I was never a huge Jens Lekman fan- I don’t know that there is such a thing- but, I was reading Pitchfork earlier this evening and as a familiar name caught my distracted eye and my fingers invariably clicked on the article; I had to reassess my ambivalence towards the man.

His music still isn’t my favouritest thing, but his words had me charmed. It’s hard to resist a man who quotes Joan Didion, or says things like:

I didn’t have a home in the world, so I wanted a home in a person.

He says the exact things that I have felt and wanted and yearned for: the idea of  ’home’, the idea of ‘a person’.

I’ve always felt that I was betraying some idea of myself, of who I was by admitting that I yearned for a home, for someone that loved me as much as I loved them. I worry that I am failing peoples’ expectations of who I am, what I believe, and where I stand. That this is not who I am, that I am giving in to some idea of what I’m told that I want and need to be ‘full’, ‘complete’.

That I, quite simply, want something only because I can’t have it.

I don’t know what the answer is, only that this isn’t it.

—

In between our dreary winter days, there are days like yesterday: the sun smiles down at you, the wind is quiet, and the clouds stay away. It is painfully beautiful to look at the clear blue of the sky and a mountain face in relief.

It’s calm enough for an evening walk with a friend, her sons, their dogs, and a bottle of cider in my hand. We walk along the river and I think on my new world.

I decide I like it here.

It fits like my favourite jumper: warm, with frays in the cuffs to tuck my thumbs into.

a puppy, the river, and Table Mountain in the distance.