Johannesburg - The sadness I was concealing, her body was revealing when I told LOVE that Kashiefa was leaving. She cried, she was heaving, an inexplicable bitterness enveloped the room.
LOVE’s reaction might seem perplexing to an outsider, she had met Kash only twice. But it’s never the frequency of meetings that defines the depth of a connection. I can assure you of this – my sister, Mother of Wind, can attest to this from all the way in Limpopo, with fewer than six encounters we've had in more than a decade.
Half of those were at the funeral of our father six years ago, the funeral of our incognito brother on a year we are still to remember, and a wedding back home in 2018. I pray my estranged son grows to attest to this too.
It’s never the frequency of seeing each other eye-to-eye that defines the depth of a connection. It's the rare quality of the bond, a soul-to-soul understanding, that makes the heartache so tangible.
Look, I hardly see Kash myself.
It’s the radiant rarity of a connection, an ethereal entwinement of souls, that renders the heartache remarkably real.
Kash and Kevin Ritchie, a handsome soul himself, were the only editors I had who were explicit about the spark they saw or see inside of me. A spark I am yet to ignite. Perhaps I have ignited it and I am burning in oblivion, like a fire in the sea when flammable gases seep out of the seafloor and burn on contact with oxygen in the water. Nonetheless, I am content with being a walking flame.
The Arabic name, Kashiefa, means “discoverer”. She discovered my flame, and Shain “God is Gracious” Germaner gave it a name –Poetic Licence. It’s a portal of healing I tap into weekly on this platform. When it was stage bound, Ritchie, The Handsome Soul, called it Ultimate Form, and he sent me to the Market Theatre in Newtown to archive it. That was the beginning of my then-new chapter of discovery.
Dear Discoverer, as your new chapter begins in the UK, remember the tears of my LOVE. She met you only twice since the reboot of this column three years ago – first in September of 2020 at a farewell lunch of a darling, Sheree Bega, with then-current and former Saturday Star staffers at Mozambik restaurant in Randpark Ridge. And last year, when we had the pleasure of meeting readers at Grill Jichana (I’m having trouble finding a better lamb shank) in Rosebank.
Remember her tears and heaving, they were a physical manifestation of what I was feeling.
She knows what you mean to me; the world is not enough.
She understands the intricate nuances of my correlation with you, a cosmic kaleidoscope with all the colours of the known and unknown spectrum cannot contain this connection, not even the stars up on the highest shelf, not even the cosmos itself.
Till we meet again, Discoverer.