Beneath the rain

The rain, the rain has washed away my tracks,  not unlike butter spread on cat paws; now I'm under the wonderful disillusion that I've lived here all my life, nowhere else. Cape Town has been like that me, which is why - this time - it feels to me that I've been adopted, not the other way around.

They've been big-fat-splat drops that have made a defenite, welcome impact against the windows and the roof. Juicy and ripe drops that have fallen heavily. Then burst.

I'm living above a house now,  just beneath the heavy-sky rain. It's a wonderfully odd shaped room of many angles, precise triangles. It's a broken white painted wood-panelled room, floor straight to ceiling,  with a lead paned window and a double lead pane French door that opens onto a medium sized roof deck that's all mine.

It's a delicious attic room with a stand alone wooden wardrobe that gives me unfettered access to the Newlands Forest,  the Rhodes Memorial, and Narnia; I've my lion and a witch. I moved in here on Thursday. At last I'll have time to ingratiate myself with my 6 year-old God daughter,  Lily Rose.

There are four books on my bedside table, three of which are intricately linked to Cape Town. The fourth book, Werfsonde by Kleinboer, harks back to Yeoville, Johannesburg, and reminds me that I do in fact have Transvaal tendrils and roots.

I've moved back into the coffee shop, amongst the people and books and coffeearoma. Next to a young couple tentatively feeling around themselves: "If you ever hurt me...", I'm worried that his deep nasal voice and wandering mind might put me to sleep. I'm automatically protective of her youthful wholesomeness, in memory of mine (long, long gone), not ever wanting it cracked or broken. I'm not made to bring offspring on to this planet, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.

I moved into Newlands on Thursday;  right beneath The Mountain, it's known as the southern suburbs 'burb with the most rainfall. I've no problem with that of course: red wine, good coffee, books, wood smoke and soot blackened hearths. Not to mention my attic room.

In brackets: "The flâneur has no specific relationship with any individual, yet he establishes a temporary, yet deeply empathetic and intimate relationship with all that he sees--an intimacy bordering on the conjugal--writing a bit of himself into the margins of the text in which he is immersed, a text devised by selective disjunction." (www.thelemming.com)