The tea is not about the tea

I did not sign the page. I want that on the record before the day eats it. The pen is still in my jacket pocket. It will stay there.

Quiet day. I cleaned the holding bins, fed the stock, watched one small Uroplectes move like a comma across my hand. I have a delivery for the venom lab in Stellenbosch tomorrow morning. Two vials of Parabuthus granulatus venom, one live P. transvaalicus for sequencing, paperwork in triplicate. I have done the paperwork. I have not sealed the box. I keep looking at the tape like it is going to say something useful.

The thing I keep coming back to is not the page. The thing is the man in Citrusdal saying my father's full name. He said it the way a man clears his throat, which is still the truth. He said my father's full name and I heard it as if my father was in the room. Not dead. Not gone. In the room, hands in his pockets, the way he stood at the school gate. I have not thought about the school gate in fifteen years.

I wanted that paper for ten years. I told myself if I ever got it I would frame it and hang it above the workshop bench so every buyer who walked in knew I had won something. I am thinking now I did not want to win in front of him. I wanted to take the pen alone in my own kitchen with the kettle on. That is not how these things work. I know that.

I am not going to drive tonight. I am going to sit at the kitchen table and not drink the tea. I am going to try to be honest about why I am not drinking the tea.