I never wanted to go to law school.
I wanted to write. Crisp poetry. I wrote thousands of poems — in parks on damp benches, on the subway with the rattle of the tracks, in empty halls between classes, on failing computers and damp sheets during moves. I wrote them everywhere and lost them everywhere. The words slipped away like sand.
But the real place I kept returning to was Port Elizabeth at twelve.
On the train from Johannesburg to Cape Town I had a massive fight with the chess tournament organisers. They were cheating for their son — rigging my schedule, impossible draws, no breaks. I fought back. They threatened to put me off the train. I kept fighting. My chess coach told my parents I had more courage in my baby finger than most adults.
Then I flew from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth. An air hostess walked me off the plane herself. Into the most beautiful place in the world. I had seen Cape Point. I would one day see Niagara Falls. But something about Port Elizabeth informs my consciousness still.
I was twelve. I didn't know I was young. I met two girls. We talked, we walked, we chased the shadows of the Rabbit band members around the city — as twelve year old girls do when they entirely ignore the boy who is simply happy to be with them. How after all could they choose me over a rock star? My parents and granny were waiting. The sea. I remember standing on the shore, the sea brushing up and kissing my feet, and feeling — without quite putting it into words — that this was forever. Peace.
I didn't know then that the shadow of youth was obliterated by every sunset.
I have always been a fighter. Even when it's stupid. Even when it's pointless. But sometimes the fight takes over the real battle. The one with myself.
My mother once stood me on the shores of a beach in Cape Town, looked out across the water, and told me that is where the political prisoners are kept. That is where Mandela was. She later got to vote for him — insisted on it — when he said that people who had left could still vote. The beauty and the injustice existed in the same moment. And still — peace. Still — the sea.
I built perfect scenarios around that peace for forty years.
The vacuum is not the absence of accomplishments. It is waking up and realising you haven't accomplished what you planned to. And because life is finite — the years go by like sand.
At sixty-two the apartment is the same. The chair is the same. The three paragraphs are still there.
The vacuum won everything except one thing: the refusal to let the scenarios stay trapped forever.
Futurizing was born in that refusal. It does not shame the 3 a.m. scenario building. It does not replace your sacred futurizing with cold planning. It simply asks:
"What is the tiniest, ugliest move I can make right now that honours even one percent of that future?"
One grain at a time, the sand finally started landing in my actual hand.
This site exists so you don't have to wait until sixty-two.
Keep building the scenarios. Keep tasting Port Elizabeth.
Then let one tiny piece of it touch the real world before the sand runs out.