Halfway Lamentations

Have you have realised that you will never become a singer by filling invoices or that maybe you will never sew on a button really good and that becoming the baddest button-sewer shouldn’t be your game? You might be one of those lucky ones that have embraced gym and divorced donuts. Are you one of those eager bunnies that have learnt a new language, changed your hairstyle, and are now giving to the poor? Or you could be a sorry-ass case like some people I know and are in exactly the same place you were when the year began.

It would be fair for me to take stock and account for my year so far. I’m not ashamed of my lack of integrity or my evident laziness—I will not go looking at the records to check what I professed or promised at the beginning of the year, if anything. I do know that sometimes I get sporadic visitations from confusion and depression. I get restless when the fantasy video (I still have not upgraded to DVD) that plays in my mind does not match my reality. Then I call on my good friend Jezebel Juice who does her thing with immaculate precision, and in an inebriated abyss I curse my homies that are recording platinum albums, getting investment advisors, going on exotic vacations, buying slick German automobiles and just plain making it.

This takes me back to a time when I was a little girl in the village, waiting at the village post office for the delivery of Whitney Houston’s album, My Love is Your Love. My track of the time was, “When You Believe”. I remember then, I thought I could pass mathematics by studying for two hours after I was done with my TV schedule. Mariah and Whitney had me convinced that I could get a hot date to take me to my matriculation dance and I could grow up to be a successful engineer, astronaut, ballerina, a regular feature on the sitcom Family Matters, a pastry chef or whatever the dream of the day was. You couldn’t tell it now, but when Whitney sang, “We were moving mountains long before we knew we could”, I came dangerously close to hallelujah fits. Now those words are from a song I had forgotten, from a song that if my peeps knew I was listening to again, they would revoke my gangster pass . . . a song that I have again found myself belting out so passionately.

How are you looking, people? It doesn’t matter really what happened, does it? Your miscalculations, misunderstandings, mistakes and all those misses don’t matter, they cannot be undone. I don’t want to preach, even though I have watched enough Aunty O to have become quite the master of fluffy talk. I respect your crazy-ass circumstances and your downright stupidity because we are all human here.

From the bottom of my ambivalent heart, I say close that door and lock it, put your earphones on (be careful not to sing along out loud) and play Mariah Carey’s and Whitney Houston’s “When You Believe”. And then tell me you don’t feel you can do just about any damn thing you want.