Jonah

In my dream last night, you and I were fishing. Your feet were long and brave enough to break the surface, while mine dangled shy above a cold I later reluctantly held in my hands as I helped you remove the freezing fish from the water.

I was the one who offered to slice open the belly of the scared body, wanting to protect and shield you from a death I naively hadn't expected. My chest rose and fell as quickly as the one trembling in my clutches, even as I pretended to be handling the situation with deft and confident incisions.

You looked at me with an expression on your face so numb and devoid of any particular expression, that I wonder now if you weren't appalled at what I was doing, even though at the time I read the look as one of surrender, of consolation, of farewell.

And once inside the fish, still panting though ever more slowly, we saw no innards where innards should be, nor blood, nor signs of any organs to keep any living being alive. Instead we found your father's watch, ticking and still living, as it had on his wrist never needing to be wound.

It was your idea to leave the watch there, to tie it back up inside, to return it and the fish to the depths. There they would forever lie, together and without you, even though we stood looking at our wobbly reflections knowing part of you would never be seen above the surface again.

The accident, the tourist

Yesterday afternoon I went to visit my boyfriend visiting his father in hospital. For the entire twenty minute drive I watched in my rear-view mirror, a man in the car behind mine picking his nose.

I wasn't offended by his actions, nor his lack of discretion, more surprised that he had that much to pick out. And then I realised he too must have just moved house. I spent a good few hours on my nostrils on Friday evening after relocating from Fitzroy to my new city apartment. New that is, for me.

He must have lived in his previous home for years; packing his beloved, yet dusty possessions carefully into a series of scavenged boxes, or else his new place is a fixer-upper and responsible for the soot and moving debris up his nose needing immediate removal.

The other information I gleaned from his actions at the time, was that he must also have been driving an automatic car, one hand on the steering wheel, the other free to plough into his face.

I wouldn't want to be his nose cartilage if he were forced to brake suddenly.

And so I drove on, carefully, and more predictably, until he eventually passed me by.

take care, but don't be careful

the trouble with grief, when it is not your own, is that it behaves much like the rubber vine i read about in an article whilst waiting for my boss to have his back adjusted by an osteopath last thursday.

there was nothing better to read in the reception area, or in the magazine itself, and so i waded through each intimate detail of the plant: its pods, flowering times, life-span of up to eighty years, the best methods of prevention and control, and i thought myself bored at the time, but now my mind returns to the weed, so crippling in its threat to the waterways and woodlands of northeastern australia, that it has been classified as a "weed of national significance."

grief has a similar hold.

grief won't let the light in, nor let anything else grow in it's immediate vicinity.

just so you know, writing this makes me feel worse.

for a while i kept waiting for the back-drop to change. for make-up to be called in to touch up the lines by my eyes from too much squinting, smiling. lines that reveal exactly where i have stayed too long.

and then i decided to be careful. then i decided not to be so careful.

and i know that you know that it is easy for me to write any and all of this, because it doesn't belong to me, even though i belong absolutely to it.