Crises of confidence have been arriving like waves recently; purging everything I hold dear with their purity and perfect logic.
I have endured one for each of the last three nights, a paralysis which lasts for a few seconds, and the swallowing back of every negative thought that my mind so expertly conjures.
During one such episode of self-assault, I explained to Bluefish that I sometimes wish she could pick apart the haystack, and prove to me decisively that the needle does not exist.
She arrives in England in three days, after almost six months of waiting. I won't hold her to her promise of teasing apart all the hay in my brain - it fills the cavity of my skull - for she would very quickly be exhausted. It is her imminent arrival which causes the unceasing questioning.
I've been here before, but the situation was reversed. Flying to South Africa with its garbled language and broiling weather and vast distances for the sake of love. Seventeen hours the first time and ten the next. It was less than two years ago but nevertheless seems like a distant, impossible dream which recoils from me when I reach out to touch it.
I do not wish for Bluefish's England to be the same truncated, ungraspable memory. Think of just about the furthest place you can travel to from here - it makes Johannesburg International Airport look like a walk to the shops - and that's where she's coming from, to see me and me alone.
A redeeming feature I must be, for there is little else to hold her interest, save for the sun drying the rain, and the rain repudiating the sun. No strange language to fascinate and appal, and any natural beauty drowning in the river of human shit.
This is England, my darling. I long to dismantle its haystack and present you with the needles instead of the wisps, but you might need to do that yourself. And this is me: go to work, write a bit, do a bit of studying, worry, complain. I hope that, together, the country and the man are enough so that, when you return home, it is only a temporary hiatus before you come back to your surrogate nation and my perplexing, intense love.
