Of mermaids and mountains...

[copyright Jade Gibson 2007]

Well, I saw my first mountains again, in the real sense. When they stand stark and solemn against a night sky, with a three quarter moon rising above a swelling sea coated with a sheen of moonlight. A friend drove me down the coast towards Kalk Bay (harbour), Fishhoek (beach) and Boulders beach (where the penguins are) in the evening, after I declared I hadn't seen Cape Town properly yet. The dark streets with firmly shuttered and burglar-barred shops turned into an open stretch of sky with bright stars circling the moon.

'I can breathe again,' I said. After a year in London, I could see far again, across a sea that suggested new horizons, a vast sky unmasked by buildings, neon signs and massive crowds.

I remembered once, seeing over Kalk Bay harbour wall on a dark night, a luminescent seal shooting through the waves. 'Red tide', explained my friend, 'when the algae come in they float in the water, and when they are disturbed they give off fluorescence. The squid come in too, and people fish for squid.' I remembered the seal; a flash of bright phosphorus green, spectral in the water, as it chased food, the squid also luminescent, darting in bright sparks under the waves. The seal swirled in the dark, appearing translucent as it awoke a haze of spinning green light around its body, seeming almost human in its silhouette. I understood then how sailors could easily believe in mermaids, strange spectres that ghostily haunted the waves with fish-like tails.

Earlier, I danced, my own spectral mermaid, amongst a sea of floating colours. Up to now, I have been looking at Cape Town from the outside inside; as a visitor, a spectator. There comes a time when you move from living in a place from the outside, to a time when the place takes over and encloses you, becomes shell-like, protective, and the two of you are in unison. I am not sure if I am there yet, a little torn between two places, but, slowly, I feel I am growing wings here, and soon, like the seal, will be sailing in my own light.