surfing in mecca

I have had a very difficult time accepting this new reality.  I am accustomed to transplanting my feet in new soil and shifting my lenses, my perceptions, my language, my internal clock.  It is something I enjoy and anticipate.  But South Africa has been different, and I have been unable to pinpoint the source of my complex settling process.  It is a complex process, to be sure.  At first glance, Cape Town could be a city everywhere and anywhere; I could equally be in Australia, in Los Angeles, in Hawaii, in France.  The mountains and oceans mirror my wallpaper in LA.  The devil-may-care veneer of students, the boho chic that appears nonchalant but is actually carefully coordinated, reminds me of Berkeley.  Walking along bustling streets, one is equally likely to hear conversations in English as well as French, Xhosa, Zulu, or German.  The UCT Library is generous and filled with a surplus of scrumptiously creased hardbacks, but I typically must leave myself an hour with which to print a two page paper, as the printers frequently catch the flu and obstinately refuse to function.  Cape Town fails to sit comfortably in any distinct category.  It frequently morphs without warning.  And thus, I have felt equally without category and equally placeless.  I have been circumscribing my life here, drifting in the corners, rationally aware of its truth yet fundamentally unable to accept it.

Surfing has been my grounding force.  When I enter the water, I must be vigilant to every successive wave pulling at my side.  I do not possess space in my mind to consider the numbness of my fingers in the cold water, the numbness of my fingers when the girls at the shelter clasp them tightly for two hours, the numbness I force myself to feel when refusing money to the young girl knocking on the door to my flat who calls herself "Miss September."  In Muizenberg where I surf, I am cradled by the strength of mountains.  There are mountains behind me, to my right and left, across the stretch of ocean before me, misted blue and violet in the fog.  And every day I surf, there are rainbows.

At first, I did not want to learn to surf.  I was terrified of the waves, of taking a nose dive on my board and wiping out.  I fall off my board often, and I will probably take a nose dive one day.  Fear is not, however, a legitimate excuse to not do something.  Quite the opposite.  Fear is the reason to embrace everything worth embracing.