It's  surreal experience to really feel at one with a place. Like you belong to the smokestacks, and the hot tar and the grinding wheels and the gutters filled to the brim with the city's discarded papers. The first time I felt like I really belonged to Joburg, and it belonged to me, was at the very outset of a 14 hour bus trip to a one horse town in the Eastern Cape. The mammoth bus affords me a slightly elevated view of my surroundings. Over the red tin roofs and hand painted tavern signs of the CBD I see the decaying office buildings, and the blocks of flats with clotheslines drooping from the balconies like mardigras flags. Weeds sprout from between the cracks and the bubbling paint, making their own way in the world. In the late summer evening sun, every barefaced brick on a ten story rise glows,and something clicks. I put down the book in which I am attempting to bury myself and will my eyes to fix the image in my cluttered mind, before the moment's intensity is stolen by a taxi driver turning down the wrong lane or a red robot. Smashed plate glass windows next to the rusty fire escapes reflect different shades of blue and brick, keeping the secrets in the gaping black holes well hidden from prying eyes.

That particular time of day has always been special to me,I'm really not sure why. The world shifts gears, and the walk of the people on the street takes on an urgency. Everything always looks slightly less bleak in that gold light. Looking at the city as I was deserting her for a week long jaunt in the country, I figured that life had me where it wanted me just then.

(unfinished travel piece)