Words by Natasha Fracc
When ‘swiping’ was a thing you did in break dancing? That day when a ‘dashboard’ was part of your car and held a steering wheel and a clip-out radio? When ‘disrupting’ was that thing you did in class with paper planes; when ‘a handle’ belonged on a door – and an ‘apple’ was something you found in an evil step mother’s handbag?
Remember that day when ‘Content’ meant you were happy and when ‘I’m losing people’ actually meant the ones you loved were dying? And what about the day when ‘followers’ were actually serial killers that lurked in parks – and ‘fans’ were things we used only in the Summer? And when ‘Corona’, well, was a beer you asked for at a bar…
What’s it all about, this second meaning of things?
Is it your God’s double play on the choices we make, or an ambiguous stab at the endings we choose? Here we sit, whiling away the days where words like ‘solidarity,’ ‘social distancing’ and ‘sanitise’ are woven effortlessly into our dialogues and our culture. They meant something else before. And now, they have reinvented themselves as a new language of survival.
Will ‘lockdown’ be a latchkey verb (or is it a noun?) for the rest of time or will we one day know it as an ice cream recipe with 300 000 views, or a thing we say when we’re committed to a relationship? Who can tell. We’re breathing through unthinkable times towards an ‘unknown’ that is only ever known when we get there. It’s frightening, and it’s feverish and it’s tinkering on the edge of a new definition, for all of us. One we have no control of.
“Incidentally, there is no second meaning for Courage”
But what if we took a deep inhale through the hardship, and decided to cling to the things that we know won’t change. Those things that still feel good to our eyes and our souls and our lungs – and that will never ever abandon us for another meaning. Like sunsets. Or air. Or the song of a bird. Or even, the word Courage. Incidentally, there is no second meaning for Courage. Nor patience. Nor kindness.
These are words that have held their weight in feeling and definition through centuries of war-torn cities and joy-induced lives. They have lived on through the bunkers and the river banks, and the bombings of Hiroshima and the Twins that fell to their knees and the Bubonic plague that lasted almost 400 years. The sun, the air, the birds and Courage came through all of that, without a scratch.
It is these little things that will continue to survive intact for us, through the loss of the hug and the handshake and the kiss; they will survive through Zoom™ calls and mobile screens, and face masks and glass windows. We know this for sure, because History tells us so.
Between the night sweats and the mind numbing and the softness of your children’s’ cheeks, it is somewhat settling to know that no-one will ever ask you to remember a day when Courage was another thing. Because, it is an instinctive resource irrevocably unscathed. It is certain – and it is yours, unchanged. Like the sun, like birdsong, like air.
