like blocking my ears when my friends spoke about leaving me, hiding under the covers when I was supposed to be sending in university applications and living life as a secondary character, away from blogging and art and writing. At some point I figured avoiding real life and avoiding myself, or the very things that made me most myself, would mean that the Khensani who was meant to die would not exist and therefore could not die. And, wow, what a waste. In the time since I last inhabited this here Internet space, I witnessed a revolution, I had my heart broken (again) and I tasted the very same magic that made Marina Abramovic risk her life for her art. I'm upset that I refused to let Khensani embody all those things in the ways she knew best.

II. Tears dry on their own

Today, I listened to this song by Tshepo and I was reminded that I have never (and will never) have an original feeling in my life. The parts of me that all but erupted when my heart was broken in a hazy November try to tell me that I have felt all the pain in the world and no one can understand. These parts, held together with gum and bobby pins, they screech and howl all night looking for guidance, for answers. They tell me I should never love again. They tell me I need to find love again. They tell me I have never found love, again and again. Before, I ran away from these cries. Death was too imminent for me to carry on about a boy I'm not sure ever knew me, let alone loved me. And now, as I watch my friend begin to feel his feelings fully so that they can dissolve, I am beginning to realise that I am OK with this, that I am OK.

III. Letting go

I cried about him once in the summer. But I cried about me all year.

IV. There is gold dust on my fingtertips

Not long ago, I told Motheo that I was a void. Somewhere between five glasses of whisky, an inability to say "no" and becoming a daughter of the night, I had become this black hole. Every day felt like the heightened youth and drama and hedonism of Lana's This Is What Makes Us Girls, felt like the scene in The Vampire Diaries where Elena flipped her switch and Damon loved her all the more it. It was this midnight world that I had always fantasised about, this midnight world where adventures and memories were made. A place full of 3am conversations and fleeting forrays at love and I was just a giant vaccum of it all. Nothing mattered. Nothing held any significane. The entire summer was one long night and I couldn't sleep at all. 

V. The begiining of the end

I guess all of this sounds sombre or that I've given in to losing my way, or, I don't know, one long completely teenage cry in fear of the future. But it's not. I laughed this summer, I cried this summer, i love this summer. And all of this is me trying reconcile the fact that just like a life after high school, I can't visualise who I am growing up to be. I can only experience it. This morning I realised that I've managed to go almost 15 days of this year not wanting to die. And I think that means something good.

VI. I'm eighteen this year.

I'm looking forward to discovering more feelings I'm certain no one in the history of the world has ever had, I'm looking forward to making friends and making art, I'm looking forward to not anticipating my death. 

If anyone asks, my New Year's Resolutions are to get money and fuck bitches. 

Yours

Khensani

When You Do Have the Juice Like That

"Omg, khensani, are those swimming trunks? u r so creative!"
Hahaha, no, peasant. I'm just broke and always twenty minutes late to everything.

Fashioning short shorts out of your brother's too, too big swimming trunks will seem like a really clever idea when you're left with two minutes to get ready before having to head out. You'll tell yourself that your colour palette is so on point and you've just extended your wardrobe by another item for absolutely free, thereby creating a whole new plethora of outfit choices for the summer (which, you seem to keep forgetting, is almost over). You'll pair your cute new shorts with a thrifted button up shirt in your favourite shades of blue ("ah, look at how well they go together," you'll remark, "this was meant to be"), slip into the pink Pull & Bear trainers you're always wearing and never washing and throw a wink at the mirror before you leave with your thrifted jacket and the remaining trophies of almost-responsible-nights-out-when-you-didn't-lose-everything on your wrists and fingers.

You good-looking fool, you.

You're going to regret all of this when the hair-ties holding your shorts up keep getting lost, the drawstring of aforementioned shorts keeps giving up on you and your shirt exploding outwards and forwards, and don't even get me started on what a burden that jacket will become to you on the dance floor. I hope the compliments were worth all the anguish.

Jacket: Better Half Vintage // Top: Glitter Betty // Shorts: somewhere in the Seychelles // Shoes: Pull & Bear // Rings: [the store formerly known as] Sass Diva, Mr Price, LEGIT and a really nice old Turkish women in Osmonbey // Choker: Glitter Betty //

this is me thinking about how much easier my life could've been if I had just worn some jeans.

♡I'm not offline, I blocked you, asshole.♡ from 9arbage on 8tracks Radio.

Has anyone else made some terrible choices for the sake of letting your look live?

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Travel Diary // A M S T E R D A M

On the ten hour flight from Johannesburg to Amsterdam, I imagined tall, lanky blond Dutch people who cycled around, recycling everything and eating, I don't know, fish paste and asking if I knew Die Antwoord or rode a lion to school. I was almost completely right. What I didn't imagine was how completely in love I would fall with this city.

From the architecture, to how incredibly well-dressed, beautiful and surprisingly diverse the people are, to the shopping, to - I'm at such a loss as to how to aptly describe what was the greatest time of my young life. To describe that I will never feel at such a peace anywhere else again and that if only I could have another three years to explore and love that city, it wouldn't be enough. It would also be shit expensive on my stomach but hella on my calves and quads.

The Last Days of Summer

"Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance." - Yoko Ono (I think.)

One (you, me) starts to look at time and things laterally, as simply location. Like, when your gran looks back on a time, she mentions the place first; or how certain things only exist in terms of certain places. Like, you were happy in that townhouse and your baby brother started teething when you were in that gross flat behind the highway. Where as, something my brother mentioned in passing (that I know aren't his words but the sentiment is there), "The question isn't where are we but when are we." The big, ol' fat daddy Time. And nothing makes you more aware of the all-encompassing Self than the changing of seasons and position of the moon.

I. THEY CALL IT FALL
I was woken up one Sunday morning by the rustling of the leaves in the tree behind my bedroom window. I was still fully clothed from the night before and had my phone under my breast. My knees were locked and my back ached from hunching over myself. Before I had time to register the night before or the day ahead, I was hit with that creeping sense of waiting and uncomfortable aloneness that comes with the feeling of waiting, dreading that you get on a Sunday. Usually it comes around 18h00 and you think about the English essay you still need to write. But this wasn't the 'I want to hang myself' weight of a Monday morning. No, this was just waiting. Like, in the beginning of a fantasy/sci-fi film when the a wind howls through the main character's room and they're woken up by just the moonlight. A faceless voice whispers, "It's time." Except that I felt like I was waiting for the moment that it would be time.
That's how I knew summer was over.

II. THE POWER OF WALKING
No one appreciates walking anymore. A boy once told me it was possibly the most redundant form of transportation. He found the whole act of depending on your own feet, leaving it all up to numero uno, to be such a waste of time. I guess he spent so much time by himself that the trip from his house to the gas station for Marlboros was overkill. I'm not so fortunate. And I guess there's a connection between not feeling Self and never walking enough. Maybe that's why the middle-aged, grey cheeked, who spend hours inhaling exhaust fumes and monotony never feel quite at home anywhere. Maybe that's why driving through the yellow tinted suburbia you've known so well strips you of those feelings of independence and grown-upness because the lawns aren't as green and the dogs don't bark like they once did. Maybe that's why the first thing he did after you both exploded over the marble counters and dirty dishes, after you'd cried venom and the door frame shook was walk and walk and walk.
I vow to walk everyday.

III. DESIRE
"I think desire isn't lack, it's surplus energy..." - Chris Kraus, I Love Dick.
I remember reading this earlier in the year, the more rosier of the days before I started to feel grown, and wanting to apply it to everything. Chris describes desire as this sort of claustrophobia, where in desire seems to only fill you up. It's not this want for, need for, quest for more. More and more and more. It's an, 'I need to give and give and give.' I can't be exactly sure that's how I felt because I journaled it three months ago and never revisited it.
I'd recently found myself in a relationship of the romantic sort after declaring myself as emotionally ready and independent and filled with Eartha Kitt goodness and it freaked me out. I abide by the Justin Timblerlakian philosophy of 'what goes around comes around', osmosis, really. So gaining all this energy, this desire (for another person, for moments, for warmth in these bones) would have to mean losing this energy somewhere else. I hate admitting it to myself but it seems like whenever I enter a phase of, I don't know, happiness or contentment I can't create. I worry I'm depending too much on ache to do things or those moments of pity and uncomfortable intospectiveness you go through when you come off of a high to make.
Then Maya Angelou passed and I cried for a death for the first time ever. And I read Toni Morrison's Beloved and in the preface she talks about the day she quit her job and went home to relax and live off of novel royalties. Then she was overcome with this sensation. It was unfamiliar and a little disconcerting at first until she realised that she was, well, happy. Just simply and purely and truly content. Then she wrote Beloved. 
It's not really desire or pleasure or rose stained glass if you have can'ts. Then you're just passing Time.

IV. PINK DAZE OF YOUTH
I saw something on Tumblr that was along the lines of, "Locate your feelings. Don't analyse. Locate. Are they in your stomach, leg?" It reminded me of an article I'd read (what could've been) weeks or months ago about theories on where certain emotions stem from. 
I think all the hours of making/admiring art, crying into poetry and trying to understand everything about Sofia Coppola films means that I had come to spending a lot of my time trying to analyse feelings. Beat them until they confessed their motives, until they revealed every intention they'd ever had, until I could kick them in the shins and make them leave my bones so I could be self-aware. 
And I guess that's why I'd also grown so disinterested in Instagram and Tumblr and Twitter and, eventually, blogging. It felt like I was beginning to spend a lot of my time watching myself and my thoughts and my feelings instead of just being assured by the fact that all those things are there and that I'm alive in the most exciting time to be a person and that my friends are great, my relationship is wonderful and I have all these beautiful things to look forward to. Journaling and photo-taking just felt like abuse of these moments of 'Strange Magic' I so desperately wanted to keep so that I could look back on an aesthetically pleasing life.
I started a diary then. I was just going to write down a play by play of the things that happened that had some sort of long-lasting impact on me. Be it, Katy calling me 'my boy' with a huge grin the one Monday or when I got invited to a house party by ex-boyfriend (and spent an hour wondering if I was lying to Lilita when I said that I wouldn't go) or how I scribbled Donald Glover's open letter (to himself? The world? His future? Me?) on my bedroom wall. I was just going to have to locate feelings.
I want to look back and enjoy or cringe at these moments once again for what they were. Not the grey balls of putty I would mash and twist and wring out to be whatever I needed them to be.