The leaves change but nothing else
How do you write about travel when you can’t go anywhere?
When I started this newsletter, I worried I would get ahead of myself, that I would tell all the stories I wanted to tell before I had any new ones.
But then, I thought, I would just talk about Johannesburg but now, even that’s hard.
I don’t really believe in inspiration. Well, I don’t believe in using inspiration for motivation but it’s hard when these things just remind you of everything you can’t do.
While Europe and North America appear to be reopening, South Africa is still mostly closed. We can buy alcohol again. We can get takeout and delivery again. You can buy a meat pie at the grocery store again (I alway go for curry, if they have it. Then it’s a toss-up between pepper steak or steak and kidney, it’s always odd what colonialism leaves behind).
Alert level three.
We might go for a hike this weekend but we still can’t leave the province. Public parks – city, provincial and national – are still closed, but some private reserves have opened.
We go to the CBD, downtown Joburg and, if it weren’t for all the shuttered stores, it almost feels like normal, people are out on the streets. You would be too if you lived in a small apartment and didn’t have anywhere else to go to get a bit of fresh air. Men sell fake license plates on almost every corner, never pay an e-toll or a photo radar ticket again.
You forget about things like that when you’re locked down in a quiet middle-class neighbourhood.
You forget about everything.
I was in Istanbul, eating breakfast at a café and looking at Twitter when I saw the news: Breaking, Turkey is escalating its military operations in Syria.
So close, but so far away.
The waitress refilled my tea.
It is a strange feeling, to know in your mind that you’re in a place, a country, where something is happening but to where the life around you continues on as normal.
It’s a feeling I have sometimes in Johannesburg, a police armoured vehicle passing on the highway on its way to or from something that you would not know about were it not for the news. The shelves are full at the grocery store but not too far away, thousands of people are lining up for food aid.
It’s a feeling I have more and more these days.
The thing that is happening has arrived everywhere, but I still feel removed.
I still have a sense of normalcy, I sit at the same desk, look out the same window, the nature of my work is unchanged, even if the stories are different.
I see a question on Reddit “What isn’t illegal but feels like it is?”
These days, the real question is “what is illegal but still feels like it isn’t.”
“Don’t get arrested,” I say to my wife as she goes out for a jog.
I lose sense of time. It’s been 56 days, or something like that, I told a friend in Canada less than a week ago. It’s now day 70.
The leaves change and fall. But nothing else.