Ek bestaan nie eintlik nie Hulle bestaan nie eintlik nie En as ons net 'n bietjie langer wag Sal ons nog minder bestaan (As wat ons alreeds nie bestaan het nie) Dan kan ek mos maak net wat ek wil? Dan kan ek mos sê net wat ek wil? Nee. Glad nie.

If you look at your tomb before it's your time to die, you'll die anyway. That's what they say at least. It's meant to be a surprise. No matter how confusing life may have been, in those last few moments when you walk up those stairs to your tomb, it's all supposed to fall into place and make sense. I say stairs because I imagine mine with stairs. Nobody actually ever sees their tomb and comes back to tell anyone about it. There was that one guy that one time who said he did. He told us his tomb was a cave. Nobody took him seriously. What kind of a tomb is a cave anyway? They say your tomb chooses you. When I was younger I knew a boy who said his tomb was a plate of ice cream. Three scoops of Neopolitan: strawberry, vanilla and chocolate. All leaning on one another - and melting - but never too much melting. That's when the ice cream was at its best, he said. It meant you got both the warm and cold sensations touching your lips. According to him, life was about the contrasts. He was quite political when it came to ice cream. And I admired that. So much so that I decided to adopt a plate of Neopolitan as my tomb too. He chose that tomb and I thought if I was passionate enough about it, it would be the same as my tomb choosing me. Nobody said you couldn't be passionate about somebody else's tomb either. I grew out of it in a year or so, and decided that that was a dumb idea for a tomb. Almost as dumb as a cave. Who eats ice cream off a plate and not out of a bowl? I rejected the plate of Neopolitan and sat without a tomb for a while. My true tomb came to me one evening at a dinner. It was a family gathering which aptly foreshadowed the dread of the situation. I watched as they tied the lobster's claws together and dropped it in a pot of boiling water. To me, there was no honour in this situation at all. The lobster was disarmed of its only weapons, thus stripping any chance of a fair fight. If that wasn't enough, the lobster was given false hope and may even have felt a sense of relief returning to the comfort that water gave it. Only to discover that its home had become a twisted and blistering hell where it was forced to suffocate in a soup of its own flesh. As I said, there was no honour in this situation at all. So, in the name of the weak, the voiceless and the exploited, I adopted the lobster as my tomb. Now I imagine my tomb as a lobster resting on its back. Resting at the top of a few stops where the church altar would normally be. I'm blinded by the flashes of gold that reflect and meet my eye in every corner of this church. The stained glass windows flicker and paint a path leading up the stairs. I walk up to my tomb. Step by step. The church organ snorts awake from its slumber. Only one key plays at a time. One dull note. The lobster's legs expand and contract in unison along with it. The claws are there and they're tied up. The organ begins to hiss. The claws start flailing. The lobster is in pain. I need to free the claws. Now I say I imagine all this because when you truly know what your tomb will be, even without seeing it, it's all you can think about. The key is to fantasize about your tomb. The tomb will bring clarity and release. And you can think about how soft, warm, sad, hard, disappointed, anxious and jovial it may make you feel. The important part though, is not to actively seek your tomb. My grandfather's tomb was a bird cage. Specifically the kind Marie Antoinette kept in her atrium at Versailles. They were like any round bird cage really, except the door was marked with the royal crest. I only knew this because my grandfather would sketch it out at any given moment. He generally only fantasised about his tomb. He never went as far as actually visiting France. The one time he started welding a cage big enough, my grandmother sent him to the doctor. The doctor said the usual and told him he was thinking about his tomb too much. He told him he needed to find something to take his mind off it. So my grandfather took up carpentry. We were all a bit more relaxed since we'd never seen a wooden birdcage and the beams grandfather was using weren't in the right proportions to attempt one. He began building some kind of a stage out in his backyard. Eventually he added a few stairs and finally two longer poles joined at the bottom by a piece of wood with a circle cut out of it. Now a guillotine was never meant to be his tomb. I can see where the connection comes in. But nobody really knows what answers you get when something like this happens.