When there are no words

Elation, deflation. A week later you may not be licking your wounds, but I am. Forget the Men in Black’s “vintage win”.

Mapimpi’s game-changer try was obstruction? I didn’t have my resident Bokkies expert who gave me the love of the game in my corner.

I did see the (brief) obstruction, but wanted to argue. And he would have proved me wrong, I know.

But he’s dead and I’m sending scores into the family group.

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One’s sleeping; another listening to music; one’s just angry with the world and the last one is ignoring us all. I never felt so alone.

A giant of a father and his love for sport means… mother is trying to keep it alive. Or maybe not. Mother can only use words.

“You’re the one that uses words so much better than me,” he told me not once; the man whose funeral 400 people attended exactly because he was a scribe.

So 12 years later I must believe what the ultimate scribe told me.

He’d always allowed me to fly and taught me words are powerful. Not mine.

I wither as Salman Rushdie is bleeding on the floor at a book talk: Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison, he said in Midnight’s Children.

Big words; powerful words from a man doomed to death by a mad religious leader decades ago.

And some boy who wasn’t even born when Rushdie wrote the doomed Satanic Verses did him in. Why?

It’s just words; hurtful for some but stabbing him 10 times speaks of a deep hatred. I see Ayn Rand’s 1957 words trending worldwide. Why?

VIDEO: Salman Rushdie on ventilator after stabbing

She’s talking about us; South Africa: When you see men getting richer by graft and by pull than by work and your laws don’t protect you against them … when you see corruption being rewarded – you may know your society is doomed. It still is just words.

Powerful ones, but I sometimes wish we can communicate like animals: wordlessly. I have a cat.

Not quite mine. Her dear soul also departed; off to wherever and she is stuck with me. We understand departed souls and each other.

I, like her, need a shoulder tonight. She understands and asks for a hollow in my arm.

She’s nestling in and I type around her. I have no words for her comfort. Now that’s powerful…