Stockyard Creek; Toohey Forest; Creek Road; Mansfield

I look in the secret place every day but why do I bother? Why do I bother? The wheels turn and the days go by and I'm no nearer answers. Yes, there are reasons to bother but it's difficult some days to make them amount to a life.

I keep walking because if I stop I am a target for mosquitoes. It's damper down here by the creek.

But it's a sunny day. How can you feel anything but sunny when it's sunny? I love the smell of the trees. I love the music that's playing as I walk. I love everything and still it's difficult to make it amount to a life.

One day I'm going to leave it all behind, drop it down a well and make it just another piece of history. One day.

Maybe I should worry less about mosquitoes and stop for a moment.

***

You know, I have never stopped loving a person I've loved. I don't know how. Even when they've hurt me enough that the best advice would be to stop loving them, I couldn't do it.

I take myself too seriously when all it is is a case of neediness that even the destruction of hope couldn't extinguish. Or is it? Perhaps I really am bigger-hearted than I want to believe and I just don't find an outlet for the love I want to share.

Or maybe it's just one more brick in an edifice so poorly put together that I'm scared of mirrors. (But couldn't you just take a hammer and fix that? Why does it seem impossible to rearrange the bricks?)

Except I did stop loving Jesus. Do myths count?

***

There has been a crash on Creek Road. Fire trucks and police cars are huddled around the wrecks. I can't see how bad it is. Beyond a small pang of sympathy for a child without a father, a mother without a child, I don't care about it. I am even annoyed that the car in front of me has slowed to rubberneck. I want to get home to read Zenella Harry Potter. She seems so tired she can barely be listening, and yet she remembers the details. She is beautiful. She has suffered badly from having to share her mother with the twins. She has suffered too because I have been such an arsehole. I haven't meant to be but I crashed into the mud and couldn't drive back out. I'm still here, crying at the wheel. Every time I think I see a towtruck, it turns out to be another motorist, stuck in the mire, wanting to be pulled out themselves.

***

I have become scared of going out again. You wouldn't believe it to talk to me. I'm not brittle or shy. I'm not retiring, not quiet, not even as gentle as I'd like to be. But I am scared to find out what's available because I'm scared it's me, it really is me.

Is it you if you become twisted? Is it still you in a new shape? Or is the real you the unbent version that you could return to if you knew which way to turn?

Maybe there just isn't a way back and you have to live with the new you.

Hey, don't fret, I'm just talking. I won't ever lose my faith in us.

posted by Dr Zen @ 1:02 pm