Dear reader,
Music festivals.
They’re great when you’re 19 and drunker than you’ve even been; hell, from what I’ve seen, they’re even great when you’re 28 if you’re willing to pretend you’re 19.
The stage was set up inside of an old barn.
I imagine cows use to calf there, midst the pungently tepid air, carrying all of the burdens imparted on them by their farmer, silently, and then finally laying them down between heaps of manure and straggling tufts of plastic; remnants of old feed bags, perhaps.
In its prime the barn would have been filled with hay; golden wisps of autumn that would cling fiercely to the underside of anyone who dared tread upon them – but this barn, on this weekend, on this particular day, was a different beast all together.
The music was deafening; somehow it was both a destructive force and a catharsis.
The bass rattled every molecule in your veins, causing them to rebelliously lurch against the arterial walls of your circulatory system – nearly escaping through the pores of your skin with every beat.
“There goes ‘flakka lady’ again,” my friend giggled.
‘Flakka lady’, as she had been so lovingly dubbed, was clearly enjoying the festival more than the rest of us.
“Watch out, she’s going to kick us!” my friend warned.
Flakka lady was flailing again.
She’d do this, sometimes, betwixt the bar and the barstool which she had made her home for the weekend.
At times, I was uncertain whether she was dancing or was simply losing her balance and trying to remain attracted to the earth through the pull of gravity by kicking her heels up as high as she could and waving her arms around erratically.
I exhaled a cloud of smoke and for a moment she was lost in it; her gyrating form consumed, and briefly it seemed she too had become mist.
That night I lay in the leaky tent with You beside me, entwined so as to escape the trenchant drops of lukewarm Johannesburg rain that found their way through the crevices and cracks of the canvass.
“You’d tell me if I ever turned into the ‘flakka lady’?”
I mumbled, half consumed by the festival’s frivolities and half lost in the expanses of my own mind.
“We’re all the ‘flakka lady’ every now and then, even if it is just at this festival, in this barn, on this specific weekend, on this particular day,”
You replied,
“but at the very least you’re my ‘flakka lady’ and that should count for something.”
“It does,” I conceded.
Festivals are a fantastic place to come into contact with the highest echelons of society whilst giggling at those hung on the lower branches, but perhaps they’re a good place to remember this as well; we’re all the ‘flakka lady’ at some point in our lives.
Perhaps that should be enough reason for us to withhold our laughter.
Anxiously yours,
Aimee
