That is what I am is not what controls me. Life is something I still have yet to define, I hope I never want to. Living each moment to its fullest is difficult because I know it requires an external view. Which is very hard to maintain for my own life, yet it is something that I practice knowing I will never be able to have control over. I have been told that my calm uninterrupted quietness at times is meditative. That others can see within my eyes the clouds that I lay upon. I am above and below my own words.

Irrational feelings that churn the cream of my traits are now resting at a surface to thick for me to swim in. It all began with my first encounter with a life promised but stolen and a life taken.

Not too long ago I came across a Blessbok in labor; this I thought at the time was to be my first interaction with an animal who was about to bring their blessed child into the world. However something different happened. Pain is a process that I understand is part of life, and now I have seen it become part of birth. She was in pain, and completely helpless. Struggling to breathe and push, she grew weak too weak to even pick up her head. Those two small hooves that penetrated out of her had prepared me for a moment I was hoping to never forget and for those twenty minutes that I sat near her I had noticed that those two hooves had made no progress. I had come to realize that she must have been there for some time because as I approached I observed around her that there had been dried blood frozen on her legs cauterized and attached to the bed of grass in the shade near an odd number of Acacia trees.

She laid their motionless. I kneeled down to check her pulse and to see if I could get any reaction out of her. Those big brown eyes of hers had no life in them, they stared into my soul and filled me with the emptiness that carried through me filling me with nausea and confusion. Her body was warm and soft. The nose still moist with flies crawling in and out of her nostrils. The crusted blood had been covered with an army of flies, they buzzed their way around landing all over her making sure that they had their inspection fulfilled. The baby within kicked trying to escape the womb fearing that it would never make it’s way into our world.

I grabbed the hooves and pulled, they were soft and covered in fluids that made me gag. I squatted and pulled more than a couple times trying as hard as I could giving the child everything I could, all that I never had, for all that it could have. I took its hooves and tried to do the rest, making sure that it would deserve a life for the very best.

The quality of an ecosystem can be assessed by the amount of different life found within a small area. Beetles, worms, bees, wasps, flies, stick bugs, bats, birds, snakes, lizards, frogs, and mammals; They all live together to create a world filled with birth, death, and fear. The belief that in the animal world there is no emotion, is a fraud. They feel as we feel. Perhaps not insects but all mammals I believe, have the capacity for emotion.

I couldn’t write, more so that I did not want to after the accident. All I have is emptiness to dwell upon. I have been detained by my injuries from my escape to India. This one planned trip with a childhood friend that has now been cancelled was a time for refugee and freedom. Now I am rendered heartless for I feel abandoned by the optimism of life. Though the gift of life is an evidence of a higher purpose by my continued existence. Unabashed I now feel selfless for once having felt too much self- importance in my strut and in my mind. Cheating death and coming out of an accident as deathly as the one I was in, has yet to define meaning into my life, nonetheless it reminds me that I am struggler, and takes away a worry that I have. To find meaning, for all I want, is for my life to continue for the best.

Ananda lead with this left foot each and every time that he walked down steps, making sure that the right would never lead. He would repetitively shuffle his feet unabashed by this mindful tricks, creating evidence around him to further delegate more unwanted acts of oppression by his fear of disrupting routine. The stairs were cracked and covered in stains that made him sick, a thick vapor of pollution drifted up above him. His eyes stretched out passed the crowd of people to look out for the sign that would point him to the boarding gate. But in the mist of doing so he found the pigeon colored ceiling with moldy, crusty holes. He remembered a time in which he rested in South Africa to find a brown house snake staring at him from the corner of his room. That bush cottage seemed much more of a preference now rather than this dingy airport. The flight to Harare was a bit less than two hours.

This was better than taking the bus.