You have to try.
The idea scratches around in my head while stuck in traffic. Every afternoon the same, crossing Barry Hertzog Avenue to get to where I train.
The days are filled with tired Domestics on tired feet trying.
Their best not to grimace as the summer heat sets in and the hill needed to reach Barry Hertzog shows no sign of flattening. So tired feet carry tired women up a hill to catch a taxi back to their designated residence in a free country.
Almost every day I see this.
So, I roll down my window to offer assistance.
On a particularly hot day I recall a lady’s feet accepted my offer. By the time the door was closed she appeared terrified of where such tired things had brought her. She couldn’t make out the sad eyes behind my serial-killer sunglasses.
It was just two blocks up a hill, not even a minute’s drive. Still, stories came pouring out her nervous lips: she told me the road in which she works and how on one occasion a Nigerian offered her and her young son a lift when it was raining.
She was scared and ran away, she tells me.
Making it to the top I wished her on her way, but the story wasn’t over, she made me wait to hear the end of it.
I didn’t really listen.
I didn’t really try to.
I wanted to get to training. To try and get better. To try and fix what’s wrong with me.
To try.
Slinking back in the quiet tension of the night is where the idea begins to ache.
The shopfronts adjacent to the main drag, marked with robots that always burn red, is scene to a different crowd altogether.
Car guards weave between road and pavement, energetic from fruitlessness; drug addicts in reflective vests are many of them.
They’re hungry.
I know, they say as much and think they are deceiving me.
But their eyes betray no lie in what was said.
I believe them.
Their vests are proof, an occupation, a necessity. They’re trying their best, trying harder than me at least.
I can’t help them.
Another night, another character, a man venturing from one side of the double lane road to the other. Shorts and a shirt, unremarkable in the extreme, metres from my bonnet he stood out all the same. He and his young daughter in tow.
Anything that would meet them on their short journey would meet his stomach first.
His hands preoccupied, clutching two beer bottles, an evening’s respite from a day of trying.
No doubt.
His daughter holding a reward of her own, a milkshake, I think. Her eyes wondering, the car lights a spectacle to one so young. I just find them blinding.
The speed with which the man covered ground, remarkable. He’d be safe off the road in no time. Safe in his car or stretch of pavement or home or wherever he was headed clutching what was so precious to him.
By the time the accursed robot changed I let first gear release while trying to maintain the father in my periphery.
He thought to buy his little girl a treat, how kind an act.
I think he was trying his best, I know he was.
But the aching wouldn’t stop.
Another night filled with angel lights that sear eyes and scenes that pull at heartstrings, waiting in line is when I saw him.
Strewn out on the asphalt just off the middle island along with all his things.
Not much.
An empty carton of box wine, torn at the bottom and made regal atop his head.
A crown.
Or head covering in preparation for rain that showed no sign of coming.
I think he knew something I didn’t.
I think it would always be that way.
Unapproachable.
Out in the road presiding over exhaust fumes and middle-class desperation.
Untouchable, mostly unobserved yet I knew.
He didn’t have to try.
He was King.