The heat is getting to me. It comes as a depletion of air, forcing films of water from my skin and it’s like breathing from the spout of a vacuum cleaner minus all the dust. I read of an English autumn, shuffling leaves and the smell of earth, sunshine slipping off bronzed foliage onto a road leading downhill. Cars weave by and it’s like a river minus all the water but still I am sinking, turning and oscillating, drowning faithfully as expected. Sleep beckons but I am tired of the shadows I get under the eyes and the endless droughts inside of them. The only dream left is the dizzying heights the climber hopes to reach and the angel fears to fall. And the mortal wonders at the use of it at all.

Bones are grating against each other, all fifty-four of them, under the skin of my hands. It’s like a tango; except the tempo is all wrong. Once upon a time I used these hands to wring poison from my whining, dream-haunted brain; but now they lay useless. I’ve even stopped playing shadow puppets with them in the morning sun, because I’ve taken to waking before the sun rose. I hold them up, right angles to the wrists and push. Hold the world at bay while I struggle between finding the best place to hide or fastest way in. I wish you’d all stop asking me about who it is I’m looking for or what is I’m waiting for. Some things are neither lookable nor waitable. I don’t know when it’ll end. I’m too busy begging for mercy— for it to finally begin.

It’s a laminated red card from the Alfred and its final sentence proclaims the holder of it to be radioactive until 2013. No sex without a condom and no holding babies, he tells me with a wink. I can still shake hands, though and he squeezes the back of my hand as though to prove it. His skin feels like paper softened from sweaty palms and repeated scrunching. Somehow I don’t doubt that he might be dying. I think it has something to do with that gut feeling you get when you know someone is afraid, but they’re trying not to be. For everyone’s sakes, you know.

Ironic that the woman in the wheelchair who comes by every Sunday and who complains of all her ailments and troubles still comes by every Sunday and still complains of what she’s complained to me about the week before. It is most morbid of me to believe that Death only keeps away from her out of either a strong desire to prove her wrong or to keep her hooked.

I think how unfair it is that it is always the cheerful people who has to put up with the kind of things a person shouldn’t have to put up with. Like cancer, like having to work twice as hard compared to before just because now you’ve realized that there’s not as much time as you’d thought you had left. 

After all, you can still shake hands even if you are radioactive.

I have forgotten how nostalgia can play tricks like this: one moment I am in my room, fitted snugly into a bean-bag with a seagull-shaped book in my hands, and the next I am on a windy island. Lonely all over again. 

Lately I have taken to practising chords in the hazy bluish light right before nightfall. I can’t see the frets and can only, barely, make out the strings. It is not surprising that my fingers feel the strings better— the wiry sharpness of the sixth; the texture of coils on the first. The semi-darkness brings a new sense of uncertainty into the notes, which I can’t bring myself just yet to describe as music. But I serenade— to the best of my ability— the curtains on the other side of my box of a room and across the sea of my bed, anyway. 

The human brain is designed to retain. A net of nerves, blood and fluid that is ever-expanding even as it is simultaneously dying. We tire of the pain of knowing and fear the loss of forgetting, and our breaths catch at the sight of another’s memory toppling over the craterous depths of the blackest hole. I’ve once read that having Alzheimer’s is like rubbing out a chalk-filled blackboard; the duster begins from a single letter in the centre, then spreads out, wider and further, until the board is wiped clean of every single word. It is frightening, isn’t it? To know that even the most cherished memory is not safe inside your own skull. 

In an ironic way Nature is fair in all Her dealings. Take, for example, the falling of limestoned ground. In what they call sinkholes there are occasional, delicious gifts— deep pristine pools; jagged-tooth caverns; plants previously thought extinct— preserved in all their glorious wholesomeness. Who is to say that the loss of solid ground has to be elegiacal? Peel away those thoughts and memories we’ve learnt to armour ourselves over the hours and the years and here we are— all pure and clean again. 

How just, and how deserved of us; that the moment you do remember is often more precious than the memory itself.

It is disarming the way reality dulls the senses. A soothing of the skin and hair follicles; a false security. Who’d expect a pickled arm when life has shone as an unwavering beam of warmness for months. Even years? Aeons.

Look at the seven seas and those lichenous landmasses and you, a stranger, make a quip about my height in the world. Oh, my distaste for the climbing that takes your feet off the ground! Why not dig toes into the soil and spin. Steadily grow. Flourish. Erupt.

How to take a fall standing. Absorb venomous balls of unintentions in a coronary vein or cradle an icy blade in the curve of a tongue. It is a skill in cheeks, and of knowing your left from your right. Letting the spikes burst into spine-cracks, twisting and burning and stinging. It pains me to bend: this thing they call Sin. Pride.

Another night rose from the ground. I don’t like the unfamiliar; nor the phantasmal Route 55 hurtling towards me, all rattling windows and fluorescent lights, out of the the dark. The goddess abandoned her jeweled cloak in the chase for something better, and this gridlined city bathes under its multifaceted glow as its own shadows deepen. An all-consuming energy streams by in pulses and pauses and the lights blink blindly along. I am in fear of the night city. Of the suddenly illuminated sights passers-by were never meant to see. Sloping faces, wandering hands, shoes worn inside-out— to name a few. The simple blackness of it. How newly hatched sea-turtles struggled towards our never-ending lights instead of the swaying, flickering ocean. The treachery and fatality associated with it. Yes, it is the conjurer of nightmares: this night, this city. The bulk of the guitar rests wordlessly between my knees as I hum, erratically and breathlessly, the first bars of Prelude in G Major. It was long ago that I’ve learnt of the word “self-sooth” and recognized its importance in maintaining sanity. I smelled jasmine and sunburnt footpaths just before turning that corner, I reminded myself firmly.

In one of the many books I’m in the process of reading a woman wrote an entire chapter about reading and writing. She wrote of books I’ve read or heard of or even owned but haven’t gotten around to reading just yet. It’s never happened before. I feel like I’ve met an long-forgotten friend I didn’t even know about, I feel I should pressing those pages to my cheek. I know they’d cup my jaw and we’d fit together like jig-saw. Snugly. The moment when she said writing embarrassed her. Isolated her. Because imagining was equivalent to lying. And I thought, Yes, me too.

She wore her hair carelessly loose. It was silver-white reflecting tinges of the palest lilac when she turned her head. There must be a special name to making your hair that way, I keep thinking to myself, some fancy Hollywoodish name; something slightly old-fashioned that I’d never even heard of. Or perhaps not. Maybe she thought it up all on her own, with those dark eyes of hers that glittered like brittle gemstones she doesn’t seem the type to tamely sit in a hairdresser’s chair with her hands primly crossed and place her hair at some mere mortal’s mercy.

David: “She would’ve been stunning when she was young.” And Lida nodded furiously, then added, in case there was any doubt at all, “Super-duperly stunning!”

I had the honour of bringing her her coffee and she thanked me huskily for it - a lifetime of jewel-studded cigarettes condensed into a single word. She blinked charmingly. I didn’t know that a woman could do that: talk to you with her neck inclined like a graceful bird, talk to you with slow-moving lips, talk to you while looking into your eyes and blink in a way that made you wait— almost breathless— until she opened them again. How she sparkled! I wondered how many hearts she’d captured and adorned her dresses with before the smiling man sitting opposite her now caught this beautiful woman in the very end. A beautiful woman with such femininity, such power who made me feel so child-like. My dirty apron, my messy hair, my goofy purple glasses, the androgyny that had made me feel so safe. This is indeed power, and this woman who only came by for a coffee had it, and used it as effortlessly as she breathed. 

I decide to grow my hair until it flows into silken rivulets. Although it is most probably irrelevant.

On the train this morning I sat next to a boy engrossed in the hardcover volume he cradled in his hands. I eyed those creamy pages flagged in blocks of red along the edges like stepping stones or possibly even stairs; and wondered to myself A dictionary, of all things while the engine hummed and the carriage swayed and the wheels rattled once in a while. A solar searchlight scanned our faces through rain-misted windows at precisely 7:30am and the boy had hair like twisted yarn, a boring mudwater brown speckled in water shadows and sun. And you should trust me because I know: there is nothing like reading next to a window with the sun out right after the rain. I was envious of him. He had the seat, the light and a travel guide to Peru (I’ve realized that it wasn’t a dictionary by now) on this monotonic metallic Melburnian morning. The word Li-ma brimmed with intensity and colour. His headphones were the size of my fists and the sound of his music pierced into mine, ran along with the melodies lightly in the strange steps of a foreign dance. This must be the magic of classical music, made of notes that fit like hands sliding into water between the peaks of waves. There is an infinity of possibilities to two rhythms, or the safety of walls to a room of one’s own— an inevitable choice, they say.

a long time since I’ve written as fast as my brain 

whirred 

in time with the speed of the sparks 

of cauda equina

double-loss fingers running across a sheet of plastic keys 

(posing as metals, posing as 

more than they’re worth as I am)

looking for the right place to belong

pushing, punching

ever have you typed so hard you grew small

miniscule pumps that beat firmly pressed

your prints on

to fit presumably

who wrote in what

sense do you mean the how

comes of the where 

did I hide the diaphragm

no

they’re all here queuing in neat lines of variable length

as neither lung nor heart

only venns

In the middle of a dream last night we tore through a silent meadow and its beauties flew by like pages of frozen scenery. The grasses did not swish nor did the tree-leaves tremble. A flock of swans sat upon the rippled water of a pool unruffled as I waded past their sides. I desperately wanted to wake and write of mists but the mist would not come to me. Nor would anything move. I conjured and imagined and tried to force some motion, some life or in the very least some sun into this quiet grey place. 

In the end I fear that I must have deadened something with the plenitude of previous words, all those decorative recordings. There is a limit to everything, I learn.

How, for example, would I tell another of the world tilting inside of me? Could you draw a fallen city, or a dying flame, or perhaps a twitching animal eating the life out from its very core? If I were to tell you she is a girl who had bound herself to an unflowering tree while the Spring she longed for crept along the grass stalks beneath her feet— would you recognize her face, amongst the many I might show you? When a single word has the magic to invoke a composition of emotions and memories, and a single sentence the power to condense and combust a lifetime of unnoticed, irrelevant moments into the star of a person— the lint and flecks your eyes caught in streams of unpaused thought— a universe created from your multiple souls. How would you like to look me in the eye and tell the world of my insanity? The scientist says we dream of our deepest desires. And so it is mine, daybreak-prior, to complete a minefield of unfinished clozes. 

I come to conclude that not all of us sleep to rest.

Silence builds its own bridges: the same way a river carves its channel, or how a tree draws its rings. We sit unperturbed on the bridge watching briny waters pass beneath our swinging feet. Even as children we knew that bridges built on bridges collapsed make for strongholds, for impenetrable sores. Who cared whether this is the hundredth or the thousandth time we were caught in between the same crevice, trapped on the same bridge? The bitterest of rivers will still flow. You won’t stop burning the lake and you will never see the colour of your palms, father. This I know.

In a world where corals are turning into bone shards and icebergs are dying at sea, who are we but the minute? When the quake begins we will rupture as predestined along fault lines of our pasts and scatter from the nerve-ends of the plant; some as petals, some as seeds. Who will catch your fall, father?

I stood on my side of the crossing and stared into the solid black of evening draped above the streetlights and the clattering of the rail-crossing bells and the bus shelter on the other side. It was grey and overcast when I left the city on a train bound homeward not so long ago. Still day-lit. I start thinking about inkblots. If the sky here was a blot of watered ink I’d be staring into the centre of it. Then it’d get lighter, lighter, and fade steadily - eventually - into its edges. I imagine a monochromatic landscape and a train running from one end to the other, back and forth: light to dark to light to dark to light. Should I take a train back, and test the accuracy and limitations of imagination? Perhaps, if one really believed in the power of thought. Perhaps then a city of one’s own might forever remain in daylight. I am pondering this when the train pierces a sudden hoot into the dark air and begins to move off. Metal wheels smear past like a streak of ebony smoke beneath a row of aluminium boats. I like watching the lighted windows flash by. I find it oddly comforting and wish train rides were never-ending.