He had only moved to the city recently

He had only moved to the city recently and was not yet familiar with the circuitous roads that seem to meander and twist back into yet further streets named after trees and tropical plants. Cordia into bamboo into oleander into aralia into poinciana. As he walked along the road he paused to try and locate the source of a particular odour. It was a sweet smell. Of fermenting fruit. And seeing nothing that might account for it he continued walking.

There was nothing especially uniform about the houses in this suburb except that each appeared to maintain an indifference to the other. Each house whether carefully maintained or roughly sitting behind metal linked fences was a territory unto itself and in this sense each distinct rectangular kingdom was like the next and the man expected that each housed a family that was much like the next: husband, wife, children, pet. Any individuality was lost on the man, who walked with the slightest stoop, eyes pinched in the sunlight. Whatever he expected from these houses the man saw no one as he walked. The streets were empty and apart from the rustle of lizards as they emptied from the sidewalk sunshine into underbrush and leafmeal the only other noise came from birds.

Small, white-faced double-barred finches peeped and hurried into dried grass nests constructed amongst the leaves of pandanus. Olive backed oriole swooped ponderously then disappeared into a mess of greenery while bar-shouldered doves, with their rust-red necks, scaled with tiny feathers, scattered amongst the seeds and debris of pathways. The man, who may not have noticed these things, still walked and in the heat of early afternoon began to tire. His shoulders stooped further and he felt within himself a quickening of the blood, an unease that he carried with him suddenly bursting. He appeared as a man who had at once remembered that he had forgotten something and a concerned and pained expression fell upon his face. He was not certain why he had become downcast but were it not for his surroundings, he thought, he would have dropped to his knees and wept. He thought of his wife and family and friends, and felt for all this utterly alone.

The man was not prone to melancholy and he gathered his thoughts amidst the uncertainty of his sudden sadness. He wondered what sort of self examination of his inner feelings might be necessary to determine precisely why he felt so overcome with an emotion that he imagined approximated grief. For a moment he considered howling, expelling this uncomfortable stone that swelled and constricted in his stomach, but at the last moment, as he had just begun to raise his head but before he had urgently thrust his face skyward and opened his mouth, he hesitated and instead continued to walk.

June 23, 2013

A boy is sitting, windswept in the prow of a dinghy

It is late evening and a boy is sitting, windswept, in the prow of a dinghy. His father navigates across the sand pan, between moorings and markers. The sound of the engine makes it impossible to talk so the boy sits silent, facing outward, eyes lowered, his pale face bristling at the water’s occasional flecking. There is the faint smell of fuel and wet rope and the boy wriggles his bare feet which have begun to stiffen in the cold water that sloshes at the bottom of the boat. Looking out across the bay the boy notices light reflecting across the water which, just for a second, seems like the scales of some shimmering monstrous creature. The boy quickly wipes a wet hand on his trousers and tightly grips the gunwale. The boy’s father looks back at the trail of the boat frowning at his failure to negotiate a more direct course. As the small boat passes the last of the navigation markers the boy’s father turns the throttle accelerating into the bay. The boat raises against the thrust, leaping into the larger waves of deeper water and in an uncomfortable rhythm begins to shudder and slap across the bay. The boy’s weight can’t stop the prow from lifting and the father slows the boat sensing but not seeing the tightening grip his son maintains on the side and the way that his toes have curled and legs have braced to try and hold. So once again they slowly make their way across the water. The man watches his son. He watches him pause for a moment to pull his woollen cap tightly down over his head. The father’s cigarette has long been extinguished – the ember was blown brightly from the tip as he pushed the little boat out through the sand and silt – but it still hangs wetly from his lips, the end frayed with tobacco strands. The father gazes into the sky and even now, after so many years and so many journeys, is amazed at how vivid the stars appear. He locates Orion, the three bright stars that form the belt of The Hunter. Without knowing why it seems important the father wishes he knew other constellations, other names of things, so that he might tell his mute son. And as he looks again at the tight woollen cap and outline of the boy he is gripped by the sense that he doesn’t know enough at all.

May 13, 2013

I am writing to you from no-place

I am writing to you from no-place. The dark hours between waking and sleep. This time visits me at the trough of morning, before the scrape of birds upon the roof, before the sunrise like explosion across the harbour. I write wishing I were with you, wishing that the audacity and passion of text could infect those moments I spend with you. It is August. Around me, around this place, the imbecilic wind haunts, accelerating between buildings delivering some apocryphal message for thirty days and nights of this month. The air slows and a thin gauze of cloud unfurls, its silver pallor covers the sky, darkening, diminishing star-speck. Looking out into the streets, into the city, into distance, I look for the angels that walk among us not knowing whether they journey through the City of the Dead or through the living. I look for them hoping to see the penumbra of figures peering through the windows of my neighbours’ house inspecting each for some signpost or a familiar to deliver to them directions or instructions. Nothing appears no dark wing beats at the window and no coal black eyes. At this hour, in this no-place, nothing exists. Perhaps this wind, in its fury, has left an absence. The welter of leaf meal and seeds, of litter and dust, seems to have vanished. For a moment I am the last of things. But I know that this cannot be – you are sleeping. Drawing breath deeply from your stomach, your fingers curling through fabric clutching like the clumsy hands of a child at something that seems always beyond grasp. Your breath quickening, rising and falling. And at intervals the planing of one foot across the other. A near-silent portamento and the slow comfort of touch. I am dwelling too long in the shape of your body. The slow erosions of movement that curl your hair these nights have left fine spidery talismans across sheet and pillow beside the scribble of yesterday’s makeup. Even here, far from where you sleep, hours before you will wake (when perhaps you will finish a glass of water left from the previous night, throw open a window and examine the advancing hours, then pad quietly through still dark hallways only now illuminated by weak shafts of light and begin washing – the first of your small ceremonies this morning) I know what it must be like to lie beside you. There is little else to do at this hour. The distance between this time, between this place and the next differs whether I sleep or sit here and write. This distance between us is equally unpredictable. Despite a childhood of promised blood-red sunrises mornings begin with a small dot of light that gapes through the rest of the sky washing everything with painful alacrity. There is none of the possibility of the earlier hours. Morning presents itself naked and cold. With the light a pentimento, shapes and lines previously hidden in the darkness, and a return to normalcy. I am preparing myself a pot of tea. The sounds are of the boiling water, the neighbours’ dogs anxious to free themselves of their nightly burden trying to break from their yards, the click of bird-claw on the tin sheeting above my head and the occasional menace of sharpening beaks, engines grinding passengers up the street and ferry blasts. Three short sounds indicate reverse and the need for correction before turning back into the harbour.

February 17, 2013

I recall her stance

I recall her stance, the way
she teased the blue smoke, like hair,
through long fingers. The
way I smiled though inside
I was as stale as a spent
match.

January 27, 2013

Everything that I own is not mine

There is the sense that everything here, everything around me, that I own, is not mine. I have no connection with these things any more. It is as if these are the relics of another life.

In some respects they are. It is because, as the song says, everything I have is yours. These things all once belonged to her. To her and I. Ours.

Of course, reading letters is difficult. Whoever they are from they were written to me. But also, not me. To a previous me. With emotions that are long spent. Loves long burned hollow.

And the other difficulty is realising the passion with which I lived. When everything, every fibre, every dollar, every breath was for her. Notes, gifts, I have them still even though I have largely forgotten when I loved her so completely.

It is not just that the love is lost. It isn’t just that we no longer love each other the same way but that I’m not that person anymore. I don’t greet each day with the same determination or passion, filled I expect with the knowledge that I am loved and am in love.

The market basket that now holds my laundry was once a Christmas gift for her, full of food and wine. And without her now these things have lost all meaning. The glasses, the coaster, the lamp. When did I let this all go?

I’m not sure that I can live just for myself. Not that I can’t go on, just that each day is half-lived. And I don’t know when it all fell apart. I imagine that if I can determine the break then I can remedy or avoid but really, now, all I can remember is the joy lost.

So I dream of running. Hitting the road, flying somewhere far away.

With movement I can distract myself from the loss. Though at some point I have to stop and face whatever has happened.

The problem, when a relationship like this dying, is that it isn’t just the end of two people; it is the end of the two people that they would become, the dreams and plans that they shared, that they began to prepare themselves to become. And the break destroys that, destroys those futures utterly. Even reconciliation meets with different dreams. More fragile, less fanciful. Not hopes of living in Tuscany or by some beach, but dreams of just making it work.

So now, I’m living in the vacuum of those broken dreams. And I made plans. I had tried so hard to map out what I would do after the split. I knew how I was to regain my footing. But that isn’t the same thing. And I’m living a half life in the emptiness of dead dreams.

And now I wonder whether running is enough, or whether running is necessary. Perhaps silence. Remaining hidden and mute.

January 3, 2013