Ocean of broken faces.

Hope has no scent here. Only rage.

This week, someone who knows me well, who knows the cracks in my voice when I speak of the past, wrote me a message. ‘Annelies, utterly curious …the Substack, do you create and write that yourself?’

I sat with it for a second. Not offended. Intrigued and slightly entertained. Was he gently implying AI? Or perhaps thinking I’d hired some glorious Virtual Assistant to magically turn my inner world and memories into stories to entertain the Substack crowd on a Saturday?

Let me clear that up because this deserves some attention.

There is no VA. It’s me. In my knickers, bro. Writing from my bed, with sweeping views of turquoise. And a 3rd round of coffee.

In my world, every piece begins with a scent. A sound. A memory that punches me in the gut before breakfast.

I write half paragraphs, scribble like a woman possessed, on the backs of unpaid bills, on serviettes. I whisper lines into my phone mid-walk, mid-tears, mid-anything, and gather fragments.

There’s no mahogany desk where i sit and write at 10 a.m looking all glorious for the ‘Gram. Hell no. I hunt.

Daily and on foot. Ten clicks under sky. Five at sunrise. Five when the light begins to fall.
That’s when the ghosts come, you see. The ghosts prefer those hours. The ache, the old stories, the stink of regret and broken things. I taste rot, hear old chants riding the wind, and I collect. Word by word. Bit by bit.

Then comes the reckoning. Orchestrating the bits.

I lay it all out, unpolished.
Then the slicing begins. Delete. Delete again. I pause, hovering, do I say knickers or go full drama with tiny white lacy lingerie? But if the words don’t punch you in the gut, then honestly, why bother?

Whichever lands hardest.

And yes, I replied:
Yes.

Simple.
He answered back: ‘Wow wow wow. You should write a book.’

Bro, I’ve been writing this book for six years now.
In stolen moments. In fury, in heartbreak, in flat-out refusal.
And yes, in joy too. In roaring laughter and small, sacred delights.

‘Wildfire’, It’s not tidy. It’s not glossy.
It’s scorched.And it’s nearly there.Nearly done.

Except for one bloody chapter.
A right pain in the arse, if I’m honest. Hard to explain. Harder to write.

It’s about a visit I had to make, years ago, when a colleague of mine was locked up. I had to bring him food. You see, jails in this part of the world don’t come with catering services.
No meal plans. No tea trolleys.
Not even running water. No toilets. Just broken dignity.

Here is an excerpt :

Still no rain.
The air is a stew of sweat, dust, and diesel.

Dala-dala conductors swing from the sides of battered minivans like circus men, their shrieking whistles slicing through the haze as they move the market crowd.
Some are drunk on sugarcane gin, others glassy-eyed and swaying, calling out to girls with polyester wigs and eyebrows in the shape of questionmarks.

It’s thirty degrees and climbing. Nothing here is soft.
And still, somehow, the Maasai women glide through it all.

Beaded, regal, baskets balanced like crowns.
They float, untouched by the noise, beaded queens in sandals moving through a kingdom of chaos.
And me?
At the gates of central prison, opposite the market.
A thin plastic bag of rice and beans swinging from my wrist, like some offering to the underworld.
Eyes behind mirrored shades track my every move.

I don’t meet them. I look away. Jaw tight.
“Shapeshifters,” I mutter under my breath. “Fucking shapeshifters. Look away.”

The jailer lady waddles over, white socks pulled high, keys clanking at her side, hips as steady as her stare.
Her arms flapped wildly for me to follow.

The gate slams shut behind me, and the stench hits like a punch to the back of the throat.

Fermented. Animal. Foul. Feral and ammoniac. Like cow piss left to fester.

A migraine triggered immediately, stabbing behind my eyes.

I gag.

Turn my head.

But there’s nowhere to go.

The smell is inside me now, soured urine, sweat, faeces, rot. It clings to the skin, seeps into the folds of your clothes.

Hope has no scent here. Only rage.

The corridor is damp, the light dim . My eyes struggle to adjust.

I wasn’t prepared for this.

There are no windows to crack here. Closed-in by cinderblocks and metal: sweating, breathing, shitting, pissing, and vomiting. Too many men caged into a couple of square meters of metal . I had never seen so many faces in despair, lifeless and hollowed eyes, staring mutely into a void. Humans raped of their dignity. Nailed within the human frame.

He, the monster, had reported me

A spy, he had told them. Spying on the government.

And just like that, it was gone.
My life, hijacked in broad daylight.

Business? Gone.
Home? Gone.

The authorities were after me.
Twenty years I’d lived there, loved there.
But here’s the thing they never tell you: you’re always a guest.
No matter how deep your roots, how well you speak the language, or how many stories you’ve folded into the land, you belong only until someone decides you don’t.
Rights? Zero. And the moment I found out they were coming for me, my mind went straight back to that prison.

Within forty-eight hours, I disappeared.
Fled.
Crossed the border like a ghost fleeing its own body.
Wrapped in a borrowed burqa, sweat pooling down my spine, heart pounding so loud it drowned out thought.

In my hand, a battered duffel bag, once carried by a friend who tracked buffalo through the bush, who read the earth like scripture.
That bag now held everything I hadn’t lost. Twenty years, reduced to thirteen kilos of necessity and a heart full of blur.

So no.
This isn’t AI.
This isn’t a copywriter on Fiverr with a flat white and a thesaurus.

It’s me.
A woman with a story and a reason to write. With a wonderfully powerful determination in her gut.

With love from the Ocean, and still in my knickers.

Annelies