I have long had a fractious relationship with the Rosebank Mall parking lot.

Parking lots in general are horrific blights on the urban landscape. Mall parking lots are even worse. And then … and then, there is the Rosebank Mall parking lot. The final boss. An endless, dingy Bermuda Triangle.

First, it’s always been a labyrinthine thing. Hidden entrances, dark forgotten corners, unfathomable mezzanines and ramps that send you back to where you came from. There are pillars placed specifically to make them easy to crash into and inexplicable blind alleys that leave you trapped next to the perpetual hot roar of generators.

For as long as I can remember going there, this has been the case. Take one wrong turn trying to get out – and after a lifetime of being turned and turned around you’ll eventually emerge, blinking in the harsh sun only to realise you’re now somehow in Pietermaritzburg. It’s as if the place had originally been designed to hide a Minotaur at its clammy, hidden centre – a sinister maze that is wilfully trying to keep you in, rather than doing the decent thing and letting you go out into the free air to live your life.

Machines gone mad

The seeds of our own inconvenience are often folded into the things we create in an attempt to make our lives easier. And this is no more in evidence than in all the mechanisms and devices we have dreamed up to make public parking, something that was already awful, into the closest thing to torture that is ethically and legally allowed by our society.

Actual living breathing human beings at little toll booths were the first thing to be mechanised out of existence, and I really do think that the automated parking garage pay-station is where we started to go wrong as a civilisation.

The amount of times where those machines are either broken, or don’t take the money you have, or don’t have change, or are offline, or the ticket doesn’t work, or the credit card reader isn’t functional, or the machine itself decides to shred your crisp bank note, set it on fire and spit the burning embers back into your unsuspecting face with the angry contempt of a five-year-old who’s been stung by bees, makes me think that they’re deliberately designed to not work. It’s their natural state.

I hate pay-stations with the ceaseless fire of a million suns. They have robbed me of more of my precious life than just about any other thing that exists on earth. And that includes the Camel Milds I smoked in my early 20s.

But you know what being a human is like. We forget things. Or we apply a thick layer of warm nostalgia and false memory to the traumas of the past. It’s an evolutionary protection mechanism which makes us forget the distress caused by banking apps and self-assemble bedside tables.

Trapped in time

Which is how, at 5pm on a Thursday evening, having innocently popped into Rosebank to run a simple errand, I found myself walking to my car (parked at the back end of a level of the Rosebank Mall’s parking that is also just sommer a go-kart track – this is the insanity I’m talking about) texting a friend to see if they wanted to meet for an after-work drink.

As I got into my car, I noticed that there was a queue of vehicles forming. It was a brake-lit snake of VWs and Hyundais stuck in the simple act of trying to leave.

Huh. I thought. That’s odd. You don’t often see a queue trying to get out of a parking unless you’ve just gone to watch Coldplay or something. It must just be one of those things. It’ll all get going any second now. Surely. Surely?

Things did not get going.

After an hour had gone by and I’d moved about 35 meters, it felt like there was the very real possibility of being trapped in Rosebank for the rest of eternity and the level next to the Clicks turning into some dystopian Mad Max universe where people hunted each other for food using broken exit signage as primitive axes to fight off competing gangs driven mad by diesel fumes.

I phoned my friend – that post-work drink feeling like a fading memory of life and colour and what it was like to Be Outside.

“I’m going to be late.”

“How late?”

“It’s hard to say.”

“Why?” she asked.

“I’m trapped in a parking lot,” I replied.

“How?” she asked, not without good reason.

“I really don’t know,” I answered, also not without good reason. Because there wasn’t anything I could see to explain this vehicular purgatory. “I should be out soon.” I said with more hope than certainty.

Surely? SURELY!?

Not so fast

This is where any attempt by our shrivelled minds to grasp at the rhyme and reason of life inevitably falls painfully and profoundly short. The universe had plans for me still.

At the cusp of the second hour of still not leaving the Rosebank parking lot, a kind of deep disassociation had started to set in, a fractured crumbling of my senses.

I’m pretty sure the Kia Picanto in front of me was reciting nursery rhymes, the walls around me vibrating like a giant cosmic dentist’s drill. I was onto my second podcast, but was no longer finding the studied, amiable chattiness of middle-aged white men comforting. Or even something I could understand, as though they’d been replaced by cats and I had forgotten how to speak cat. Life was an endless MC Escher loop, and I was trapped on a repeating staircase having bananas that were somehow also birds thrown at me by a demented clown.

But there, glowing balefully in the near distance, was the unblinking neon eye of the EXIT sign. I was so close. So … close. Inching forward, centimetre by first-gear centimetre, until there it was.

Freedom.

Except, instead of free air and clear roads, the streets of Rosebank itself, somehow infected by the madness within, were just another layer of crawling, hooting, rain-slicked gridlock.

Two hours and 43 minutes after blithely walking to my car – a young man with a song in his heart and the innocence of summer running through his veins – a very different me finally made it home.

Poisoned by time and exhaust-fumes, blinded by tail-lights, aching from unceasing clutch control, I was a broken and penitent Sisyphus, not sure of what crime it was that I had committed, but certain that the punishment that had been dished out was vastly disproportionate.

I was bewildered. Humbled. Undone.

A test of the soul

A couple of days later, I was in a conversation where the topic of Stern Tests of the Soul came up: things we do to deliberately strip away the ego and any preconceived notions of who we are and what our lives even mean, facilitated by sustained and disciplined introspection. People were throwing about all the various things they’d done to lay bare their most precious inner selves: silent retreats were mentioned, so too were various psychedelic drugs. Someone said hot yoga.

It was in that moment that I reframed my entire Trial By Rosebank. I realised that my ordeal the other night was actually a gift.

How lucky I am that I don’t need a bearded guru to feed me a gross mushroom and guide me to the heart of the universe in a smelly hut. I don’t need to go to a 12-step self-help course designed to assist me to access the Power Within. I have no use for a shaven-headed man on YouTube talking about protein-consumption being the only legitimate path to personal freedom.

I have the Rosebank Parking Lot. A perfectly good spiritual trial, run by malfunctioning machinery, crummy design and the ghosts of failed urban planning. And honestly? I think I’m okay with that. Oh and also, I’m getting Admyt if it’s the last thing I bloody do.