The Expedition to the Baobab Tree

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WITH BITTERNESS, then. But that I have forbidden myself. With ridicule, then, which is more affable, which keeps itself transparent and could not care less; and like a bird into a nest I can slip back into a tree trunk and laugh to myself. And keep quiet too, perhaps just keep quiet so as to dream outward, for the seventh sense is sleep.

In the past, time often caused trouble when I still wanted to have more than day and night was obsessed with counting and uncertain whether the times during the day when I dozed should be reckoned as night, where night was the eventless and day the busy. Sleep as night. How I sometimes stretched out my nights, curling myself up into the smallest possible bundle in the darkest hollow, forehead pressed against knees to kill the gnawing within myself, entangled in confused thoughts, and fixed on a color to which I held myself so that I could later say, my sleep was blue, or living red like blood, or a grey transitional shade. I woke up crumbled, sat up lightheaded, unsteady, and set a dusty foot down in the great assegai blade of sunlight that bores all day with a steady murderous twist into my dwelling.

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