Today, the river is green. Clumps of broad-leafed plants stretch from bank to bank, spinning in delicate patterns as they are pulled into eddies that ripple from the centre, where the water runs fast and deep, and the squat barges, heaped high with gravel, spread tresses of silt behind them.

Toward the banks, the plants clog the water, a blanket bunched around the boats manoeuvring between the piers. The surface looks solid and substantial, like the tops of clouds, as the seatbelt sign dings to itself in resignation and you soar upward into the sunlight. I always imagine pulling myself through the window, running down the wing, and swan-diving out into the white.

I want to hop-scotch across these plants. I want to run like a basilisk. I want to be free.

We hit a narrow channel and slow to avoid the curling wake of a passing longtail. A swarm of tiny grasshoppers, green as the plants they’ve leapt off, launch themselves into the air and onto the woman in front of me. There is a wet slap as a catfish hurls itself from under the plants and smacks into the side of the boat, as if in competition with the grasshoppers. The woman doesn’t react at all.

The shrill whistle of the conductor sound from the rear of the boat, as he guides it toward the dock. Endless wolf-whistles to anyone who will listen. We are under the bridge now, in a moment of shade, and in the distance I can see the building that is built but not finished, near-fractal recursions of faux greco-roman balconies stretching 40 floors into the sky, the columns less and less complete the further you crane your neck.

The river is green, and as we whistle our way up against the dock, I remember green Pepsi.

.

“You want green Pepsi?” he says, as the lady with an apron bulging with cutlery leans over to place bowls brimming with thick brown soup in front of us. There are small chunks of meat in here I can identify, and larger ones I can’t.

“Green Pepsi? What?”
“Is special Pepsi. You want, you try?”
“I want. I’ll try.”
“Okay, I go for green Pepsi.”

At this stage, I am imagining one of two things. The first is a special edition bottle, bright green, with energetic Thai script, and with pictures of cavorting, oiled young things, smiling as they frolic over whatever beach or forest setting the men in suits deemed appropriate to “really, like, connect with the demographic.”

The second is a bench, somewhere in this mass of people sat on plastic chairs under the bridge, where sugar syrup and an assortment of tiny bottles are used to concoct whatever bespoke beverage is required for the occasion. I am thinking about green Pepsi. I am thinking about bhang lassie, happy pizza, special cookie and ‘hey mister mister this one just for you special okay?’

Okay.

What I am not expecting is enormous cans of Heineken, and matching green straws. He grins and pushes one across the table. “Green Pepsi!”

The lower balconies of that building behind him are covered in bright green paint. It hurts to take it all in at once, the building, such is the enormity of the spectacle of 40 stories of crumbling opulence, a tall, broken kingdom surrounded by a sea of humanity. It’s not something you expect to see in ascendant Thailand. Instead I think of rural Japan, and of their struggle to retain a sustainable population, as the excess of the bubble years is slowly reclaimed by the trees.

..

I dream of a river with deserted, crumbling schools lining its banks. Where blackbirds swoop between the trees, harassing hawks three times their size. Dragonflies as big as my fist hover above the surface of the river, iridescent and ancient. The train fills with school children and then empties again. Lungs. Like lungs.

I dream of you. I think this is important.

You bound through the glass door, and the house is as it was when I was growing up: orange map of Texas on the back door, potted plants crowding against the glass criss-crossed with fat strips of masking tape, to stop the dogs running through it. The bricks outside are specked with moss.

You throw yourself into my arms and smile, really smile, then nestle your head against my neck.

“How did you know I was back?”
“Your brother called. He said I had to know.”
“He said…”
“We all know.”

I wake and, in the dim light that filters through the curtains, everything is green.

Posted in Mwah on Wednesday August 25, 2010. Shoutouts.

Gnarled and pitted wood rests where it has fallen, shapes transformed by the tiny creeping filaments of the moss that covers everything, in this place so textured with age. It is in everything: in the soil woven thick with fibrous, sinewy roots, in the song of the tiny birds that whip amongst the canopy, and in the Maori prayer that echoes through the trees, a complex baritone chant that surrounds the knuckly boughs and reverberates, liquid and substantial. But most of all, it is in him, as he towers above, timeless and massive. There is an air of certainty here. Of inevitability.

Kauris spend the first hundred years of their life fighting to clear the canopy, and to reach into the sun. There are trees of that age scattered around the edges of the clearing and their slender trunks look fragile in comparison to the massive bulk of Tane Mahuta squatted in front of us. This is the world’s largest known kauri, and it is some two and half thousand years old. His name means the “Lord of the Forest” and he is the one that dug his shoulder into the muddy ground, coiled, heaved, and rent Papatuanuku and Ranginui asunder. In this, he created the earth, and the sky, and brought the huddled god-children, blinking, into the light.

I spin a slow circle and take in the vertical abbreviations in endless green, and try and judge their age. It is sobering to think that before these trees reach the sunlight, we will again be returned to dust in the ground. Still he towers above us.

.

A school of fish are pinned to the wall with nails. They spell the Maori word, Koha. It means a gratuity, a gift. The fish are chocolate, and I take one from the wall and chew on it. Behind me, a mountain of butter or, more specifically, a particular mountain modelled in miniature, in butter, shares centre stage with a radio in the shape of pavlova. I am in New Zealand. I ponder if I can get away with taking a second fish.

..

It took longer than we had planned to clear the sprawl of the city of sails, Auckland’s network of freeways, perpetually under-construction, are lined with witches hats and empty in the pre-dawn light.

In time the blocks of prefab industrial buildings give way to the rolling greenery of the hill country, the road ducking and weaving between hedges of scraggly gorse. On the way we talk of the burden of assumed responsibility, and she says, “It’s getting easier, you know, getting easier every day. At first it was demanding, and difficult, and it put me in a bad place. It still is, of course. It still is difficult. I guess there was an element of guilt there, a sense that somehow, in some way, there was something you could have done differently that would have changed things. You have to let that go, or it’ll tear you open, but once you do, it becomes much easier.”

She had mentioned this in December, briefly, as she stood by the window and looked out over the city. A punctuation, a pause, and a furrowed brow before she turned away and pointed out her school, her college, the path we had traced in the rain as we tramped the back streets beside backpackers on the piss. The lines on the hotel window remind me of those painted on the inside of the cabin that undulate as they trace the curve of the fuselage.

…

I have spent fifteen minutes in an unfocused daze glaring at the walls of the cabin. The lines. This is dendrochronology for the jet-set: a record of the passing of designer signed glasses over dappled grey Formica, white linen, and perfect half triangles of folded navy-blue tissue paper. My head rests against the wall of the cabin, and the gentle vibration of the engines rattles my teeth.

I follow these lines as they buck and curve, cut short by dotted plexiglass, and the blue on blue on blue of the early morning Tasman beyond. The Weather Report mutter in my ears in approbation, bass, strings, and the clicking of my teeth an unintended solo.

I have the volume down enough to hear cabin noise and this half-heard jazz is entirely at odds with the Chilean pop, as interpreted by the immaculately-manicured hostie, that issues from the galley behind me, accompanied by the soft clinking of cutlery.

The seat belt sign above me illuminates, dings, and Senores Pasajeros are asked to secure their seatbelts. I drift out of consciousness.

….

The sign, framed in the green and yellow so favoured by the DOC, informs me that this tree is partnered with another. One whose clumpy, knotted branches stretch into the mountainside mists of a pentagonal island several hundred kilometres off the southernmost tip of the four major islands of Japan. I’ve been there too. It took a pre-dawn departure and seven hours hiking up trails set between the roots before we stood at the top and leant back slowly, marvelling at the spread of branches shaped over four thousand years.

Jōmon has rested there since humans huddled in groups around their fires, set between the barrows, shaping tools of bronze. This squatting giant felt the pull of seasons before people had arrived, before roads, before cars, and before the view from the clearing took in the structures erected on the islands in the blue haze of distance. Cranes and gantries that plot the initial point in the parabolas of white scrawled across the sky, tracing the rockets launched from Tanegashima as they claw their way beyond the pull of the earth. That there is evidence standing in front of us of these kind of time frames leads to a very acute feeling of insignificance, and the realisation that we humans, for all our bluster and self-worth, are but a buzzing noise, half-heard, at the edge of the world’s history.

…..

We collapse onto the grass at Manukau, and my heart soars. The spray-flecked breeze brings with it the smell of chips, and the laughter of the kids playing touch with a rolled-up ball of newspaper beside the fountain. I can just make out a santa-hatted figure at the far end of the beach, reaching forward into a yoga pose I cannot identify, nor replicate. We are engulfed by the familiar sounds of summer: that meaty thwomp of a wet tennis ball being lofted into the ocean by a cricket bat, the squawks of those enormous red-beaked gulls as they fossick amongst the kelp, the snap of unfurling canvas in the breeze.

The essence of the Pursuit of Happyness, she says, lies in seeing mistakes, feeling the shape of them, and then laughing them off for their triviality. That y, for example, it has always bugged me, “and that’s the point,” she says, “that’s the whole point of the movie. Seeing the frivolous for what it is and moving past it.” This resonates, the cracks meld, and I stretch back and take in the sun. One of the kids has scored a try and is thumping his chest, newspaper held aloft.

……

This has been a pilgrimage of sorts, I think, a quest to reach out for something spiritual, if spiritual is the right word for we two godless, empty vessels. But there is spirituality, for me, in the wonder I feel in these two places separated by hemispheres. For all the treated pine boardwalks, the shutters of cameras clicking behind me, and the carefully hidden dark green barbed wire wrapped around the base of the tree, there is something beyond measure in the age of this place.

Our fingers wrap, brown on white against green. She is back then, for a second, and I drink it in.

Then it flickers and fades and she recedes. Disconnects. I fail to chase it because I know something has changed. Something fundamental. And from that comes a powerful desire to grasp the present and to shape it. To leap between the connections and to trace them back to their source, and be kinetic and frantic and alive in the way only humans can. For all the crossed paths, confusion, and duality of the past few days, this is good madness. It is transient in a way that is entirely at odds with this place, but that is human, and it lifts me up and gives me purpose.

We look out over the forest. There is a spider crouched on a broad leaf at eye level, powerful jet-black front legs tapering to a rear of mustard yellow, the outline of a smaller spider in reverse, and its whole function centres around this deception. It jerks a few steps backward then leaps forward and is gone, in the perfect choreography of something that is not what it appears to be.

We are here, both of us, in this place beyond time, and we are both thousands of miles away, seagulls chasing each other into the pines and the smell of salty air as irresistible as the call of friends and family, as they collapse onto the grass ahead of us, laughing. The future unfurls beneath my feet. It ripples and shears, and is beautiful in all its scattered, tangled complexity.

Posted in Mwah on Sunday May 30, 2010. Shoutouts.

I wake at eleven thirty and know, at once, that it is food poisoning. This is followed by the realisation that, in less than six hours, I need to be on a plane. My fare is non-flexible, non-refundable, and on a public-holiday long-weekend, near impossible to rebook. I grit my teeth as the first waves of nausea ripple through me. I will make that plane.

I roll onto the floor and reach for the backpack I have yet to completely unpack, the zips still covered in the tape the disinterested Laotian border guards applied after a cursory search and a half-hearted push for bribes. I feel inside for the battered plastic shopping bag, the one with a grinning number one, muscled Popeye arms giving a dopey double thumbs-up; “Clever shoppen auf Plus.eu.” This is my travel drug collection, and it is both versatile and extensive. I begin to prepare myself three courses in tablet form: a smorgasbord of pills from crisp foil pockets, a chaser of stale water, and the sour metallic taste that comes with the realisation that I will not be sleeping, not tonight.

That night, I discovered that my roommates will be on the same flight, and we plan to pool our resources and share a cab in the morning. When they awake at 5, I am standing in the kitchen, staring at the floor, a fizzing rectangular canister of blackcurrant flavoured oral rehydration solution in my hand. I am sweating and shivering simultaneously.

“Morning”
“Good mor… what happened?”
“Woolies potato salad happened”
“Oh. Oh, right.”
“Food poisoning”
“Oh, Dan.”

The last is phrased so as to communicate three things. These are:

1. You look like shit. Really, all kinds of fucked up. Are you twitching?
2. I asked you to book the taxi last night. Did you book the taxi?
3. Will they let you on the plane? If we travel with you will they let us on the plane?

These are answered are simply:

1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. Yes. In fact, I have been through Canberra airport so many times the past year that the security theatre has sunk into a lower level of consciousness, and is so finely ingrained I don’t have to think as I pull things from the pockets they belong and put them into the pouches they belong. So, while you wrestle with bags, check-in machines and the conga-line of people struggling with their shoe buckles, I will be upstairs, behind the mirrored glass doors of the Qantas Club, kneeling on the floor of one of their pristine toilet cubicles, throwing up blackcurrant flavoured oral rehydration solution.

I spend the rest of the day alternating between bed and floor and enjoying Prochlorperazine tablets. These, although yet to be endorsed by Mike Myers, are nonetheless little, yellow, and very, very strong. When I wake, it is afternoon and I can eat bananas. I can drink tea. I am overjoyed. To celebrate, we head out to buy alcohol.

The rain thumps the windshield in wet slaps, a schoolyard bully with a history of rapid escalation. He’s working his shtick, and the routine fits like a glove, so practiced is he in its execution. He’s balanced in the ebb and flow, and the way he juggles the expectations of this newcomer is in lines set to perfect verse, drummed in iambic pentameter against the tempered glass. Lash. And pause. Then, as if taunted from across the quadrangle, the droplets yield for a second, and there is a suitably dramatic intermission. The wind darts into the wheel arches, then golf-ball-sized lumps of ice begin to slam into the windows.

The sound is of someone throwing rocks into a trash pail. Large rocks, small pail. Outside, my partner in crime scrambles to pull shut the door of the garage. The rain is so heavy all I can see is the odd limb jerking spasmodically, a shadow puppet silhouette behind a wall of water. On the news that night, there are pictures of cars with ragged holes in the windows, houses stippled with damage from clouds sheeting mortar-fire from above, shrapnel of ice from the sky.

Going out in this to buy bitters, mixers, and those little cherries that taste like everything your grandmother ever baked, is mental. I’m grinning as we aquaplane over roads that look like rivers and even though I don’t drink, the payoff is a night of new faces and new ideas, and tiny pieces of candy scattered across a suburban driveway from the belly of a shattered pinata.

The next day, an inch thick carpet of leaves covers Melbourne. The cartoon fat kid drawn in the condensation masking the inside of the train window defrosts from the inside out, revealing a tapestry of sheeting rain outside, outlined by a chubby double chin. Shops struggle to outdo each other’s flood signs, and while there are a few “CLOSED DUE TO FLOOD DAMAGE,” I also spot a “Water, MAAAATE” and a “Closed, slight water issues. (ie. TOO MUCH!)” Inside, a huge pedestal fan is balanced on its side on the floor, blowing against a stain on the carpet that is far too large for the fan to have any reasonable chance of influencing.

I step into North Face and emerge fifteen minutes later with a jacket that will sit in place of the one stolen that night in Berlin, when we sat in the gloom of a squat bar under a disused railway bridge, and downed shots of Jäger amidst the yellowing propaganda, all angled lines, shades of grey, and futura on everything. The Aussies we had met were there, and we played up our challenge, shambling around with arms akimbo, poor facsimiles of bears on hind legs. We ran home through the snow-lined streets, me in a t-shirt, pale skin turned peppermint blue with the cold.

The pockets are in familiar places, the right places, and muscle-memory is at play as I reach for the zip that fastens on the right. It is like meeting an old friend after an absence of years, time dripping away, and shared experiences of the then settling comfortably together with the now. I quite like this pocket metaphor, and I wonder if it will stand up to being applied to a person. Who is not a garment, does not have pockets, nor a zip that fastens on the right. The metaphor is retracted and we hug under the row of clocks, amidst the shirtless teenagers in enormous, see-through plastic bags, then climb three flights of stairs and sit sipping steaming cocktails from a teapot, on the roof, in the rain.

Melbourne, you are completely fucking bonkers, but I think I’m starting to love you.

Posted in Mwah on Wednesday March 10, 2010. Shoutouts.

A thousand windows of a hundred hotels face me all at once, black, punctuated by a flickering pulse on identical ceilings, blue, in synchronised media fulfilment. All I can see are his legs, thin, with tight black jeans and simple white shoes. A bare wooden floor. The ornamental façade of the Jubilee hall obscures his top half and so I watch the legs with interest as they begin to dance, alone in an empty gallery, hot-stepping fifty metres from one end to the other, and a succession of bewilderingly fast twists and back steps in front of the mirror at the end. Fireworks explode above the marina, visible between the towering buildings on the waterfront, most half-finished and exposed at the top, baring girdered claws. And still he’s stepping out, out, and out again.

The menu is in arcs of colour, green & white, with a cartoon figure of a man crouched, running, menu held above him, and it advises that ‘in case of rain’ it can be used as a Makeshift Shelter™. I have always considered the phrase ‘in case of’ confusing, no matter how correct it is. I guess others thought the same, as the signs outside elevators now say, ‘If there is a fire, do not use this lift,’ and this is brutal in its clarity. The lifts here say neither, casually omitting warnings as easily as they shed the fourth floor, the fourteenth. Sometimes the 24th is there.

I duck as the bassist turns back toward the bar and almost clocks me with his guitar.

“And who are you, whitey?” says the girl that has elbowed her way past the sound guy and into the tiny area of clear space from where you can shout at the old man behind the bar. She is small, curly black hair, and a trio of tiny cuts curl, ragged, toward her left eye, bisecting freckles, and only a day or so old.
“Dan,” I say.
“Just Dan?”
“Just Dan.”
“Well that’s no good,” she says, “Much too ordinary. How about I’ll be Star, and you can be Dare, and we’ll be superheroes.”
“But I have no superpowers,” I point out.
“This is okay. We can work with this. All we need are the outfits.”
“I’m not such a fan of outside underwear.”
“Oh, that’s such old-school thinking. We’ve moved on. Moved up.”
“To?” but she has caught the old man’s eye and is engaged in vigorous explanation of how, exactly, she wants this cocktail to be served. Bamboo culms, inked so finely they look like a photograph, stretch across her shoulder-blade and out of sight, and they flex in time with her gestures of affirmation.

I turn back to face the man with the Mohawk and the microphone, all muscles, and black gloves, and neck stretches, and I look for superheroes in the crowd.

Posted in Mwah on Sunday February 21, 2010. Shoutouts.

Spring things I must remember:

1. Don’t ride down hills with your mouth open
2. Buy antihistamines
3. Don’t ride up hills with your mouth open
4. You know nothing about horses
5. Never look at threadless after you’ve been drinking, unless you’re willing to wake up and realise you now own a shirt with a woman shooting pink stars from her eyes and another with a girl dressed up like Batman hugging a giant tapir.
6. Participate more, create more, spectate less.

Posted in Mwah on Wednesday November 4, 2009. Shoutouts.

Two pots of tea surround a solitary chicken’s foot and an abandoned yam cake. There are flakes of pastry scattered across the table, and the remains of a squid tentacle have slipped under the lazy-susan. The morning sun beats through the windows as I blow on my tea.

“And that’s when I administer the reach test” he says, between sips of watermelon juice. “Reach test? You what?” she’s incredulous, and I’m curious where this is going. “Well, the waiter will always put the bill on the table, right, he’s not going to give it straight to you. So, I wait a couple of seconds before going for my wallet. I dunno, three, five. That’s her chance, when I go for the wallet, I’m looking for a token reach. A hand heading for the purse, shuffling for the handbag, that’s all.” A pause, and she’s at him again, “And what does that tell you? What does that tell you about a girl?”

Enough, apparently.

Posted in Mwah on Wednesday May 20, 2009. Shoutouts [1].

This week I am going to do my damnedest to find a bottle of Awamori in Canberra. I don’t know if it’s possible, and suggestions are welcome here, but I’m also assuming I can stoop to Umeshu, Shochu or even Soju if desperate. Then I am going to go to Iori, order Katsudon, drink my death liquor, and if all goes well I could end up on a boat punching people. One can but hope.

Posted in Mwah on Monday May 18, 2009. Shoutouts.

Today’s a softer world made me chuckle. How appropriate.

Posted in Mwah on Sunday May 17, 2009. Shoutouts.

I am looking at a brochure of discount vouchers for food court takeaway. On the front a stock photography woman with elfin ears licks her well-manicured and perfectly clean fingers. The kerning and alignment are so bad I am convinced it must be intentional, until I spot grocer’s apostrophes by the dozen. This, and a crumpled Optus bill explaining the reasons I am expected to fork out two dollars twenty for each piece of correspondence they send me henceforth, are the only two pieces of paper I find in my bag, as I sort through the front pocket looking for my keys. Spend $5 or more and receive your FREE Giant Jelly Baby.¹

These are remnants of a week spent at “home” when I felt more a stranger than ever before. People still ask “When are you coming back?” but these days it’s preceded with, “So, it must have been almost a year now” and I know, more than anything, it’s an effort at solidarity. It’s okay though; I still entertain thoughts of coming back to that world of structure, dependable certainty and familiar hierarchy. Being surrounded by the ebb and flow of a consistent, but varied, workload. But I won’t, not yet. For now I’m in the grey zone, that purgatory of the traveller, where home isn’t really home, but hasn’t yet been replaced by something, or somewhere, else.

I move out in two weeks, and I won’t miss the white sheets, plastic flowers and prints of tulips that I have pushed until they are slightly askew. Nor will I miss the nights the kids above me get drunk and run down the internal stairs to use the intercom to call back upstairs, and inform their housemates that they are slags. Or that I know you get Choc Wedges and Dairy Milk on 719, and Trumpets and Lindt on 718, but only if you’re flying on a Sunday.

Saturday is 717 and you usually get a spare seat.

I’ve now watched Doubt, with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, four times without sound, except for the one part where the altar boy ducks, rings his bell, and steps backward. That frequency must carry perfectly on the complimentary headphones because suddenly it sounds like mobile phones are ringing in the overhead lockers, and for a second everyone not watching the movie looks panicked and pats their pockets, thinking it’s theirs.

¹ Not valid with any other offer. One voucher per person. Photo’s are illustrative only.

Posted in Mwah on Sunday March 15, 2009. Shoutouts.

The door is shut, locked, and bolted. These are serious, substantial bolts, and the door does not give at all when I push lightly against it. A crumpled sheet of paper hangs by a single thread of sticky-tape on the wall, and flutters in the wind, seeking escape. I slip my gloves off and reach down to spread it against the door, between the bolts. “Royal crypt closed. Reason: because of technical reason.”

This is disappointing. I have walked for two hours up the winding, narrow, city streets to get here and an underground room full of ancient, discoloured bones would have really rounded out the experience. Besides, I could use a break from the monotony of shop after shop peddling creepy wooden puppets to unsuspecting tourists. A voice behind me exclaims, “Technical reason?” as I’m struggling to coordinate fingers with the appropriate glove holes. He is tall, thin, and undeniably German.

“Yeah, perhaps they have to dust the skulls. Hi, Dan” and I offer my glove, half-filled with fingers, to shake. He nods, ignores the hand, and pulls out a weathered guide-book. I survey my options. Across the valley there is a fort, squat, blackened, and closed. I’ve heard you can bribe the guards to look the other way, allowing you to work your way up the mountain, past the television tower to the peak. Here, you can take advantage of the gypsies selling overpriced cans of cheap imported beer, and watch the sun dip into the smog.

“It’s freezing, and if I hear another American complain about pickpockets I’m going to steal their wallets myself. Do you want to grab a drink?” He nods his assent, and we duck into an alley and walk until we find a hole in the wall that appears to be part of a workshop that is servicing the maroon city trams. The owner glances at us for a second as we enter, cigarette dangling from his mouth, and points us to a series of upturned crates in the corner. We sit, and he brings us two tankards of beer without question or explanation. I reach for my wallet and he shakes his head. “Finish,” and nods toward the door.

The German is Marcus and after a beer he explains to me the complex process of obtaining high-school tenure in the German system, and the impact it has on academia. How it’s a better option than most universities because of the twenty days of leave a year. He begins to explain his research, and then backs off, thinking I will lose interest. But I am fascinated, and I tell him so.

“Glial cells, you know these? Cells in the brain that support, uh, thinking cells. Not like neurons, but important still. I investigate the effect on sclerosis. I think, maybe twenty years we can map it properly, work it out, map it. Reverse effects maybe. Yes. It’s funny, you know. Germans and Americans have a very different perspective when it comes to this research. Even under President Bush there was funding for stem cells, cell research but in Germany it is impossible, illegal. I think we worry a lot about the past. The Nazis, yes. Anything with genetic selection, genetic determination, and the government is involved, regulating, controlling. So, we cannot do the stem cells. But we look elsewhere. There are only two countries who can make microscopes, Japanese and the Germans. This is for a reason.”

As I begin to talk about elevator factories in the fields beside the shinkansen, my phone buzzes in my pocket with a message from the other side of the planet. It is two things: short, and unexpected. I hit reply, and pause for a second while I consider what I want to say, and how I want to phrase it. I write that it’s a leading question. It is, I think, but I’m not entirely sure who is leading whom.

I’m continually perplexed at my ability to turn simple situations into the impossible. And how often it feels like stacking card against card against card. Licking your thumb, then running it slowly down the outside edge to feel for tiny imperfections. This is how relationships are built, feeling gingerly for weaknesses in the structure, tensing and teasing, before pushing ahead because it feels right. Hoping the imperfections mesh and create strength, hoping that the moment of fragility happens during a lull in the wind, before it all blows away.

Marcus has to catch a train, and I wind my way back through the streets alone, admiring the sleet as the droplets flick against the glass and coalesce. I let myself in the back door and climb down to the basement. This used to be a chapel once, and the brickwork is still perfectly clear in its purpose. But they are talking about sex again, and the mood is light. I ease myself into a chair and grin at the bar girl as she puts on the Neutral Milk Hotel album we were arguing about last night. There is solidarity to be found with strangers, and comfort from those who do not know you.

She is from Canada, and she leans against the altar as she tells a story of the cold, and the night.

So wake up run your lips across your fingers till you find
Some scent of yourself that you can hold up high
To remind yourself that you didn’t die
On a day that was so crappy whole and happy you’re alive

Posted in Mwah on Friday February 27, 2009. Shoutouts.