From the ashes

Everyone has been talking about the Cape Town fires, but I've had little to say...until now. 

I thought I was okay until seeing the pictures of the charred, hollowed-out Mostert’s Mill. That's when I felt this emptiness.

Pre-COVID, I attended one of the mill’s open days with my family. I wanted my son to experience the awe I felt when visiting this working piece of history as a child. He loved it. When we talked about the fire, he kept saying that the mill couldn't be completely burnt down. Oh, the heartbreak.

But it is more than the destructive fire that saddens me. I think that, like many Capetonians, I have felt deeply affected since we've already lost so much in this pandemic.

I didn’t realise that I’d miss smiling at strangers or that there was a powerful intimacy of that quick embrace with friends, standing shoulder-to-shoulder and talking about nothing in particular and everything all at once while our children ran between us. I took that for granted. I was too busy, running through my to-do lists, to notice. I turned down coffee invites from old friends and potential new friends because I too busy. I didn’t think I had the time.

And then COVID spread like wildfire. I was retrenched and now I have the time, but because I struggle to pretend everything is okay, it's hard to scrape together some semblance of a social life. It seems that now masks are worn as necklaces, distancing is out, hugs are back and the social media selfies that prove it only make people like me – people who still take the threat of COVID seriously – feel alone.

And just when I thought we were making our way with masked playdates, one of my mom friends mom-shamed me for making my son wear a mask. She told that my son might start to think that something is wrong with him because he has to wear a mask and that he may become depressed. She seems to think it is better to lie to my child and tell him that there is nothing to worry about anymore, as though our whole family is magically immune to COVID. To me, that is like running through fire without any protective gear and hoping that, if we’re fit and fast enough, we won’t get burnt.

But we burn anyway. We burn to be as carefree as everyone else.

In a play park recently we watched from the sidelines while children huddled up close around a cake singing while proud parents squashed together to take photos as a birthday girl blew out candles. It was beautiful and horrifying at the same time. There were no masks, no distancing and all those respiratory droplets. And this is happening all over, all these little flickers that, given the right conditions, could turn into the next big fire.

I’d like to think that after the fire, we can rebuild. We could plant indigenous trees to replace the pines we were once so fond of. And maybe, one day, we’ll forget that there were pine trees on the slopes of Table Mountain or a time when not wearing or wearing a face mask could mean the end of a lives or the end of friendships.

Photo by Bjørn Tore Økland 

P.S. You might enjoy reading Stepping off the path