Dating : What is to H-E-A-L?

What does it mean to heal? Is healing analogous to forgetting, or is it a new start? Does it feel like a plaster being ripped off the epidermal layer of a child’s knee, or does it feel like the faint leap of a heartbeat? Maybe it feels like tachycardia, when your heart beats too fast, or that feeling when your arrector pilli muscle makes your hairs all stand up.

It feels like a mountain.

What exactly do you do when you’re healing? Are you supposed to confront your past for answers that are to ring in your hears reminding you like haunting processions of the mistakes you made in the past? The kind of reminders that keep popping up in your brain like alarms on your phone’s lock screen, and you miraculously wake up every morning knowing what is right and what is wrong?

Or is healing slow? Is it like the sound of a smooth river that is pleasing to the eye but damaging to the body? A slow march of the minutes, a gradual hour, the grains of sand stuck in ebbs of time, made of silk, shattered in the desert in Salvidor Dali’s persistence of time, warping Matter like Van Goghs starry night: a process as long and as permanent as the scar on my upper forehead. A collection of coffins flowing as banks flank the sides, drifting further from your memory until the time that you killed your pain didn’t even exist, and you can hold the salt of your tears in your hands like the power of milk.

Is it as indiscriminate as the blot of less-pigmented skin next to my left eye? They call these birthmarks- so is healing a wound as big and as enjoyable as a birth mark? They tell wonderful stories and allegories about these wounds given to us at birth- they say they are stork bites, Port Wine stains, a beautiful momento that we accept first before we ask, a little lining reaching back into that moment in time where you were not a foetus but a person, they called you chubby, or quirky, maybe even naughty, or quick to reach the milstones. It was there even before you heard your mother’s tongue lashing against her palate as she looked at you, but you don’t even remember. Is that to heal?

Do people go to psychologists to heal? That is what I see in the series, on the television at home because I do not watch television in University, so maybe it is the process of becoming transparent, when the mirror becomes a window and the body becomes the soul, and you can float in deified corporeal existence like a peice of cling wrap ripped from the roll and hanging in an ethereal current of air for all of instagram to see that you are the guru of meditation. Maybe it is to be covered in epithelium at birth so that your mother can tell your siblings that you were special, you came with a puddle of rain from your mothers womb, veiled with everything that life’s shower’s could bring, a bride before your father had to count cows.

Perhaps to heal is to be suddenly invested with that familiar feeling of reaching out into the cosmos, with the length of your arm becoming the length of your desire, spanning intergalactic distances as you finally find that feeling that you fought for, only that you would not know as you do not know the feeling, but follwed the constalations until you held a magic rod of lightening, towering over the world with breasts made of emerald, feeling at once as if you had found your place like a body doused in the warmth and immiediacy of hot water, to close your eyes under this shower and dream in metaphors.

And maybe it is also to voluntarily peel off all the scabs and bask in the light of the paler, thinner skins, and put the scabs on your back, on either side of your spine, so that it may read ‘HERE LIES MY JOURNEY’, so that their last space in the universe can be dried under the light of the sun, and peices of you can peel from that ventral appendage and remain like vestiges in a shallow quake of history.

For me, healing is to cloak, to diguise and to blind the cues to action until they don’t exist. I can’t shake the feeling that it’s that blunt stab of pain in my anterior neck, inferior to my back tongue swelling with fear, superior to my collarbone warped like the carving on a violin, perhaps even as indistinguishable as the shivers that come with nerves that feel like bundles through your body.

And perhaps even the two seconds spent drowning in the smell of filter coffee, eyeing your reflection in the people that walk past the tall, commercial windows that do not make it feel like home. To realise that that stain on your shoulder is gone…

What is the Nguni word for healing? Do I even know how to say this word in my own language?