It's not you (I'm giving up on), it's me...

"You need to remember that this isn't a failure," Sandra said a couple of Fridays ago. 

This was obviously important - that was at least the third time she'd said it. 

"It's not that things went badly, or anyone did anything wrong, just sometimes things don't work out, and that's OK. It's not like it was bad; I think it's been really good for you, it just ran its course which is sad. 
"But it's definitely not a failure." 

That made four. 

It wasn't until three days later that I noticed just how much she'd stressed that particular point; it seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to say and I was in complete agreement, so like a tiny octopus pretending to be seaweed, in the flow of conversation it slipped past me until some time later when I took my mask off and realised it was clinging on to my brainstem just a little too tenaciously. Floating in the current, I inspected my little stowaway whilst it regarded me with nonchalant insouciance in return, and thought: 

"Wait-a-minnit..." 

Subtlety isn't what you'd call Sandra's "strong suit"; she usually plays clubs, hearts, and spades, exclusively in that order, but like a diamond in the rough and empty places you must walk she occasionally trips you up, because whilst what you've been putting down had all the appearance of having passed over and through her, when you turn your inner eye to see its path you find she's standing right behind you staring back with the hint of a smirk in her bright blue eyes, having picked it up, got a firm grip, and wound it up like a cosh to whack you upside the head before stabbing you with it right between the fourth and fifth ribs, leaving you to suffocate in your own bullshit in the shallow ditch she dug right in front of your feet when you were too busy studying your own navel from the inside out. 

It took me longer than it should have to register how hard she was steering me away from the ledge I've desperately needed a win to pull me back from; if I'd realised just how much the stench of failure had been carried on my breath with every word that's come out of my mouth this year I'd have brushed my teeth more, or at least switched brands of mouthwash. Sandra could see the sand my house was built on crumbling away beneath my toes, God-bless her cotton socks, which is handy because I was distracted at the time being broken up with by Bridget, my fascinating Redheaded Distraction. 

"If I did have a tumor, I would name it Marla. Marla, the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you would stop tonguing it, but you can't.” 
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

A couple of months ago Bridget and I were out running errands, and I was being a bit vague:

"You've been pretty 'absent' lately."
"Yeah. Everything's been a bit... grey. I'm sorry, it's kinda hard to describe better than that."
"Hmm," she considered, "maybe you should try writing about it?" 

I'd barely written anything more substantial than a fart in a wetsuit since last year, and when I had managed to James more than a few hundred reJoyce-ful words together it had been like pulling my own teeth. Nonetheless, I gummed on it, and put some thought into how to describe Depression without it turning into "goth poetry". In the peaceful time I spent packing away the suddenly-surplus second place-setting at my breakfast table for the move back to 1 Pacifica Via, Solitudo, I came up with a metaphor I've come to call The Room. 

Imagine finding yourself trapped outside a Room with no walls, which is so completely full of Nothing that there's no room in it for you. The Room is so full of Nothing that it's become condensed, compacted, and concrete; a diamond-perfect lattice of pure atomic Nothing. It's a Void so Perfect you can't even call it a vacuum; it's the Antithesis of Anything, its surface so smooth it has no friction, so clear that at first glance it seems you can see completely through it, completely without mass, but so dense it bends light. The Perfect Void draws you in until you're smeared across the boundary of the Room, so completely you're not so much outside as you are a thin smear around it. For all that you're indelibly adhered to The Room, you find you're still able to move freely, in fact you can go anywhere you want, but no matter where you go or how fast you run, it's right there. You try to tell people about the Void in the Room you've found somehow embedded within your Self, which you've no choice but carry around if you're to do anything at all, but no matter how heavy it is no one can see, touch, or feel its weight, so most of them don't even believe it exists. Even if they do, no one can help you carry it because the Perfect Void in the wall-less Room that you can't enter, but can never leave, exists entirely within the boundary of your own skull, and every time you stare into it you find you're staring back at yourself. 

I remember the moment, if not the day, when I discovered that the background-state in the back of my head had a name, and was neither epidemic, or pandemic, but endemic to me. The High School I went to published a Creative Writing Anthology each year, and I used to write little stories, ideas that popped into my head, so I submitted a couple of pieces because "why not?", before promptly forgetting all about it. I was pretty chuffed when they were included and had a bit of a proud moment taking an early-print copy home to show my folks my name right there in black-and-white on Page 13. Over the following days teachers who's classes I'd never been in, or with whom I'd never really got along, started coming up to me in the school-yard reading from a script so consistent it was like I was hearing it in gestalt: 

"Hi Peter, how are you doing? Are you OK?" 
"Yes, sir. Why wouldn't I be?" 
"That's good. It's just... we'd hate for you to... go anywhere... without telling us."
"Erm... k?" 
"You know you can always come and talk to us if you want... if you need to." 
"O...K, sir. Thank you, sir. I'll be sure to do that, sir?" 

"What was that about," Eugene asked in hushed tones as soon as they were out of earshot, "did you get in trouble for something?"
"No, didn't even tell me to pull my socks up or tighten my tie like he usually does. "
"But you ripped the elastic and cut off your top button so they wouldn't stay up..."
"Exactly! He seemed worried I was going on a trip or something."
"Weird. Oh well, Magic at lunch? I've rebuilt my Green Weenie Deck with extra Saprolings." 
"Fuck yeah, but me and that Black Deck James loaned me are still going to pwn you!" 

Years later I flicked through that cheap, spiral-bound collection of photo-copied stories and teenage-poetry and re-read the piece I'd dreamed up one night, written from the perspective of the voice in someone's head whispering a song of worthlessness and failure in the quiet stillness of the night until the protagonist put a gun to their head and painted the wall with their brain, and as the 90's-era environmentally-unfriendly light-source warmed up to incandescence, I had my light-bulb moment, realising: 

"Oooooh, THAT's what that was all about!" 

I was 15 when I wrote that, 16 when I was being buttonholed in the schoolyard by a conga-line of button-down, oxford-cloth, private-boy's-school teachers doing their best to balance their nascent SNAG-training with the ingrained toxic-machismo of their own "boys don't cry" upbringing, confused as anyone else who didn't get the memo because it had never occurred to me that there might just be some other way to be, and the way I was wasn't normal. 

But "normal" was an undiscovered country that I'd read about in a book once, but never met anyone from; what perspective could I possibly have had at that point? Just look at my friends: 

Matt was zany and Singaporean, and always wrote the scenarios for our D&D games. 
Adam was a Christian-pacifist marshmallow, who never said boo to anyone. 
Mott was Singaporean and weird, but amazing at maths. 
James could build a Magic: The Gathering deck out of spare parts that could win tournaments, but was so dyslexic he could barely write a coherent sentence. 
Smeghead was an obnoxious little shit, but so loyal you felt like a country he'd fight wars for. 
Stubbsie could have run Pheidippides into the ground, and done a victory-lap besides, so long as someone was there to tie his shoe laces for him and tell him when to stop. 
Eugene was a an overweight Burmese guy who badly wished he was black. 
And then there was me, with a face the bullies broke their fists punching, great grades, a rage Smeghead and Adam could barely drag me back from, a brain full of knowledge, and a black sense of humour. 

"Why can't you be normal?" Gary, and Arno, and Michael would yell at me, fists flying. 
"What the fuck even is 'normal'?" I'd ask myself while returning their punches in kind, threefold. It was a name I knew, but didn't feel like I had a use for. 

The way I felt, how I'd lived for as long as I'd known, that clinging little stowaway I'd always carried around, the country who's citizenship I held, had a name I was only just beginning to discover, and that was Depression. 

I got bullied a lot in the first half of High School. The teachers coming up to me wearing masks of concern were the same ones who'd been unconcerned when I was having my ankles kicked whilst marching between classes, getting shoved around playing sport, and taunted in the same schoolyard we were now standing in. Some of them had even reprimanded me for "taking matters into my own hands" when kick came to shove and I felt like all I could do to make it stop was punch on. Appealing to authority only achieved additional aggravated aggression, but breaking my hand beating some bozo's bonce was a small price to pay if it meant they left me the fuck alone. 

By that point, Authority had become the name for people who protected my oppressors; no wonder I've always had a problem with it. 
By that point my hand had healed with a bend in the metacarpus connecting my left-pinky to my wrist to serve as a permanent reminder for the cost of standing up for myself. 
By that point I'd taken the fight back to all of them, one at a time at first, eventually moving up to groups of as many as four at a time, and I hadn't always won the battles but they left me and the boys around me alone, which was what mattered. 

I wasn't to know it at the time, but by then the war was over; I never had to fight again all the way through to graduation. 

But I was always ready to. 

“Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj 

Bridget and I had a good run, all told. We met at just the right time, when I was starting to look outside myself for a whole I could be part of, and she was ending it with a partner who didn't made her feel whole. We had a lovely time, and there was love there for a time, but for all the fizz and zing we've enjoyed over the last half a year there's a hole in her mind that no one else can fill, and a hole in mine which I haven't been able to stop tonguing enough to let heal. We've been good for each other; we're both better than we were when we met. We've both been valued; we've proven to each other that we both have value. We're both desirable; there's been no shortage of reciprocal desire. We're neither of us whole tho; there are gaping holes in each of us that no other person can possibly close. Neither of us is so much insufficient as we are incomplete, and whilst I've found contentment in adequate sufficiency she wanted more; how could I blame her? She's suffered from her own depression, and it shows in all the gleaming seams where she's kintsugi'd herself back together. I started out broken, it seems, filling the empty spaces with Nothing so neatly there's no seam to denote where one ends and the other begins, leaving nowhere to find purchase. When Bridget broke she stuck the pieces back together with gold, becoming more beautiful, and she'll do so again; when I fell apart I wrapped myself in another layer of nacre, becoming colder, but even less accessible, and even harder to hold on to. 

When she put the idea into my head a couple of months ago that I really should write about my Depression she was right, although I suspect not quite in the way she was thinking at the time. I've not been writing much this year partly because putting time into her meant I've not had so much time for that, but hugely because when I've reached out for a thread to pull on, unravel, and weave into something my hand came back with Nothing worth saying. More importantly tho, you need to understand that under and behind and inside everything I've said here over the last couple of years, something horrible has been growing; something that seems to always have been there, which I keep fed and watered and carry with me everywhere I go. 

All I've ever really written about has been my Depression; how my world looks through it, the texture and smell of it, how events feed and shape it, and every once in a while the moments of respite I get from it, I just don't make it the topic. I gloss over it with a pop song, a Shakespeare reference, and a self-deprecating joke. 

I am Pagliacci The Clown. 

I hide it behind a smile, wrap it in a metaphor, or blend it in with anger; but it's been getting harder, and colder, and heavier, and I'm running out of strength to keep carrying it around the way I have been, so I decided to try something different, bite down, eschew misdirection, and see if I can spit it out directly. 

"The person who is breathing is me." 
― Rita Farr in Doom Patrol 

Sandra was right to worry that I might see this as yet another failure; my confidence has been shaken so hard this year it's shattered, my self-worth sifting right to the bottom of the rubble like sand under the coarser stones of doubt, defeat, and dread, so who can blame her? She knew we were on the rocks, so it didn't come as a surprise when one of us stopped and shook other out of their shoe. She was there, at the other end of the phone, for the three years I was single before I managed to work up the courage to try "being with someone" again, and how determined I was after Jenna, and Kat, to not make the the same mistakes again. She must have been terrified to think what failing again would do to me after the year-and-change since I moved back to Canberra. 

One of the things I've been comfortably sure of is that I'm fucking good at the thing I do for a living, so when I fenced off the shelves in my mental library labelled "306.7: Relations between the sexes, sexualities, love" behind barbed wire and warning signs saying "DANGER! MINE FIELD! DO NOT ENTER", that was what I poured my energy into. Picking up The Job That Brought Me Back To Canberra in early 2022 was the culmination of years of practice, and by that time in the year where we all go and wake up Billy from Greenday I'd not just done a good job, I'd done one everyone had believed was Impossible until I did it. The sensation of knowing, not just believing, but knowing with absolute proof to back it up, that you're as good as you'd always thought you could be isn't just incredible, it's louder than words. 
My self-image lined up perfectly with my self-in-the-world. 
Me-cursive; Me-sync; I was Me all the way down. 
The last of the marble had fallen away, and looking back at me in the mirror was David; I was taller than Goliath, and carved from stone, and for the first time I could remember I felt Absolutely Real. 

Sounds like a pretty happy place to be, right? 

See, about that... 

Nearly a decade ago I was looking over a pile of brightly-coloured glossy images of my brain with my neurologist, talking about my relationship issues, and he made a contemplative noise as his pen traced circles around a darker-than-normal patch somewhere between my ears. 

"So... when you're cuddling up on the couch, or post-coitus... how do you feel?"
I thought about it for a moment, and replied, "Uncomfortable? My back will be hurting, or I'll need to move to get circulation back in my leg, or I can't reach my phone to check something.
"Why?" 
"Not warm and fuzzy? Relaxed?"
"No. I mean... it's nice, and she likes it, but I get fidgety pretty fast.
"Why?" 
"Well there's reduced blood flow in your hypothalamus, and what you've been describing suggests you may not be producing normal levels of Oxytocin. I'm thinking we could try a supplement and see what effect that has."
"You want to experiment on my brain?" 
"Oh! It's a naturally occurring neurotransmitter, there's no risk...!"
"Nah, you misunderstand. I'm all about the scientific method and better living thru chemistry. You got a hypothesis about my hypothalamus?
"Let's do science." 

A week later I and I'm sitting in same chair again. 

"So how did you feel?" 
"No different, really. I felt nothing. What was I supposed to feel?" 
"Warm fuzzies? Better sense of connection? Some people say they feel 'euphoric'. Did you feel good at all?"
"No, I didn't get any of that. I kinda just got the dumb." 
"..."
"I could pay attention to the conversation, but I couldn't keep track of any background thoughts. Someone would mention something that would remind me of something else, but I couldn't think of what that was, and a moment later I'd have lost what it was they said in the first place. I was fine with a sequential train-of-thought, but only one, not the three conversation forks and three unrelated background processes I'd usually be tracking, certainly nothing abstract or inductive.
"I just felt... dumb, stupid." 
"Did you feel relaxed at all?"
"I guess, kinda? 
"I mean... 
"I was calm... 
"But I knew part of me was missing. 
"And I knew it was there but I couldn't find it. 
"And I was kinda freaking out about it to be honest. 
"But I couldn't listen to the part of me that was screaming and the conversation at the same time. 
"So I couldn't quite get to panicking about it." 
By the time I stopped talking John's eyes were wide, his hands planted firmly flat on his desk. He slowly leaned back in his seat, breathed in, then out again, and said, "That sounds... unpleasant. Did you try it again?" 
"Yeah, little bit.
"And no.
"Whatever that place was, I'd rather not go there again if that's OK?"
"No. 
"No, I don't think I'd ask you to do that, no." 

So apparently the "love hormone" that gives people feelings of trust, emotional attachment, safety, all those things we think of as "happy", doesn't work on me. I don't know what I'm missing, if that helps. I don't get to feel happy, but it looks good on other people so I can still get a vicarious Dopamine hit by doing it to them. Other people can't simultaneously keep track of multiply-nested loops in two conversations, rehearse the agenda for tomorrow's meetings, and compose an email to their mother, all whilst playing DJ for Headcheese Radio's Silent Disco, so it's a bit like "swings & roundabouts", right? 

Just like Popeye The Sailor Man, I am what I am. I don't need to be happy, I just need a win every once in a while. 

When I closed that project off I was at the top of my game, and on top of the world, in a remarkably unique way; usually reaching the peak means climbing over a bunch of other people to get there because being the best means there are a pile of people you're better than. I took nothing away from anyone when I took "no one can do that" and added "except me" to the end, except for the haters who just wanted "that" to fail and... well, fuck those guys. Fuck them right in the ear. I've no interest in competing for a place in the hierarchy; stack-ranking is a demonstrably false economy because almost everyone in a team has something to offer, and if they won't join the team they can get the fuck out of my way. All I ask is a tall problem, and a Purchase Order to Invoice against, and that was exactly the reward offered me, so I kicked my wheels into gear, and with a song in my ears I wound my old life up, spread wings like sails, left Perth in the dust of my wake, and shook my arse back to Canberra. 

It's important to remember something tho: I didn't succeed just because I had a unicorn skillset, although that was a critical factor. I didn't do it alone either, because whilst the haters were legion, I joined a team who were working towards the same goal. I made it happen because I marshalled the forces, set up the field, muttered "Victory or death", and went to war. 
It was a war I fought with everything and nothing to prove, and everything and nothing to lose.
It was a war I fought because that was the only way to get it done. 
But it was a war I never got to stop fighting. 

I was a wreck when I stepped off that flight, held together by duct-tape, determination, and the dearest of friends. Less than a month later I was battling locative dissonance, and it was becoming obvious that my war wasn't over. At the time, I said: 

"I'm exhausted, on edge, I can be calm, or focused, but not both at the same time, my manoeuvring thrusters are shot, and I'm a whisker off bingo-fuel, but my nose is pointed down the throat of the beast, I have ammunition and fumes enough for one last world-shattering salvo as I make my final burn, and my fist is hovering over the glass-covered button labelled

'Bop in case of Blitzkrieg'."
― Thursday, April 20, 2023 - Full Circle...

I'm neurochemically disinclined when it comes to trusting people, so when the Big Bad Bossman turned out to be a hypocritical narcissist arsehole, and the estimable Bosslady quit the field in a final, desperate act of self-preservation, it ripped a hole in me that only Nothing could fill, not because my hard-earned trust was betrayed, but because I ignored the warning signs and walked brazenly into the minefield like an over-confident fool. Even at the top of my game I zigged when I should have zagged, fell for the neon-signposted Samaritan Snare, and got trapped in my very own Kobayashi Maru. The man I thought was a visionary turned out to be a manipulative, gas-lighting bully. I still remember the evening he "fired" me, then threatened to fire my whole team, because I disagreed with him. I was leaning against a desk so I'd only be an inch or two taller than him instead of six, when he declared: 

"You know, I used to have Big Four consultants doing the job your team's supposed to do and they got results," omitting, conveniently, that these were the same people who couldn't do what I'd done for him the year before. 
"Fine," he announced, slapping the desk he was standing next to for emphasis, "on your own head be it," and as he turned to walk away declared, "I'll make some calls tomorrow." 

He got two steps whilst I sat there, silent and still, before he turned and circled back. The argument carried on for another three-quarters of an hour. 

Finding out I couldn't trust the Bossman was one thing, but then I don't really trust anyone. I build a model for who and what they are based on the patterns in their behaviour, and use that model to calculate whether they're a risk or an asset. It didn't matter that he was the most dangerous type of gaslighter; one who absolutely believes, and has always believed, what he's saying even when it contradicts what he said last week, all whilst holding a Master's Degree in Cognitive Dissonance. I was David, and the only person who could actually deliver what he was trying to achieve, and I have a long history of standing up to bullies, and I thought I could handle it. I was wrong, and realising I couldn't trust my own judgement cracked the bedrock. After that it was all downhill. 

By July I'd burned through all of the confidence which had made me believe that I could do the Impossible, and had earned the opportunity to keep doing it forevermore, and was burning through my belief in myself. I was alone at home, and alone in the office, undermined by spies and derision. I have the most amazing friends, so loyal they make you feel like a country they'd go to war for, but I felt so incredibly, indescribably alone, just me and Nothing else; alone-liness and war without end. 

Colleagues who'd worked with me as allies stopped responding to my requests. 
Meetings would be organised about the projects I was working on, and I'd not be invited. 
Projects I'd been told I'd be in charge of were quietly assigned to other Managers.
Approvals I requested so I could proceed with the work I'd been assigned would be ignored, whilst the Approver's complaints about my lack of progress escalated. 
I was systematically side-lined, and isolated, and had my support cut out from under me.
I was set up to fail. 
Throughout, I continued making what small progress I could manage because what else could I do?  There was a job to do which I knew I could, even if I was losing belief that I'd be allowed to do so. 
In the midst of all of this my contract actually got extended, and for why? All I've ever been able to think of is that he was happy to spend over a hundred thousand dollars of someone else's money just so he could keep beating me until I broke. 

To my shame, I took it; I'd taken on a lot of debt to take that plunge back to this side of the country, so I couldn't afford not to. I retain some small pride from how long it took, and how much it cost him. 

I remember, sitting here in a chair that will never fit as well as the one I built out of rubbish from the kerbside then left behind when I left Perth, feeling the pressure crushing my chest like I was drowning all over again, and how badly I just wanted it to end. 

I re-read my own words in the quiet stillness of the night, with a glass of wine, or whisky, or worse, and my noise-cancelling headphones sealing away my ears, and every time the memory it evokes leaves me drowning in tears whilst I sit here and try to just breathe. 

Breathe. 

The post I put out recently called Stop; Continue... started months ago, early in the autumn-before-the-winter-which-is-now-almost-over when you could still sit outside a Canberra pub with an old friend in your shirtsleeves without freezing. Most of these are written the same night as the idea which inspires them pops into my head, but when I was finishing the Perthistential Crisis series in November it was getting harder and harder to draw another bucket from that well. By April all that came up was dust, but I'd still try dipping my quill in it every once in a while nonetheless. I was scratching at it one night, making more mess than sense, when Bridget came round and let herself in with the keycard I'd given her and asked what I was working on, so I let her read the draft. When she got to the part about hands reaching out to help she stopped, looked up from my laptop, and declared: 

"That's bullshit." 
"What is?"
"No one's helped you. No one's done a fucking thing," and I burst into tears. 
She held me whilst I wept for somewhere between an hour and 10 minutes and made sure my laptop didn't skitter and dance on the tiles of my balcony, until eventually I looked up and replied:

 "I need that to not be true." 

So when I finally came back to it, I rewrote it again and again until what I said was. 

"It's always darkest just before the dawn."
― Now That's Bullshit

By the time Bridget turned to me and said "I think we need to talk," a few weeks later, half a year had gone by since I'd finally fucked up and given him the excuse he'd been waiting for to terminate me with prejudice, ending 2023 with a bang that sounded more like a whimper, leaving me a man who felt Nothing but hollow. I left the stage gracefully, in disgrace, and ever since have been trying, and failing, to find a way to capitalise on a stale memory of success that's long-since faded to grey. The achievement I thought I'd build an empire from was gone, eroded to dust, leaving me behind with a cart I built out of Nothing to carry all my failure in because there was so much of it I couldn't hold it any more, and that was all I had left to offer her. That confidence which felt indomitable back then is so far gone I almost can't remember what having it felt like, but I remember a time when I did. Years ago Sandra would talk me down off the ledge again and again, saying "Remember who you are!" 

But I'm not sure if I can; I don't recognise myself in the mirror any more. 
It's just me in a staring contest with the ledge, each daring the other to jump first. 
I don't think I can win. 

Back when I had a Penpal, in the series of letters which slowly segued sideways from sharing with an ersatz-sibling into screaming into the abyss, she wrote to me: 

"I don’t know how to do much in my own best interests. It’s too heavy and I haven’t the strength to drag it around. But it only gets heavier. It seems so petulant to sit in front of the answer and believe that there is a forcefield preventing me from simply reaching out and even acknowledging it is there. I’d seemingly rather sit in the shadow and stare at the key that opens the door, and grieve for the loss of motivation to grab it. What madness. I acknowledge this feeling you are having, of knowing just what you should do and feeling powerless to actually do it. To endure the continuing pain, and for what? The fleeting glory of inhuman success? The complexity of unjustified fear. Is it the deepness of feeling that if discarded leaves a void of any meaningful (painful) biofeedback?" 
― Monday 5 Dec 2022, 9:38AM - RE: Struggling

That verisimilitude, that connection of minds-which-are-alike, that tipped-hat acknowledgement that "I see what you did there" resonated with me at the time, and has echoed ever since, such that I've made a point of re-using, re-hashing, and re-mixing those words and that sentiment, in homage and thanks, at every opportunity. Sometimes it's the smallest thing people put down that you pick up and run with. Even something so small and fragile as inch can be the the only thing in the world worth having; an inch can take you for miles. An inch can be all it takes to trip you tho, and my feet are no longer between my face and the pavement. 

Now I'm sitting here on my ledge in a chair I bought at a thrift store for $5 that's falling apart beneath me staring into space, the battery light on my laptop is flashing with a rapid cadence, and the fog that's fallen, like the ashes of the bridges I burned on the trip I took to get here, has turned everything a bit grey. My own fall has come and gone, but still beckons nonetheless, and even with Sandra's voice echoing in my ears I'm wondering who I am not to accept it. 

Somehow it feels like everything has now come full circle, because my mouth is so full of dust I can't scream any more, but that's OK even if I'm not, because I've Nothing left to say. 

I just want it to Stop; 

Extraction by way of retraction...

Musical accompaniment: Jebediah - Please Leave 

The jets spooled up and started generating thrust as if driven by the same elastic band that was finally starting to snap me back to where I came from. 

Finally. 

The equilibrium moment in the bungie-jump into the hell of my past seemed to last a lifetime, but in a few weeks when some time has passed I know it will feel like the blink of an eye. Of the many things I've learned in the many days I've clung to the surface of this planet, it's that interminable and infinitesimal are just two words for the same quantum moment; which we use depends entirely upon our perspective from our relative position along the line prescribed by Time's Arrow. 

Sitting in this indifferently-comfortable Virgin Airlines-branded seat constructed in a factory I once watched roll past the window of a bus to Seattle, Washington, USA I give no fucks either way, but I'm glad for every second which passes, and the 236 metres it propels me further away from the place I left 234 days ago. Every moment of comfortable familiarity felt like a blanket weighted with glass beads, each one inscribed with a memory, and for every one that, upon inspection, played back a fond one there were three more filled with the screaming void of every mistake I'd ever made, everyone I'd ever hurt, and everything I've ever wanted to leave behind so I could be a better me, me-ified, me-born. 

I'm not sure what I've wanted more over the last 10 days; to go back, or just to not be there. As the days flowed past I started feeling like I was fading to match the scenery, each one harder and harder to handle. 

I acknowledge that I'm leaving not proud, not noble, not with my head held high. I'm just trying to slide thru with as little friction as possible, leaving as small a wake as I can manage, not even the hero of my own story, just a Boy who's Lost and wants to go Home, flying though the night towards the second airport from the right of the map, hoping to reach it by morning.  

I've no control in this moment, no agency, nothing to do but wait. I've no ruby slippers to click together and make a wish, just the second-hand ticking away on a ruby bearing'd movement, not counting up or down, but around and around and around, waiting until the ride the ticket I bought will take me back to where I'd rather be. 

I fucking hate Perth, not because there's anything inherently wrong with it (although there's plenty), but because of the who I remember being when the soles of my shoes meet the pavement of its cloyingly familiar streets, and the who I can't not be when I'm there. The weight of my own history rests heavily on my shoulders; have you ever tried to carry the weight of you and all of your past selves around? 

Fortunately, practical programming practice prescribes the use of pointer-variables, so post-compile they all precipitate to a particular point. For once metacursion has a practical application, at least where life-hacking Virgin Airline's baggage allowance is concerned. 

I have no idea how or where to finish this; finishing implies an 'end', and that's not what this feels like. 

Whilst every 4.24 seconds, and each kilometre that represents, is a relief, the weight on my mind is in no way diminished. The same elastic band which extracted me from my personal hell is nonetheless propelling me back into a battleground I not so much chose, as landed in. I won't pretend that I've the energy or strength to hit it running, but I will at least stick it, and make an impact. 

Sepia stained skies...

The duty that had dragged me back discharged, I waited until darkness and a cool breeze fell, and with both the mosquitos and Mother Dear having taken themselves to bed I finally let myself flow like the rest of the waste-water down to my old spot by the river. 

I'll no less pretend to having an unpleasant time over the last three days than I will having much to say to the old friends at Ricky's party yesterday. I've certainly had a busy schedule, but also a fairly relaxed one, with plenty of time to look at the scenery as I go from one place to the next. This evening's been the first really empty space I could slot myself into, so I have. I nearly wound up here that first night, but Binky was free and it was a good opportunity to get in some quality time. Friday was good, if somewhat over-inebriated fun, which left me a little the worse for wear, and late for the event on Saturday. I hadn't intended on making an entrance, but being 45min late to the party will do that. I'd telegraphed my attendance only slightly more loudly than I had my departure so there were a few looks of surprise when I walked prodigally through the door. 

"Yes, I'm still alive."
<No, I've barely given you a second thought since quite some time before I left.>
"Yes, my cat is still a douche-canoe."
<Oh, didn't you hear I have a cat? He moved into my carport last December and now he's stuck with me.>
"I'm finding Canberra exactly where I left it, but also strangely peaceful."
<I suppose you could call 7 months and 24 days worth of planning "sudden" when you didn't care enough to talk to me the entire time, and I didn't care enough to tell you.>
<Plus I fucking de-friended you, but I guess you didn't notice.>
"I'm pretty heavily booked for the next week, I'm afraid."
<You didn't have time for me last summer when I was being excluded from all the social events, so don't go getting your hopes up.>
"Still working with the same mob, they keep finding things for me to unfuck."
<You couldn't understand it a year ago, and it's only gotten weirder since then, so let's save some oxygen, shall we?>

Ian was there tho, as he'd been the night before, which was nice. 

Afterwards I went back to Ricky's and we settled down on the couch with pizza before she passed out 5 min into the second episode of Loki, then we watched the rest of it whilst she nursed her hangover this morning, went for brunch, and then passed out again for the middle hour of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. It was a pleasant time, all told. Just after 3PM I packed my bag, said goodbye to her dad for what may well (bearing in mind his health is anything but) be the last time, and hiked over to Gosnells Station to catch the train back up to Lathlain. 

Something that's been hitting me in the eyeballs everywhere I've gone over the last 77 hours has been just how flat, and brown, this place is. Not just the topography, but the houses as well. Half-built single-storey beige shoe-boxes rising out of grey sand under a washed-out sky the colour of dust and stagnation. I've become so used to looking out over verdant-green hills under vivid skies of blue and violet and rose-gold and peach. It's not that Canberra is 'new'; it's just 'now', but Perth has been feeling very 'old', and entirely 'then'. 

I've been trying to put my finger on why the word I keep coming back to is "peaceful", but the mercury bead refuses to stay on the page. My lifestyle's not changed all that much; I still spend most of my time alone, I just seem to be choosing that instead of the alternative being too hard do deal with. I walk more, but I'm still just walking to a workplace, or the grocery store. I still work, and work some more, then sit around watching the world grow dark chatting to people online, listening to music, and bashing words into this year's laptop. Perhaps it's as simple as the view; a wide, open expanse full of colour and movement feels a lot more free, but also connected, especially when compared to the white picket fence under the branches of the trees I let grow over the yard. More and more it seems that the barrier I used to keep the rest of the world out was just as much a cage I locked myself into, or the cast on a broken limb left on long after the bone had set and was now causing the muscles to atrophy. 

Even sitting here along the river with a cool breeze on the back of my neck... it's nice here, but the city lights which have provided a backdrop for so many hundreds of conversations seem so very far away and washed out right now. It's all so familiar, and all so the same, and for all that I'm sitting still and my phone's GPS is pinning me to this spot on the map, I feel like I'm so very far away and still accelerating. 

I'm here for another week, and whilst I did what I came here to do there's still plenty to get done, so no point in whinging about it. So much of my world exists in the place between my ears anyway, when I close my eyes... really, I could be anywhere. On the day I left I spoke about "accept[ing] the fall", so now must be time to accept the landing and that this is just where my feet need to be. 

Musical afterthought: Metric - Oh Please

The rest is on me. 

Just when I thought I was out...

Something's been gnawing at me for weeks, nibbles and nips at first, until a couple of hours and a flight ago I found myself sitting in Canberra Airport anxiously chewing a hole in my lip. I'm flying back to Perth for the first time since I left 10 days and 7 months ago and the order of my comings and goings reversed; apparently I'm having some difficulty with that. 

Of course, a Perth trip means Perth music. It seems like my decision to throw on Ian Kenny's side-project brought it to my attention. 

Musical accompaniment: Birds of Tokyo - Circles 

I've been looking forward to this trip for a while, since booking it in August, after finding out that Ricky would be handing in the last assignment for her Bachelor of Commerce the day before her birthday in July, after being interviewed as the Subject Matter Expert by the Project group in her Entrepreneurship unit, after feeding in hints and tips from my MBA-studies, all the way back to making encouraging, supportive noises all those years ago when she turned around one day and told me her employer would pay for a chunk of it. 

"But I'm not smart enough to go to uni!"
"Of course you are! Bunch of us did, and we were kids at the time. You're all grown up'n shit. You'll slay it."
"But..."
"I like big butts, but I don't see how that's relevant. That said, go get your dumbfuck-bogan arse enrolled!" 

OK, perhaps it was less sweary than that... no, that can't be right. Differently sweary? It was a long time ago. Long before I started encouraging her to see if her Public Service job would move her over to Canberra, which in turn was quite some time before I decided to move back here myself. 

Going back for the "End of Uni/Birthday" Party was a no-brainer, and I've squeezed a lot of meetings and appointments into the next 10 days. It promises to be a good trip. 

I've really not been looking forward to this fucking trip. I didn't want to book myself as Unavailable in the work calendar. I really didn't want to organise a cat-sitter, or pack my bag, or go to the airport. I want to be sitting on my balcony which, for all the noise of the traffic and Emergency Vehicle sirens only gets mostly drowned out by the music blaring from my headphones, is... quiet. The thing I get paid to do has been more than chaotic enough, let alone what I carry around between my ears. Every day, whether literally or metaphorically, closing the door to my flat means I don't just get to block out the former, I get to sit above and look down on it, process and understand the latter, push music into my brain and flush the contents out through my fingers. 

Going back out into the world again means leaving my ivory tower; I'm not sure which is worse. 

Sitting in the Departure Lounge, it also occurred to me that I pissed off, or at least slighted, a bunch of people when I left. What if I run into them? No, I don't anticipate torches and pitchforks at the airport. No, I don't think they actually care, or even noticed. As I told faux-Bosslady the other day, "Never tell me not to be paranoid, paranoia is what keeps me and the people around me safe, because paranoia is what keeps me vigilant and the angles covered. And don't say what you're thinking, just don't. The least trustworthy thing that can come out of your mouth right now is 'you can trust me,' so don't say it." Running into someone I de-friended out of a sense of betrayal is an awkwardness I'd much rather not have to deal with, so I'd better make sure if I do I have some cutting one-liners ready to seal the deal and turn antipathy into actual animosity, right? It's much easier to avoid awkward conversations when they won't speak to you in the first place. 

That's a sane, sensible approach that any rationally well-adjusted grown up would take, right? 

Even in the absence of angry mobs, Perth is full of ghosts and echoes, and several hours later sitting in this cramped seat half-watching Sisu on the guy in the middle-seat's iPad, I'm realising just how little I want to go there. I'm an hour away from landing and I already want to leave, but perhaps that's just anxiety talking. I'd say something about rolling the dice and seeing if I feel better about things when I'm on the ground, but my Mother's picking me up from the airport, so those dice are more loaded than a Program Manager's schedule. 

I will, of course, stop complaining, politely ask the lovely Qantas hosties if I could trouble them for a straw, and suck it up. Whatever doesn't kill me just makes me more annoyed and cynical, after all, and will probably give me plenty to write about. 

"Flying Dutchman"-level ghosting...

 I hadn't decided whether this was going on the blog or not - I figured I'd work that out when I finished it. I wanted it out of my head tho, so sent it to my Penpal('s email address which has been my "grief toilet" for some time, and whilst she's not replied in a while I was also asked not to stop so I intend to continue dumping this shit into it until that changes or the address gives me splash-backs). 

I was listening to this when I sent the following message to Ian, and the combination made me realise that more words needed to be generated: 

Twenty One Pilots - Trees (Vessel Album version)

"For those who are keeping score, it's now been 2 weeks since I sent Jenna that 'fuck you and the rest of the money you owe me' email. 
"I can't say I really expected one, but at this point I reckon that ship has sailed and it's a 'Flying Dutchman'-level ghosting.
"Or, as Jeff Murdock in Coupling would have said:
"'Result!''" 
 - 11/09/2023, 20:33

Edit: Fri, 15 Sept 20:38
I wrote (most of) this on Monday night, and was in such a mess I'm pretty sure the last 500ish words are garbage and need to be rewritten. I say this here, because I'm about to read it through and attempt to do that now, and that means cranking the same tunes on repeat whilst I do to get myself back in the same headspace that had me quietly weeping through the early hours of Tuesday morning. Depending on what I find, further annotations may be included. Or not. I'll work that out when I get there. 

I also cc'd Ian when my finger stabbed the blue button marked "Send", because Ian'ing is a virtue. 

 And on that note (the first of which I believe is a D5#), here I go....  

---

Three months ago I was checking my bank accounts and updating my spreadsheets and made a decision - I have one I keep for my rental property (created a decade ago when I first started renting my spare rooms to keep track of income and expenses, making tax time easier), and others for my "loan shark" activities. I have a history of bailing people out of debt, starting with Kat (long before our getting together was even vaguely a consideration, mind you), followed by Jenna a year after she moved in with me, and then Sandra. I had a quarter of a million dollars of inheritance, I knew people who were paying ruinous amounts of interest on barely-serviceable debt, and buying debt is a time-honoured wog tradition. A lot of people I've known over the years rate high on executive dysfunction, and banks and credit-providers are geared specifically to take advantage of people who blank out when the numbers which describe their problems are too big to face. If I could offer half the rate whilst still making a profit it wasn't just ethically positive, it was mutually beneficial. 

I solve problems for a living, and have demonstrated that I can consistently polish a turd. An easy win-win is, for me, a no-brainer, and as Scott once (or twice, has) said to me: 

"If you lend someone $50 and you never see them again, it was money well spent." 

That probably wasn't meant to extend three orders of magnitude, but "in for a penny, in for a pound", right? Whether "Sterling" or "of flesh" is just a question of currency. 

Kat I floated $10k not long after I started getting to know her, when Jenna and I were still "fresh", so she could clear credit card debt accrued from a trip to the Worldcon Sci Fi Convention in London with her immediate ex. For a couple of years she made her payments, and I kept my spreadsheet updated. When we'd go hang out by the river we'd invariably stop at the servo for Iced Coffee, or grab a bite to eat at the nearby Hungry Jack's, or she'd be short on cigarettes, and I'd usually play the "I know how much debt you're in" card, and cover it. Much later when we were together, and she received her own inheritance from her mother's estate, she cleared the slate, and I told her that I'd been consciously using the interest she was paying to cover dinner. 

She was SO PISSED OFF at me she wouldn't speak to me for quite some time afterwards, but that was fine because she was kissing me so hard my lips bled. 

I floated Sandra $50k when she started up The Blind Dove Cafe, which was just off the intersection of Flemington Rd and Nullarbor Ave in Franklin, ACT. The best offer she had from a bank was 50% of the equity at 13.5% interest (which she couldn't get near because they had no equity worth mentioning), so I offered her the lot at 10%. She sent me her Business Case, I sent her contract documents; she sent them back signed and witnessed, I sent her a bunch of cash. I might have loved her to bits (and still do), but it was "business", and we treated it as such. I still paid my coffee and lunch tab when I came to visit and set up shop in the corner to work remotely on a couple of my trips over, just like anyone else. 

They extended it another $20k to invest in a grease trap (which never got installed, but the timing coincided with the end of the apartment construction boom, and the ensuing drop-off in trade, so they needed it to keep afloat). When they were on the verge of going under in 2019 I offered (and they accepted) a "repayment holiday" (including interest) for 3 months over summer, which kept them going for another year. Later when they wound the Dove down during covid and still owed me a sizeable chunk of cash, I dropped the interest rate to match what I was paying on my mortgage (~4ish%), then extended it another $24k so they could replace their dying Suzuki Vitara with a Subaru VX - I called it "protecting my investment", with a side of "I'm no worse off, but you're much better, plus fuck the banks in the ear with a tuning fork". After picking up the work which ultimately brought me back to Canberra and was able to slam enough cash into my offset account that it zero'd the remaining mortgage, I gave her a call: 

"So hey, about your loan, I need to do a review on your rate."
"Oh? Yeah, you said that might need to happen. Couldn't expect it to stay so low forever I guess. Can you do up the doc's and send me the updated amortisation schedule please?"
"Of course - it's already in your inbox. Can you give it a glance and make sure you're OK with it?"
"Yeah, I guess? Might take me a minute...?"
"No stress. I'll wait."

Sandra's laptop was 6 years old at that point, and so shit even I couldn't get it running well, but I was in no rush. 

"OK. Got your email. Schedule looks reasonable, we can manage the fortnightly OK, might even be able to get ahead on it."
"All good with me - long as you're comfortable with it. Interest rate OK tho?" 
"Oh, I hadn't spotted that, let me loo...
"WHAT TH...?
"1%?
"THE FUCK?
"Did you forget to add a zero?"
"Nah, <I explained my own debt position> and you always insisted I had to be making some money off it, so went with that.
"You alright with it tho?
"I can drop it down to like... a half or something?"
"<insert swearing, recriminations, what sounded like tears, suggestions of my having been born outside of wedlock, and other vitriol>... You're amazing. Thank you. Are you sure...? Oh my god thank you."
"Don't stress. Just... don't go missing a payment or I'll send Scotty 'round for Timo's kneecaps. I know where you live 'n' shit..." 

Just before I moved over in March and they were buying their place in Captain's Flat they had $4ish-k left, and were close to the line on their loan approval. They were running thru my broker/mate/client FinBro, and we had a chat about it - he wanted me to draft a letter saying what the initial value was, what repayments had been, how much they'd paid, and (most importantly) that they'd finished paying it all off.

"Of course, no worries," I told him, and gave him shit for being surprised when I had it to him in under 20min. 

I mean... this is why you keep a tracking spreadsheet, right? 

So I gave Sandra another call to let her know: 

"Oh, thanks, yeah, you said that might need to happen. Once we've settled and the loan's all secure we'll get back on the repayments and sort the rest out. Might be a bit less than before, but we'll do the best we can."
"Yeah, about that. I kinda did sign a document saying you were already square, and looking at my spreadsheets I've made a bunch more out of you than what's outstanding, so... yeah, I reckon I've made enough at this point, so 'happy birthday' or fuckever." 
"..."
"You ain't getting a fucking housewarming present tho. Just sayin'..."
"<further vitriol, empty promises of repercussions next time she saw me, suggestions of my possessing far more warmth and greater depth than can be empirically proven>," but did you know money CAN, in fact, buy you love? 
"Eh. I never sent you a wedding present either, unless you want to count Rickrolling you in the speech I con'd Scott into reading, so don't mention it. 
No, seriously, don't mention it, You'll ruin my reputation.*"
"Reputation as a big softie, you mean?" 
"Sure, whatever, it's your fucking birthday, now fuck off and go deal with buying a house.
"Congratulations. 
"And when you bend Timo over the lounge later, make sure he calls you 'Pete'."

* 

Musical accompaniment: Lauren Marie - Trees (Twenty One Pilots Cover) 

In the month-or-so gap between when she cheated** on me, and our first anniversary. Jenna finally told me about her debt. There was a Car Loan, plus a Personal Loan, and then there were the two credit cards she'd maxed out; one of her mechanisms for coping with depression after escaping her abusive ex was to shout rounds at overly fancy bars for her broke friends, and fly others over from Melbourne to visit her. Her debt was structured so poorly that most of her income was spent servicing the interest without actually touching the principal. 

** It's complicated - there'd been an "in principle" discussion about such things a while before, and I made it clear that as far as I was concerned she'd not done anything wrong. I guess you could say I was something of a crimeless-victim, but none of that made the feeling of being stabbed in the gut any less real, and it took some time to process afterwards. 

I wasn't upset about the existence of debt, but I was apoplectic-near-speechless that she'd taken a year to tell me about it, for a number of reasons: 

 - For a start, Jenna and I actually "dated", as in "went out on dates" both in our early courtship and throughout, and with both of us having decently-paying jobs we'd go to Nice Although Not Necessarily Extravagant Places with the agreement that we'd alternate; I got the first, she the second, and so on. I wouldn't have flinched at covering the tab if I knew she was in the hole, or at very least dropped the "fancy" a couple of notches. I can enjoy an evening with a beautiful, fascinating girl over fish & chips and a lukewarm bag of goon sitting on a rug in the park, after all. I was pissed off that she let me unwittingly help dig her deeper into that hole; I felt unconsentingly complicit in a circumstance I could have circumvented.
- I was pissed off that this brilliant, talented girl who was so passionate about what she did, who I'd spent a year falling for, after which I was Absolutely Not Bored, who after all these years of so-near-but-so-far, I could actually see myself building A Life with, could "lie-of-omission" to me for so long.
- I was pissed off that she'd hidden it so well that I hadn't caught on. 

and... 

- After all those years of subsistence-living, dating PYT's who Never Quite Fit or Just Couldn't Keep Up (not to mention Emma's Gaslight Sonata), after I'd Wandered The World Having Adventures, then scrimped and saved my way to Home Ownership, I'd embarked on this amazing new Adventure called Settling Down. I was prepared to do it on my own, but I wanted to do it with Someone, An Equal, who had dreams as bold and vivid as mine, who was a partner-not-a-dependent, where neither of us needed the other to achieve what we wanted, but could work together to Build Something Better.
- But more than anything else, I wanted to Do It With Her. 

Suddenly our "partnership of equals" wasn't, and our equal footing was separated by a divide measuring forty-seven thousand dollars. She may not have been dependent, but she certainly wasn't going to be able to contribute equally. This dream I'd allowed myself to have of having Someone To Build With had turned into Someone I'd Need To Carry, or for whom everything we did would mean delaying her own financial equilibrium, let alone actualisation. 

For the second time in a couple of months I left her place feeling gutted, needing time to process. 

I nearly walked; I'd been in a facsimile of "here" before and I'd sworn on my pinkie "Never Again"; Emma had strung me along for a year before revealing that we had life-goals which were Poles Apart: 

"Don't you want to create a new person who's half you and half me, and loves us unconditionally?"
"THE FUCK NO! HOLY FUCK! WHAT FUCKING DRUGS ARE YOU ON? HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU FUCKING BELIEVE SOMETHING THAT WAS HALF ME COULD POSSIBLY BE LIKE THAT? HOW THE FUCK NAIVE ARE YOU, HAVE YOU FUCKING MET ME??? I'M A FUCKING SOCIOPATH!!!"
"...But... It's what I want more than anything."
"And it's the thing I want so little that maybe, just maybe, if I had three lives, I'd almost consider doing it in one***." 

*** Reference to a line from Melbourne by The Whitlams: 

She found some guy on OKCupid or EHarmony or something and had a kid not long afterwards. From what I saw when I went stalking on Facebook he seemed a nice enough bloke, the kid was pretty adorable, and she looked happy. Maybe she even is, and good for her if so. I hope she's having a nice life. 

Now Jenna had done the same thing in her own way; we'd Made Plans, Created Dreams, Ideated A Life Together, and there I was calculating how little of that was now actually possible in the cold blue-shifted light when "the world is our oyster" contracts because "shit's expensive, yo". 

We'd planned the home we'd build together; her bookshelf-walled Library with the comfy chairs where we could read together just inside of arms-reach, with conveniently-placed side-tables for our cups of tea; my tech-dungeon with the gaming rigs we'd use to go on endless Borderlands runs together; the dinners we'd cook together in the open-plan kitchen, and the spaces around the dining table we'd set aside for her cats so they could be near the people who'd come round to share it with us... 

... until suddenly I found myself staring at the compromises we'd need to make if I wanted to get close to achieving a low-budget version of that using my income alone, but as much as I care more for the home than the house, it wasn't something we could do 'together' any more. 

We'd talked for days about the travel I'd done, and she wanted to do, and where the two of us were going to go; she wanted to go to Iceland for her 30th - we'd talked about it at length. Her Geologist-Lady-Boner for the place was immense, throbbing, and so wonderous to behold you couldn't help but want to touch it. It was the perfect blend of her professional passion, and my passion for travel, a place she wanted to go, and a place I'd never been; it was a few years away so it was absolutely doable... 

... until suddenly it wasn't... at least not in a way that would be 'ours'. 

After taking a week to clear my head and recalculate the vectors, in the end, for better or worse, I stayed, but I issued an ultimatum: she had a month to Get Her Shit In One Sock, and get her debt restructured. I promised to help if she asked, but unless she did I'd not push, prod, poke, or pester, in fact I'd posit not one unprompted word. A fortnight later, give-or-take, she asked me to come to Westpac and hold her hand whilst she signed the papers on her Debt Consolidation Loan, which of course I ditched work to attend. Leaving the bank with a debt she could actually service, we agreed to some new ground-rules for our dates, and hit what I guess you'd call a "Restart" button; of course, I took her out to dinner to celebrate. 

A year later my paternal grandmother had passed away, a quarter of a million dollars had landed in my bank account, and suddenly I was sneezing-distance from being able to pay off my modest little duplex. I had no intention of doing that tho, because it was far too small for the two of us and her three cats, so we'd been house hunting (I started off looking at places two streets over on Mars St on a whim because of her love-affair with that planet; she'd done her Geology Honours Project on mineral surveys of NASA's proposed landing sites for the Curiosity Rover, using their satellite data. She loves Mars like I love the idea of sitting in a pub until the end of my days with people paying my bar tab in return for solving their problems, or being able to instantly teleport so I can be in Paris for breakfast on a whim). 

A year after we'd moved into the place I moved out of in March to come back to Canberra, I finally asked how her loan was going. She made mumbling noises about how little progress is made in the first year or so because compound interest and blah-blah-what-the-fuckever; I made the <yeah-yeah, blah-blah, skip to the end> hand gesture, "I fucking know how loans work. Second mortgage and shit? What's the damage look like?"
She looked it up, told me the number.
"Hmm...k, what was your interest rate again? Like... 12%?"
She gave another number, slightly less than that.
"Aight, well I've got some cash left after paying the deposit on this place. Can you hit Westpac up for a payout figure? I want to buy your loan - I can halve your interest rate and still be ahead on what I'd pull leaving it in the offset, and we'd have you clear like 2 years sooner." 

Skipping past the protest, my accepting when she declined, then a day or three later confirming that the offer was still, in fact, on the table when she asked, confirming that I was actually sure, in fact I had a boilerplate Contract drawn up ready to go, and that it was in my own best interest across at least three different metrics, I bought her debt. 

The girls at Westpac, she told me later, were so enviously approving they waived the Break Fee for her. 

A couple of years later we went to Iceland. We couldn't time things to be there on her birthday, sadly, because she wasn't going to have quite enough leave accrued in time, plus the 30th of June is Ruinously Expensive since it's the height of Peak Season; we were there for mine tho, so I shared it with her. Standing on the frigid Reykjavik foreshore after dinner on the night of the day I turned 36, arms wrapped around her in the heavy coats we'd picked up in Berlin, she leaned her head back against my chest whilst we watched the Aurora Borealis flutter and dance in the solar wind across a silent sky, and that awe-struck moment was neither hers, no mine; it was ours. 

She absolutely couldn't afford that trip, but she paid for her Her Stuff, and I paid for mine. She was still deep in debt at the time, so her half of the Shared Expenses (flights, accommodation, so on) I paid for and added to her tab. That way it was, at least nominally, over a relevant time-frame, still "our" trip. 

This, from earlier that year, was on me: 

She left out of her description that the band was an alloy comprised of 95% Platinum and 5% Iridium, included in the design in part because neither of us are into gold, but more importantly because Iridium isn't a naturally occurring element on Earth; the only Iridium on Earth comes from meteorites which have fallen from space. Because (a lot of things, but this is pithy): 

"We are all stardust."
- Neil deGrasse Tyson. 

Six-and-a-quarter years ago, after she handballed me to Kat, there was a period of discord - despite their instigating the exchange of these Damaged Goods, they each decided that they'd been somehow slighted by the other, and I went from having a girlfriend-and-a-friend to having a girlfriend-and-an-ex-I'd-have-liked-to-have-been-friends-with-if-shit-hadn't-got-weird. Jenna and I kept in touch sporadically, and I watched her burn through a couple of boyfriends as she went; her most recent (to my count) ex and I get along pretty well, amusingly. Somehow, despite her having instigated and encouraged it, as recently as the last time we exchanged screams she still holds that against me. 

Two-and-a-half years ago we reconnected in the aftermath of Kat's departure. It took some effort to drag her out of the rabbit-hole she'd crawled down after ending things with J------ (the younger, chubbier, lawyerier version of me), but she got me in a way no one had done before and regardless of anything else, I Missed My Friend. She was on the rocks with S---- (the younger, less-refined, redheaded, dreadlocked version of me), and wound up ditching him after setting us up to become mates. The friendship got worked on... or at least fed with wedges and watered by an impressive number of pints which I snuck into my corporate "Client/Partner Meeting Expenses" Account because we'd mentioned "computers" in the conversation at some point Mr Taxman, I swear. 

A year ago we had a falling out, which is a polite way of saying "I came one slow-breath from kicking her out of my car on the side of Roe Hwy without slowing down from the 100kph speed limit whilst driving her drunk-arse home". I'd bought her ticket to come to the Monolith gig and see a bunch of bands I'd got her into, and a couple we'd come to love together. I wasn't in much of a mood to drink, so I offered to drive her, Ricky, and Priya, and was taking her to her boyfriend-after-the-boyfriend-after-the-boyfriend-after-me's place so he wouldn't have to drag his exhausted arse out of bed and come collect her from mine. I was in a REALLY bad headspace, skirting burnout having not long returned from my month in Canberra after delivering The Impossible Project, still missing Kat to bits after not-quite-two years, and coming up on four years working non-stop, finishing my MBA, and recovering from a-bike-accident-and-two-surgeries without a break. I was so on-edge that I recoiled whenever we made contact. Eventually she tried resting her head on my shoulder and I teleported six inches, pulling myself into the smallest ball I could and had to reject her when she reached out, invading my personal space with her hand this time (in a way which I know was meant to be comforting but was anything but), asking if I was OK. 

But we all know the answer to that question, because I'm not now, and certainly wasn't then; my equilibrium has been delicate to say the least, and that sort of "companionable contact" has become the opposite of comforting, so I spoke honestly, and told her: 

"No. Please don't touch me." 

It was a lovely day tho - Ricky has loved Karnivool to death since long before we crossed paths, Priya's all over Perth Prog like a Malaysian girl on a Laksa, and Jenna... let's just say that there was nothing played on stage that day that either of us wasn't absolutely into, and very little we hadn't listened to in one of the other's car at some point. It had been a really, uncynically, lovely day: 

The gig over, having dragged Jenna's drunk arse off some hapless bloke who was less interested in the mineral assets her mining-magnate boss controls than the ones she presents far more tangibly, then carrying Ricky's joyously sozzled one across the car park, and pouring them both into the FrogRocket whilst P performed a supportive shepherding role, and my own arse ensconced in the heated driver's seat, Jenna took One Of [Her] Turns. It was all of those nights when she had one too many and flipped from "the one person so empathic she guided my drunken arse, who hadn't realised he was grieving, out our front door early on a Saturday morning after watching my favourite Trek film (The Undiscovered Country) and sat me down in the driveway of the house (which, for all that it was legally 'mine', was emotionally 'ours') so I could look up at the stars whilst tears rolled down my face, weeping on her shoulder, because Leonard Nimoy had died, and my template for existing in a world of raging emotions I had no idea how to deal with and fought constantly to control along with him" to full-on just-like-the-bad-old-days dissociative. 

I won't relate her tirade - explaining the multiple layers of context would take more words than I have energy to spend, it's getting late, I'm tired, and my cheeks keep getting wet from that last anecdote. I've been gaslit by professionals, but Jenna's a far more dangerous flavour of crazy; when she flips, she believes in her pocket-universe one-hundred-and-crazy percent. When you've been told your perceptions are wrong for so long, by so many people, you find you're never quite sure; when one day you find that singular point in the heavens which stays still when the whole world around you is spinning, that one Star which always points North, the Legrange Point where your fingers touch becomes an axis around which you can calculate every vector, and any moment. When your reference point inverts gravity and polarity without warning, utterly convinced that what you thought was black is actually white, and that this up was never down, where else can you possibly find yourself but in freefall? It took a long time for me to learn to trust my senses when my source-of-truth started screaming otherwise and my inner-ear couldn't tell the difference. 

That night I took control of my breathing, and Set The FrogRocket's cruise-Control to the Heart of the Speed Limit, let the white stitching on the steering wheel serve as my reference to "up", and the red line in front of the X-Wing on my GPS point the way forward. 

I kept my tongue clamped between my teeth as she escalated, pausing when I dropped Priya off, and Ricky passed out peacefully in the back seat.
I chewed my lip whilst she berated me for abandoning her for the year she wouldn't respond to my increasingly urgent pings asking "R U OK???"
I finally broke composure when she started attacking Ian; because by that point my tongue was swollen, my lips were bleeding, and enough was enough (and no one insults my Ian but me). 

The rest of the trip played out to the soundtrack of a dissociative's lament, a whining turbocharger, a sociopath's repudiation, a squealing of tyres pushed beyond their grip-rating, a rev-limiter protesting its artificial limitation, ending with a handbrake-turn and a 

"Get the fuck out."

A furious foot introducing pedal to metal, a couple of high-speed turns, and a full-throttle thrash down the ramp back onto Roe Hwy later, Ricky opened her eyes in my rear-view mirror: 

"Your ex be cray-cray."
"Ricky, you know I love you'n'shit, right, but Shut The Fuck Up."
"You know I'm right."
"Ain't sayin' you're wrong, but you can still Shut The Fuck Up. Now go the fuck to sleep. Also, I love you."
"I love you tzzzzzzzz...." 

(Finally getting to the first thing I wrote when I started relating this story) A month and a half ago I (realised how much context this statement was going to need to make sense, and have spent the last 6+ hours listening to versions of the same song whilst I fill it in, followed by 2 x 4 hour editing sessions making sure it all made sense) was in the fourth hour of a Teams call with Ian, helping him with his second MBA unit because he and Jenny broke up recently and "helping a fellow traveller on their own MBA Journey" is a Fantastic Way For Us Both To Not Deal With That, and the topic of The Last Time I Saw Or Exchanged Words With Jenna (or Priya, for that matter) came up. A high-speed debrief on "Leadership through motivation", psychoanalysing his South African colleague, and a bottle-and-a-half of wine" are my excuses for not remembering what he told me Jenna had said-or-done immediately following our breakup six-and-change years earlier, motivating me to declare: 

"Seriously? You know what... seriously, fuck that bitch. Fuck that lying fucking dissociative fucking pity-whore..."
"<Ian'ing ensues>"
"Nah, fuck you Mr Empathy Man; empathise with this, motherfucker: you know that bitch still owes me money? You know how I wiped Sanda's slate a while back? I was going to do the same thing for Jenna at the same point, but... nah man, fuck that, and fuck her. She can wait another month. Shit just cost her a thousand dollars."
"<Ian'ing intensifies>"
"Nah, this shit ain't your fault. Thank you for telling me. You're a better friend than either of us deserve, but <waving both middle fingers at the webcam> now I'm fucking pissed." 

Two weeks ago I sent the following email to Jenna, BCC'ing Ian so there'd be a witness: 

Subject: "Loan cancellation"

"Jenna, 

Looking at my spreadsheet there's ~$3k left on your tab, but I just bumped up my rate to [my main client] and I'm sick of people owing me money so I'm calling it. Happy Birthday (or whatever occasion you prefer). 

Have a nice life. 

Regards, 

Peter." 

Six and a half hours ago I pinged Ian again: 

Thing is... I still love her, and I miss her to death, I desperately hope she gets better, and I sincerely wish her the nicest possible life. 

I won't pretend she didn't hurt me, but for all that I try to be the Ian'er man, I'm still bleeding where she pricked me, and I know I'll never be Ian enough to not twist the knife when, from hell's heart, I stabbingly take my revenge; cold as the stars which shone down uncaring whilst I sat with her in our driveway, or the tears which fell in the quiet stillness of that night just as they do now; for all that I'm relieved to have received silence as a reply, there remains a smouldering ember in my cold and otherwise-empty heart that still remembers the warmth of the arms wrapped around me whilst I grieved, and mine around her as we stared in awe, and desperately wants to see a reply in my inbox, even if all it said was: 

"Hello." 

On an order of chaotic magnitude...

 Musical accompaniment: Sean Townsend - Chillswitch Engage

If you want to understand me, you need to understand how I see the world. 

Ever since I was aware enough of the concept of "self" as being distinct from "everything else", ever since I realised that for every action there was a reaction, ever since I understood just how little I understood, I've looked out into the world and seen patterns. 

Cause and effect. 
Problem, reaction, solution. 
If this, then that. 

Where most see the chaos of balls bouncing around the surface of a stained pool table after the break in a dingy pub on a Friday night, I see connected chains of one thing leading to the next, traceable, proportional, predictable, but guided by the analogue input of hands shaking from the weariness of a long week in the office and a jug and a half of Tooheys New; each and every interaction the product of force, momentum, torque, angle, material elasticity and plasticity, gravity, and friction. I realised that every event was traceable, that if you could witness everything that was occurring within the perspective light-cone of "here" and "now", and quantify the variables to sufficient granularity, you could see everything that had led to this moment, and everything which was about to occur, such that you could accurately call which balls would fall into which pocket and which would fly off the table and into that guy's pint of beer. 

Everything we call "chaos" is simply shorthand for "effects for which we cannot perceive the cause". 
When it goes against us, we call it "The Hands of Fate".
When it goes in our favour, we call it "The Grace of God". 

In my teens I read The Bible from the start and saw the hypocrisy inherent in that fiction sold as "The one, true, ineffable word of God", applied the logic that if I, who was imperfect, could easily detect the imperfection in what was purported to be "true", then "this-shit-don't-add-up" and "ineffable-be-fucked". If ever there was a God or Fate, there wasn't now. 

Because there is no God; there's only us. 

Everything we see, feel, hear, touch, perceive, and leads us to believe... it's all patterns we either can't detect or can't understand, the same as I've never really understood people because people were illogical and did irrational, stupid things, as if they couldn't comprehend all the things which seemed obvious, and made so much noise that they drowned out the beauty of the songs I heard everywhere I went to the point where I wouldn't leave the house without something in my ears to drown them out so that eventually I stopped being able to hear it myself. 

But whilst my ears were plugged, my eyes were open, and I watched, and I tested, and I tried, and I failed, and through it all my brain recorded, and I remembered, and eventually I became able to truly see, and in seeing I could verify what my ears could hear, and separate the noise from the signal. 

Even then I found people bewildering because whilst I could see the patterns in their behaviour I couldn't understand what it all meant and I kept getting it wrong again and again and it was all so confusing that I'd given up hope of ever being able to when a psychopath pointed out I was a sociopath so I can only apply the metric of my own experience because I can't empathy and that was OK and it didn't make me wrong but something in my head was broken but that didn't mean I was and I shouldn't keep trying to fix it because it couldn't be but I should keep trying to be better because I was so I did and I have and to this day I still am. 

As time went by, and my experiences piled up, the patterns I saw in the people I encountered resolved into meaning, defining more and more granularly, like a picture downloaded over a dialup internet connection in the last decade of last century. I integrated these patterns to create models, and by paying attention to the quaver in someone's voice and their 1000 yard stare in the video of a Teams meeting I could see the breaking of their heart and how close their resolve was to failing, because I've been in all three of those places, and applying that to the models I'd built for who, and what they are I could later say to them what the logic of cause and effect dictated they needed to hear because it's what I, if I were them, and they were me, and our roles reversed, would need to hear. 

It's all patterns, and whilst patterns can be expressed as maths I couldn't for the life of me explain even the smallest piece of it to you in less than a thousand words. The tragedy of all this is that whist my brain can calculate all of this adaptively, in real-time, I can't because I'm terrible at maths. 

But my heuristics are amazing. 

My brain is a computational engine which took over 40 years of data to train, but now that it's finally become useful it's also become ineffable, like God. 

But there is no God; there's only us. 

Each, and every one of us. 

That's how I see the world, and if that makes no sense to you, you are not alone; you've found yourself in a very select club in which I also count myself a member because whilst I wrote, and live this, I won't pretend to understand it. We are all lost, cast-away, confused, craving comfort; we are all alone, therefore you are amongst friends because we are all in the same place. 

Each, and every one of us. 

On knees that won't bend...

Musical accompaniment: Oliver Tree - Me, Myself & I

"You don't even have to write as or about yourself. What would you say if you were someone else?"
 - Penpal

He found himself stuck in a pause, trapped in the gap between moments, the weightlessness experienced at the apex between the pounding of running feet, the period between stumble and impact we call "falling", the quantum instant which connects two otherwise unrelated sentences; the semi-colons describing the triumvirate of "me; myself; and I". 

With the solid ground upon which he built his church turning to quicksand beneath his feet, he scrambled for purchase, reached out to connect himself with something real. 

"Thematically cliched as it may be in this context, but I love you, man." 

There was solace and camaraderie in that indescribable moment, and with a solid point-of-reference/star upon which to hitch his wagon he watched it all fall away. 

He took a breath, exhaled, tried to reorient. Up and Down are a subjective concept; when gravity fails both are as arbitrary as a description of the colour "blue" to someone who only sees the world in monochrome. All he knew was that he was the only common factor in everything he'd experienced, that if anyone should have known better it was him. 

He'd taken risks, he knew he took them; things had come out against him, and therefore he had no cause for complaint. 

That objective truth made his pain no less real. It was, and he accepted it, but whether he was rushing towards the ground or the ground rushed towards him was going to make no subjective difference to the bones which where about to get broken, or how much this was going to hurt. 

Oliver Tree - Hurt 

When you carry the weight of the heavens on your shoulders, you don't get to shrug. When he set out to prove a point, every motherfucker in the room wrong, and put them all to shame, he couldn't allow himself to. For that reason, if no other, when he took on that mantle of responsibility he girded his loins, gritted his teeth, locked his knees, and muttered: 

"Victory or death."

The weight building on the yoke he carried across his broad shoulders, slings and arrows pelting trapezius and laterals, and strength beginning to fail, over the course of his titanic struggle he realised that he was still standing not because he wouldn't falter, but because he wasn't able to. Arms locked and shoulders braced, legs tensed in position over knees which wouldn't so much refuse to bend as couldn't, he was committed. He'd always avoided commitment; there was always an out. He'd never found a hill he was willing to die on, needle he couldn't thread, or dead-end without a night-soil lane he couldn't parkour over the fence into and échapper down, with less shit on than behind him. 

But if he didn't stand for something, he stood for nothing, so with everything and nothing to prove, one more smouldering straw fell out of a brimstone-scented sky full of fire. Refusing to submit might be a parable of fortitude, but being unable to is an unspeakable hell. As the weight increased straw-by-smouldering-straw, each a feather tilting the scales against his heart, and as much as he wanted to beg to falter, his knees refused. So it was he began to splinter, stress-fractures cutting towards his core, parts of himself falling away, falling into dust. 

As pieces of himself elided, evaporating into nothing before they could encounter the ground, he wished he could bend like a willow rather than shattering like an oak, but the weight of what he carried around shattered his spine and he crumbled. In the end, of all the things to fall to earth it was the burden he carried that impacted last, crushing the smouldering embers that used to be his self. 

Oliver Tree - Jerk

Looking up from the Pensieve Pool of blended selves and shared experience, I considered the convergent threads I could no longer separate one from the other, prismatic colours separated and converging, each distinct but irrevocably integrated; inseparable. 

What would I say if I was someone else?
What would he say if he was me? 
What would we say if we were everything, we were nothing, and we were one? 

Sandra used to say "Remember who you are," again and again, and at the time it gave me strength. 

I rather wish Ian could hear it the same way I did. 

I feel like he could use that right now. 

Drowning in silence...

Musical accompaniment: BMTH - Drown 

My dive computer reads 30m below the surface of the Andaman Sea, my knees kicking up clouds of silt as they hit the bottom, and I can't breathe. 

I've just back-rolled off a dinghy in tandem with Matthias, a synchronicity perfected through dozens of buddied dives, dozens of kilometres off the coast of Khao Lak, Thailand, and fallen headfirst into the peaceful silence of the blue. As the bottom rises up toward me I take a breath to add buoyancy to my torso, throw my hands out in an aqua-brake, tuck knees to my chest and flip over my centre-of-mass to settle neatly at the bottom and wait whilst the group reassembles. The cold, dry, decompressing air tickles my throat and I choke on a cough, then another, and another. Biting down on the mouthpiece I realise that no matter how hard I draw down I can't seem to fill my lungs with air. 

I breathe in as deep as I can, fighting the pressure constricting my chest, and it's not enough. 

I'm breathing hard, struggling to bring my heart-rate under control as my pulse thuds deafeningly in my ears. 

I'm hyperventilating. 

I'm about to drown. 

The Divemaster sees the torrent of bubbles streaming out of my reg's and comes over, thumb and index finger circled to ask if I'm OK. 

I don't have to answer with the knife-across-throat gesture; the torrent of bubbles falling upwards and the look in my eyes is enough to tell him I'm having trouble breathing, beginning to panic. 

He grabs me by the buoyancy vest, a hand hovering over my regs to make sure I don't try to spit them out, makes eye contact and reinforces it with two fingers back and forth between his and mine to say "look at me", reaches for my inflator and pumps air in to bring us safely back to the surface. 

I go limp and let him guide us, close my eyes, try to still my mind, and focus on pulling and pushing air slower and slower. 

He's the Divemaster, in charge of the dive, but I'm also a Divemaster - I might have a hundred dives to his thousand, but this is shameful. 

I shouldn't be doing this, but it's happening now for the second time this trip. 

It's 2018, and it's 5 years ago, and it's 5 months ago, and it's 5 yesterdays ago, and it's right now, and it was one of the last times I've gone in the water. 

I look up from my laptop and look out over Turner, 30m above Northbourne Ave, and pull cold, moist air into my lungs. 

It's not enough, but I hold it, stare into the darkness where I know the horizon to be, breathe out, then in. 

I remind myself there's not 30m of suffocating water above my head, or 4 atmospheres of pressure constricting my chest. 

I remind myself my buoyancy vest isn't too tight and I can breathe normally. 

I remind myself I'm not about to drown. 

The cars move north and south along the road beneath me, brightly coloured and auto-luminescent, moving in schools, scattered occasionally by the passing of a red-liveried barracuda; an apex-predator running along steel rails aping a living torpedo which glints like a steel rail in the depths. The sounds come into my ears as if through water, muffled by Active Noise Cancellation. 

The music stopped a while ago and I hadn't noticed. 

With a two-fingered hand gesture I switch screens, and press play on another song. 

sleepmakeswaves - What We Cannot Speak Of Must Be Passed Over In Silence

There are red-and-blue lights flashing silently on the road up Black Mountain under the watchful eye of Minas Telstra, which sits austerely white against the darkened sky atop a darker peak over the lights of the CSIRO laboratories which, in turn, float over the inky black of ANU in energy-saving mode. Someone's evening has reached a premature and unpleasant turn whilst my own continues anticlimactically thanks to an iterative descendent of Mr Dolby's miraculous invention for silencing unwanted noise. I find myself wondering why, if sleep makes waves, the opposite can't reliably be true. 

If the best bed one can sleep on is peace I must have bought my mattress from the wrong store because pocket coils and memory foam have left me wound up like an over-torqued spring in a two-bob watch, trapped in pockets of memory when, at 3 in the morning, I emerge foaming at the mouth from the suffocating wine-dark sea of slumber. 

I took today off work, not because I had anything fun planned, but because I've been feeling more burned out than the ashen dust brushed into Cinderella's pan-of-Peter, used-up and later dispersed to fertilise the beds from which will later bloom flowers destined to decorate the passage-way down which she'll run into the night, pursued by anxiety, a prince, and a hard deadline, shedding impractical footwear in her panicked rush towards her carbon-neutral, if magically-costly, carriage. The plans I had for my expensively-purchased day were similarly, baroquely grand: 

Go out for brunch; and

Get my hair cut. 

Sitting in the chair with a stomach full of Egg & Bacon Roll, I realised I'd slumped forward when the heavily-tattooed barber with gentle hands says, "You look tired, bro." 

"Yeah, it's been a long..." selecting an order of magnitude more-or-less at random, "couple of months." 

He grunts sympathetically, and rubs something soothing into the freshly-shaved sides of my head. 

If youth is wasted on the young, then logically life is wasted on the living; I, who is certainly not the former, and arguably not the latter, am struggling to not become a waste of oxygen. Whether I'm succeeding would best be determined by consulting with the trees; I can only hope that by the time they cast their unhasty judgement my ashes have fed the soil in which they breathe sufficiently that they will stroke their beards, and judge me favourably. 

Perhaps, some day, when I sink into the depths of endless, silent sleep, as unavoidable it will be then as it's been elusive now, and I provide my final service to this world by creating a space where more beautiful things can grow, I'll finally find peace.