The following is a post by Myer Taub, who has graciously been donating a monthly column.

[This time its personal] So here I am in LIL OL’ Newlands, the last English colony of the twentieth first century [sort of…] rehabilitating my surgically reconstructed knees and I have this flashback to me being fourteen and flirting with a girlfriend on this high arched cement steps leading up to our form classroom. I do something silly so that I trip fall and damage my knees. I remember lying on a stretcher at the -then- New Johannesburg General Hospital, my father looking over me, looking past me, knowing he is not really thinking about me but about my brother who is smoking mandrax pipes in Hilbrow and Daddy strokes my knees and says it will be alright, which then it is, because he said so. It's twenty years later and I am standing outside the Bronx on Somerset Rd. and am struggling to take my ex boyfriend home, he is so drunk that I want to hurt him and so I jump in the air thinking I am Uma Thurman from Kill Bill except the only difference is that I am wearing pumas and not tigers… (Sure) and I rise in the air falling backwards on myself, snapping my knees sideways (one and two) I fall against the pavement. Three months later I can walk and so I take a young boy (trick) camping in the Ceres over New Year and fall down a mound collecting twigs and then I decide to get strong so I swim+gym,+cycle for four years and I refuse to let my legs or rather me knees give way and its four years later I am in JHB, happy-drunk-silly-handsome. I am in the seedier side of Doornfontein, having just left a boy bar and I have two boys on either side of me and my best friend ahead, I climb onto the bonnet of his car and refuse to get off the bonnet, so he starts the car and accelerates. I slide off taking the windscreen wiper with me. I am 39 years old and in one month I will be forty I will probably have a very small party–just me and the very few friends that have called or visited me during this rehabilitation time (the black book of condolence etiquette) I lie in my bed – watch the blue sky and the green pines sometimes stir in the dry summer air and often my mother comes into the room to either love or annoy me as she just has done now… I wonder what if I hadn’t fallen in love so many times would I be in less pain now and I think how my life has become about that and people and cities, intertwining and then breaking rupturing painfully brutally hopefully recovering. I close my eyes and want to swim, swim to anywhere but here but here I am. (who said healing did not hurt)