Kala

by Colin Walsh

I am old enough to stop being afraid of many things. I will never stop being afraid of teenage girls.

I will never be young again, and Kala will never be old.

this is how people are like trees; live long enough, and your life becomes a tangle of trajectories, a crooked monument to its own mutilations.

Everything’s rowdier around us—vibe in the Square’s like a ride at a fairground that’s all the better cos it mightn’t be safe.

Just deprive the victim of their humanity, relieve the community of the burden, the human burden, of recognizing themselves in the scapegoat,

Trick-or-treating with the future.

Life is like this: immense when you are inside it, but manageable from the outside, touched from a distance.

In such moments I felt invincible. We had no idea how quickly time was running out.

“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” It’s a quote from some wan with a name like mayonnaise.

Get to know anyone and that’s what happens; they shed one layer of mystery after another, the dismal burlesque towards their inevitable ordinariness.

The things that make life comfortable are always unacceptable, if you look at them square on. Someone, somewhere, is always suffering so you can be happy. Which is why most people spend their time looking the other direction.

I didn’t realize then that the moments when you can say something are just that—moments—and once they’re gone, they’re gone, and you’ve added another brick to the wall.

So maybe life is just a load of flows affecting each other, in all directions.

But even if you’re putting all your energy into saying no to life, making sure nothing new ever happens, holding the world at bay, it doesn’t matter. Cos, basically, life doesn’t give a fuck. The rivers flow on regardless, inside you, and outside

exactly what you want to get away from?” Rossie takes a deep breath. “Pauline and T are mighty women for the big questions. Stuff makes my head spin, to be honest. But there’s a thing they once said that clicked with me. Your self isn’t some ‘deep down’ thing that exists, away in some other place, separate from your day-to-day. Like, there is no other place. You’re always here. Becoming what you are.”

“Basically, it’s this idea of how all suffering people project their ideas of something better into the future. So by being alive now, we all carry this redemptive promise that was dreamed into time by the suffering people of the past. And, like, every present generation has the potential to honour that promise. What we do now can echo back and redeem what was lost.