Thawing: Upon the Acceptance of My First Literary Submissions

Bombs traditionally come in the mail, but I received a poem.

I had organised for it to arrive at my mother's house, for reasons that stretch no further than geography - which is quite far enough.

Space, after all, is that matter of distance and occupation in which boil all other things: wealth and war, hunger and humynity, wilderness and woe. Every field of inquiry exists across spaces. Even literature.

There are many people I will not invite to this space. This poem is personal. Its publication is personal. Its arrival beckons the beginning of a new chapter, as it were. An unwelcoming of so many phantoms.

*

The initial news left me in a condition others of my generation would label: #rekt. The acceptance email alone froze my metabolism. Cryo to the core. Weightless euphoria. Breathless despair: how I mourned in that moment the death of every self I'd been, every other self I could have. Howling molten tears. Shock riddled my chest. Reality skewered my gut, decapitated my I-didn't-know-I-had-impostor syndrome, and dunked my parted skull in the well of blissful, agonising self-acceptance.

Too brutal? You don't know the half of it. Failure is the easy part, because learning is fun. Success, on the other hand? Grizzly trauma. Heave it like a burden, because if you sit still, you'll sink, and the incline steepens toward the summit.

One of the hardest cries so far, that's for sure. Like raining bullets. Or thawing. My first ever written submission to a literary journal had been accepted. A fluke, a fantasy: a frontier finally breached.

*

Home is a diffusive thing, like smoke splintering into shards. It is the only invincible armour I have ever worn.

It is both the close comfort of familiarity and the ever-imminent dawn of adventure. It is the gentleness of life's flowing changes, and the gush of its uproarious rapids - the crises, the shocks, the sudden disruptions. Even these bring out our authenticity; our solace blooms from within.

Home is also constancy: an eternal place you can inhabit, an attitude to fill that place, a perspective we carry along with us into the next place, and the next. We are home in belonging, sharing the warmth of our community. But even in alienation, little alarm bells of home remind us that we've gone astray and that it's time to return. A home is dangerous, for it can bottle us away from the injustices that harrow our comrades, and will surely hound us too. Yet it also grants us the safety, the respite, and the shelter from the world's pettiness and spite. Home tempts us to be vulnerable, so our hurt floats to the surface; but without such intimacy, how will we begin to heal?

We arrive home, a destination, but somehow, we're always journeying closer to it. Home is where we rest; home is habitual action. It is the balance and the flux, controlling what we can by letting go of what we can't. Struggling harder and stronger, having found our inner peace.

I can't believe I'm home again. But I suppose, on the shoulders of such heroes, it was only a matter of time.

*

Right now: radiantly quiet, staring at choices ahead on which I've already made up my mind. Destiny is silver with possibility; iron-mindedly ready. I have so much more to write: right now.

*

My infinite gratitude to Dr. Sally Ann Murray, the writer extraordinaire and Stellenbosch University's Chair of English, who selected my poem 'double-dollop hybrid' for this season's issue of the South African literary journal, New Contrast (#187, Volume 47, Spring 2019). Likewise for mentioning me in her extraordinary editorial.

Also: her editorial, in and of itself. Also-also: her answers to the Proust Questionnaire.

Thank you for writing.

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