… the crescent and the cross.

It’s just past 09:00 in the morning and the temperature outside is climbing slowly back towards the 30˚C mark. We’re in for another hot day on the African Highveld after an equally warm evening. Sticky and uncomfortable as the moisture is sucked from the hard, brown earth leaving you in a blanket of humidity. It envelopes you like the darkness of a pastoral night that is clear and sharply defines a crescent moon above.

Almost in a moment you can imagine G’d sweeping it in a slow, purposeful arc cutting away all the pain and hurt and suffering from the earth as if he were lancing a boil. And as the draught of the approaching midnight sends a chill down my spine, almost naked except for the thin t-shirt on my back, I walk back inside. Reluctant to fall asleep for the fear of dreams. Dreams filled with faces of people no longer in my life, places that I can never visit again, and the ghosts of relationships past.

I am taunted by the promise of a bright future forged through perseverance. A boy becoming a man! 

An inner strength that you discover when you touch the deepest troughs of personal loss and realise what it means to have ‘heart ache’. But muscles like the heart heal, in time, but the sinewy bridge makes it a little harder and less flexible to whimsical delights of a stolen kiss at Café Florian, drinking a Borolo with that handsome stranger as you lay on a night such as tonight under the expansive sky, or looking into the eyes of your lover over a cup of coffee and realise that this time …

… this time it will be different.

I thought of you last night as I sat looking at the evening star. The evening star will always be a reminder of you as the night that I love so much.