the rework journal

We’re sitting on a couch with plastic cushions, his nose leaving small impressions on my cheek. An analogue clock trapped inside a wire cage reads 10:10, that’s two hours since my train pulled into the station by his house. Five minutes of waiting for his silver holden to roll by. 10 seconds of confusion as his step-dad’s car pulls up beside me. Then a two-second freeze that I won’t forget: His sweet, teary face peeking out from the back seat. I jump in and forget about my seatbelt.

I could scratch my body apart… just tear it open… and I wouldn’t feel it I don’t think. I wouldn’t even scream. 

Nearly two hours on and he won’t stop scratching. Digging in beneath his flesh to find the bug. The bug that sails along his blood and fucks up his mind. Nearby, nurses in fluorescent joggers pass in urgency towards a hysteric cry down the corridor. No one else moves. Just the tense silence of waiting patients, accentuated by ivory walls and a BBC drama playing in the corner. I chuckle and rub his knee.

You know what this reminds me of? That old song by Death Cab for Cutie?

It definitely isn’t the time to bring it up but it’s out my mouth before I can catch it. His eyes are shut but he knows and smirks in my ear. An expel of breath that I want to steal inside my handbag ready for the moment he decides to stop. My hand slides across his chest, his heart burns on. He will fight. He always fights. I’m shuffling through neurons to find the tune and grin as I draw out the dusty lyrics.

“I looked around at all the eyes on the ground as the TV entertained itself.”

But the quakes begin again and I gently draw his exhausted body back to my chest. In my arms my best friend writhes beneath alien skin, his mind challenging his body once more to a vicious duel of survivor. His thoughts overfill and spill out onto our shoes.

Your body is fighting for you.

 We’re staring into the bowls of our separate thoughts connected through the veins of our knotted fingers. In the same moment, we both recall the final lyrics of the song, singing softly to ourselves as twin tears drip from our chins.

“Love is watching someone die.”

What Sarah Said

I squeezed my breathlessness into grey lead boxes

strung tapping toes across a five-point scale

vomit slapped onto recycled office paper

each confession fits within the flimsy hold of a reject store staple

I have found that once condensed 

I am compact, easy

to carry

a file stashed 

between the cutting pamphlets 

A punctured wheel in my mind that began in the most desolate part of the Hume. My car stops. Even if rain weren’t thrashing the windscreen I would see nothing in the dark tomb that enveloped my tinfoil guard. Suffocating, but I knew that if I stepped out into the unforgiving darkness I would be swallowed. A loneliness certain no being had felt before, speeding through a lightless tunnel far from the slightest familiar breath. Similar I suppose to how Space feels, however I’m certain there must be a humbling empowerment to stare upon all the divine complexities of earth and cover it behind a fingernail. On that highway I felt enormous. As if my immense weight had crushed all living things and was trapped inside a place beyond time. Past and future did not exist and into the black hole I was being pulled.

But now it is dusk and I roll in a coach far from the sickness behind me. 47 passengers watch silently as luxurious green hills framed with golden sunshine tumble farther than any of us can fathom. Here it was possible to forget home, left only to consider the beauty of infinity. As if the tears of my panic attack had sucked into the soil and flourished a great new land. My heavy heart here was once so slick with loneliness it stuck to the asphalt. But now, the size of an atom, no longer am I terrified of this halfway point.