Mantis laughs. 

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In her dream she is walking barefoot across the sands of history. Mother is cooking nyama on the coals, of which there are never enough, but ​​Unkulunkulu has hidden more than a little fire in mankind’s heart. Passionately, she picks up the embers and casts them to the heavens  — a sea of lights to guide lost souls through the dark. 

 

Vistas of vast nothingness and galaxies of infinite improbability, giants dwarfed by supermassive suns, nebulas bursting, binaries colliding, neutrons pulsating, supernovas exploding, exoplanets made of pewter and diamond and rock — all spiralling in an endless cosmic dance. 

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Countless civilisations circle countless suns. 

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She is travelling amongst them now, through the sea of stars to the point where it all began. The place where time encourages itself to stop. Light slows and laws break — all is still. She rests for endless eons. 

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She bursts again. 

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Impossible heat, neutrinos, hydrogen, helium, gold — stars and their dust. She is every aspect of the cosmos come to know itself. She is the very architecture that holds it up. She is Mother Earth, Father time, the Ein Sof. She has become many for the joy of becoming one. 

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The world turns and Mantis laughs. Far below she senses the distant plane from which she has temporarily escaped; can feel the pull of it calling her back. Gaia’s irresistible green lungs. 

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She awakes to a desert heat; the sound of drums. Hui! Geab Hui! Geab, Tankwa Town — and someone is asking her for a screwdriver and someone is laughing with a new lover and someone’s mother is lost and the music is hopping and the insects are buzzing, izinkanyezi, amidst a constellation of smiling faces, destined to never repeat.

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A squad of stormtroopers rolls by on a flying carpet listening to a cantina band about to take a quantum leap, and an anvil is defying gravity, and a pastor is getting married to a purple love machine, and a bug is trying spacejuice just for the novelty, and the quaggas are braying, and the lights are a-popping and we are playing, playing on a living breathing rock turning through inner space — and she, swirling amidst her existence looks down and thinks, isn’t this an oddity?  

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Finally there is you, and we are in love. Swinging like stoned monkeys from a giant monolith, breathing the cool evening air — wonderstruck, by the significance of insignificant things. We hang our heads back and marvel at Molalatladi, the space where lightning rests. We know our place amongst the stars and we forget, a little while, our desperate desire to make things last.  

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To the east a blood moon is rising and the Clan is burning. A thousand sparks light up the night sky like fireflies trapped in a glass jar and she thinks, I am where I am and you are where you are and the space between us is not so very far.