Africa Man, Original

rest in peace rhythm. 

if you aren't swinging by the end of this, don't even bother checking your pulse. 
it's too late.

shout out to therhythmoftheone, rocking for two Fela hours on Sunday 5 August, noon east coast time. 

as long as we live in emptiness

An incredible thing happened today.  I handed over my phone to my replacement, which meant I had to delete 300 text messages I've been collecting since August. There were messages that I had written, messages that I had received, a few that I had never sent. I sat there, scrolling, pouring through my typed, segmented, carefully, often pain-stakingly composed life over the past 10 months. Rereading these dispatches, I traced the arc of friendships. I watched a relationship spark, reliving the uncertainty with which those early messages were composed, hastily deleting the ones where it stumbled, lingering over the triumphs. I found movie quotes and song lyrics from my brother, words of encouragement from my parents, wisdom from a sage and funny FUNNY quips from friends long since moved away.  Messages that made me laugh, messages that made me blush, messages that I wanted to read over and over. I sat for almost an hour, hypnotized, accompanied only by the tight clicking of my keypad. Delete. Delete? Deleting.

In the end, everyone was just a number again. The way they had begun.  As I erased my contacts, messages became unmoored, belonging only to a string of digits. I hesitated, not wanting to lose these markers, these relics of my life so far.

And then I pressed OK.

And then the phone was empty.