You’re far from this. This story is just another few hundred pages of your mind.
Crowds of questions stream through me like lines of people exiting a soccer ground or a concert. They push and shove and trip. Some make their way around. Some remain in their seats, waiting for their opportunity.
Living in Sydney, I’ve taken the chance to start surfing again. One of my best memories of growing up is catching my first proper wave and surfing across it and my brother cheering at me from the shore.
You might argue that I make the rounds no matter what year it is, but sometimes the human race likes to crank things up a little. They increase the production of bodies and their escaping souls.
She was one if the few souls that made me wonder what’s it to live.
The city buildings in the distance are holding up the sky, it seems.
The best word shakers were the ones who understood the true power of words. They were the ones who could climb the highest.
She was like a lone angel floating above the surface of the earth, laughing with delight because she could fly but crying out of loneliness.
The night is alive with stars, and when I lie down and look up, I get lost up there. I feel like I’m falling, but upward, into the abyss of sky above me.
I feel the fear, but I walk fast toward it.
Amplified by the still of night, the book opened – a gust of wind.
Around us I can sniff out a savagery in the noisy southern air. It knifes it’s way into my nose, but I do not bleed blood. It’s fear I bleed, and it gushes out over my lip. I wipe it away, in a hurry.
I walked home, seeing all my doubt from the other side. Have you ever seen that? Like when you go on holiday. On the way back, everything is the same but it looks a little different than it did on the way. It’s because you’re seeing it backwards.
You can do anything when it’s not real.
Soon evening worked its way into the sky, and the city hunched itself down.
One of the best things about her was that she actually acknowledged my existence.
I don’t really know that this story has a whole lot of things happen in it. It doesn’t really. It’s just a record of how things were in my life during this last winter. I guess things happened, but nothing out of the ordinary.
To me the question is always this: if a ray of light came out of the sky and said, “Your next book will never be published – would you still write it?” If the answer is yes, the book is worth writing.
Winning wasn’t natural for me. It had to be fought for, in the echoes and trodden footprints of my mind.
I also fear that nothing really ends at the end. Things just keep going as long as memory can wield its ax, always finding a soft part in your mind to cut through and enter.