In the shadow of Table Mountain

Anyone out there?

In the shelter of the Table Mountain, there is a stillness and eerie silence that greets my ears, the cacophony hours ago, at street level, some two floors below has given way to snatches of sounds travelling distances unknown, probably of someone singing to themselves.

The insomnia phase I am in has been brought on by the slumber that caught me away on the couch soon after a sumptuous Christmas dinner. The many nights of unsleep caught up in an afternoon, an evening and a night of sometimes absented wakefulness that only my tracker can plot into any perceptible coherence.

Looking out of my window, it is only a quarter past one, and at the junction are two public safety personnel in their green and yellow uniforms, that it matters is strange because a major police station is hardly 6 blocks down, where another of the personnel appears to be walking up the street.

Someone out there

You might even hear a baby cry or a car drive past, we are supposed to be under a curfew, whoever it is must be on some essential or emergency activity. It is quite peaceful on occasion to just switch off even primary and local sources of sound and listen, though it would be nigh on impossible for me to sleep without the radio on.

Someone then punctures the quietude with the hoot of the car horn, you can only wonder why if the roads are free amongst the many other reasons I should not exercise myself about. I look out again, I am in both a modern city with all streetlights working and a place of inequalities, a man without the comforts I enjoy sits on the pavement pondering a homeless world.