Phoenix

I am nearing thirty, but at twenty-seven still not quite there, about a week away from being officially divorced, and I feel sometimes as if I am living my own version of The Pursuit of Happyness.

And no, I do not succumb to the temptation to paint myself as the flawless hero of my own life's narrative, because God knows I have played the part of villain, of monster, often enough. Yet, looking back I can see that I have been mostly good, and that I still am and I do not have to do things for some inherent vindication within certain actions.

I, for example, take care of my son, not to appear as a good father but because it is just simply something within me to do, and no rift, indeed no chasm, between his mother and I can sever that bond. And what I get by way of reward is simple and powerful, like the five minutes we spent together last night looking into a mirror, he with a cup of tea and me with my mug of coffee, and the two of us staring at each other through our reflections and simply knowing.

I am single and celibate now, not to appear to have some moral high ground but because I have had something like an epiphany that true pleasure or the true sating of desire is not to be found in the chase and the conquest, nor in the submission. True pleasure exists, and necessarily so, outside of the illusion, the fantasy of pursuit and capitulation.

We should be like planets, bodies in space, floating; and love, or simple attraction, should be something inherent and unseen, a gravitational force which emanates from the core. The next woman I will be with, we must have that, a union without the burden of detritus, or in spite of it.

In the past few months, I have been through the fire. It is not an easy thing, the realisation that the emotional edifice that you spent the past six years constructing was not an altar but a pyre; yet as the ashes cool I have found that those parts of me that have not been annihilated, have indeed been strengthened.

Three weeks to finish Fictions and to raise enough money to publish in time for CARIFESTA. No fucking sweat.