Point Cook

There is a carpet of yellow flowers, and we walk a trodden path between them. It reminds me of home.

I can feel your hand, warm in mine, although the day is cool.

I have wanted to touch you, more than anything else I have wanted in this life, although that isn't much. I am a man of simple tastes, simple desires. I have only ever wanted to be free, yet no one is chaining me but myself, the lurching pedestrian jailor of myself.

When I would dance, I was aware of my feet. I never seemed to be able to forget that I was in a room shuffling my feet, no matter what I did, there they were, and I couldn't forget it. I could never let go.

In the distance I think I see birds. What else could it be there in the sky? And I realise, this is what our knowledge of the world is and always has been: just what we expect to see, everything moulded into the pattern we feel is there, has to be there.

***

I am a man adrift, like a plastic bottle on a tidal ebb. You say to me, you have arms, you could swim to shore, but I cannot feel them, the sea is cold and brutal.


But if I had arms, I would not be drowning.

***

I feel a chill. I have to go. I don't know whether I have to go or just don't want to stay.

If I was dead, and you heard about it, you'd have a moment's brief regret and move on. I am sad I never amounted to anything. I wish I could have captured joy and put it in a bottle, but there was not enough joy to colour my days. It's no one's fault but my own.

You wouldn't even miss me. I'd be a name, a vaguely remembered face, perhaps you would smile if you could remember a good thing about me.

Perhaps there is no good thing about me. I fabricate the good because I cannot feel it inside. I realise, life becomes a spiral when you do not love yourself. You look for others to fill you with the love you cannot feel and the more you want, the less you seem to be able to find, and you find less and less to love in yourself and seriously, how can you expect others to think you are anything but what you are?

***

Perhaps though -- let me leave you with this thought -- perhaps one day you will find yourself in a dusty street in a southern French town, and you will buy yourself a peach. And the juice will overflow from the first bite, dripping onto your chin, more juice than you can swallow, running in rivers from your mouth. And you will think, he would have really enjoyed this.

It will never happen. You have no interest in visiting the south of France any more. You have so many reasons not to. But if you do happen to, yes, yes I would have really enjoyed it.

posted by Dr Zen @ 8:32 pm