Flaw.

Everyone is flawed. If your flaws do not affect anyone else then you are living well.

Vignette.

Anthony placed one leg on the railing and leaned forward so that it took all his weight. His crotch became elongated and he held this seam-bursting pose with the permanence of a bronze sculpture. "It must be disheartening for you to be a writer with nothing to say" he said. Zoe winced and turned splendidly florid. "It's not that I've got nothing to say," she said, "I have. I was once a future writer and now I'm the nemesis of current living writers – I'm the former future author of the great literary vignette." She laughed and stared at his tight pants and the ridiculous position in which he'd cast himself. "You can't do anything these days without someone thinking you're a creep, can you Anthony?"

Actinic word sequence.

Blame.

Blame requires a resting place. Far away from where our blameless lives play out. We fuss around allocating it a town, a home, a bed in which it can settle. Nobody likes to see blame aimlessly wandering, peering around corners and through windows into our lives. We don't want it brushing against us as it drifts by. We prefer it to be still. Silent and inert so we can measure our own distance from it and how close others are to where it collapses. Then we're able to give it a wide berth. Blame, we say, belongs somewhere else.

Colour Plate.

Time.

At our annual meeting concerning year end accounts, Simon would allow me glimpses of his obvious frustration. It was as if a year's worth of numbers and columns and bottom lines had exhausted him of the ability to maintain a charade; that over the seasons of calculating profit and loss, all the while with bigger questions racing about his head, he'd decided to just come out with it.

Every year, without fail, he'd tip back on his cowhide executive chair. Tilting his head towards the ceiling, looking for answers in the light dancing on his closed eyelids, he'd question me on a recurring theme:

"Why do we experience things now but only remember the past? What is the present, and what is the process of metamorphosis that causes this shift from a stream of experience to memory of experience? What is experience and what is memory? Is time the absolute that governs all aspects of the physical and the intellectual?"

Then, leaning forward across the wide kauri desk, first blinking and then staring at me as if I had the answers, he'd sigh and slump his shoulders before apologising and returning to the figures on the spreadsheet in front of him.  

I believe that he truly believed that I had the answers. He was fascinated that I was comfortable with the living I made as an existentialist literary voice suffering from an identity crisis. Fascinated yet perplexed. He struggled internally with the idea, and then expressed it every year on March 31. As if by stumping me with metaphysical conundrums I'd see the error of my woolly-headed ways, eventually committing to a career that involved fixed income and projected dividends. As if my tax return was a personal affront to his entire world view. 

I saw the young me in him. Sadly, he was twice my age.

Commute.

the footsteps of the wind

approach at altitude

signal their arrival

these plastic bags in trees

announcing their intent

the needles in the breeze

poke holes in the gaps in the silence

which melts into

the grey white noise

of tarseal pressing tired flesh

and then it stops

and starts again

and leaves me thinking

of whether this is good and great

or can never be that way

this weary sense of now and forever.

Notes.

The notebook’s beige cover accentuated its bright red logo. The pages offered advice from a dazzling array of literary lights: The best stories are the ones worth writing; every story needs an Iago. Aphorisms were highlighted in the margins. Writerly wisdom concerning style and tone traced indentations through the white leaves and ingredients with which to concoct literary alchemy glowed on the pages. Say what you mean... just write... deadline three weeks, vivid red ink formally warned. Time pressure’s good... book the baby sitter... cancel coffee group, dreary black felt-tip casually prescribed. Problem solved. 


There would be plenty of time to focus in the precious spaces between life. This will be a brilliant story. The story deserved to be written. It would be a story that inspires and explains – a story worth passing on.


Yet plot, characters and theme, voice, tone and language, poetic prose pared to lean syntax, the satisfied sigh of the last line, the simple beauty of the story to grow within the reader, revealing parts of itself days later, remain scattered like seeds in this private notebook. What prevents me from gifting this story to readers? Am I afraid to expose my words, or am I afraid these words will expose me? Am I alone in this fear? Ends.


The story has not been written.

Actinic word sequence.

Pity.

His absence remained with her like the chill of a room too large to warm. A dread descended, silver-cold; shadows lingered and caressed; drew knowing looks from unknown guests; pity, pity the dispossessed. She plunged into a lake of ice, her broken mind at last at rest.

Rather.

Think of all the reasons you'd rather not be me and that's why I'd rather be you.

Plainly.

He fanatically believed that men of words were weasels; that they were anything but men of their word; that they wove deeper meaning into plain talk to camouflage their intent, to advance their causes; that they relegated the less loquacious to silent insignificance. Unfortunately he'd confused writers with rhetoricians. But then, he'd say that me saying that plainly proves his point.

Asemic continuum.

Potential.

A car strobed red through the trees in the distance. Plastic bags cart-wheeled in a spiral of white noise in its wake. The afternoon was hot. I lay prone on the concrete which warmed my front while the sun browned my back. I closed my eyes and was anywhere. A cocoon. Fiji. Her bed. The concrete softened beneath me with each rise and fall of breath, drawing me into its porous surface. The weight of summer air pressed gently from above. Air, flesh and concrete became one and I drifted into a blurry sleep. 10 minutes earlier I'd been diving into Richard's pool. His sister was likely still there judging by the yells from over the fence. The water had chilled as the sun pushed shadows ahead of itself into walls and over fences onto the pool's surface, so I'd come onto the street to sunbathe and warm-up. I heard Simone squeal and then an uneven splash. I imagined her limbs flailing wildly to break her fall, and the water enveloping her, maybe peeling her bikini top down a little. I loved her limbs. I'd written poetry about them. Bad poems with the best intentions. Isn't that what schoolboys did when they discovered a girl's limbs had power over them? Didn't they concoct private and persuasive expressions of their admiration? I hoped so. Simone had limbs of note, and other things besides. The reason I was out here on the street, face down on the concrete, was because this is where she had lain yesterday. I was filling in the memory of her lithe outline. The glow of the world around me became brighter. I felt like peeing in my togs and almost purred in my half-sleep when I was startled by cold splashes of water bouncing onto the back of my neck. I tilted my head up to see Simone bending over me, silhouetted against the jewel-blue sky. You alright? She asked. We were wondering where you'd got to. Yep, fine. I replied in a monotone attempt to disguise the thrill of peering into her shape. Come on, she said and held out long arms to pull me up. I refused her offer desperately willing the bulge in my togs to subside. I was being mocked by my body. It was offering the chance of holding her hands or embarrassing myself. I stayed rooted to the ground. Suit yourself, she said, and I couldn't make out her expression against the clarity of the blue behind her. I'm off to make a soda-stream. Come and join us when you're ready. I wondered if she knew. She must've known. How could anyone not know? I flushed red. Ok, I need to dry out a bit more that's all, I mumbled. Ok. See you. She turned and skip-ran for a few steps. The sinew of her hamstrings rippled tightly as she slowed to a saunter. She turned into the gate and with a probing finger pinged the elastic of her bikini bottoms underneath her bum. She glanced back at me smiled. She knew what I knew that she knew. The look she gave me was as if I had changed shape while I was lying there on the footpath, and she was trying to remember how I used to appear. As soon as I could, I got up and followed. The trees revealed themselves in bright swathes along the grass verge. The rough concrete had left shallow indentations across my chest and stomach. I looked over my shoulder and saw the dark shape of my wet outline shrinking in the heat. It was evaporating and merging with Simone's vapour from yesterday. The summer had barely begun and the mix of anxious potential it was cooking already made me sick with happiness. I broke into a canter and dashed up the front steps to Richard's and Simone's parent's place. I was anywhere. Anything might happen. Life moved unstoppably forward. There seemed no purpose to it. It needed none. It was good. It just was. How quickly things change.

Anonymous Author TV.

Tomorrow.

We piece together fragments of memory to create a concept of what the future might be. For someone with amnesia or no memory development, the implications are bleak. Mental time travel is unique to humans. Being trapped in the present may not sound terrible but planning a future is inherent to our happiness. Why do we care about tomorrows? Because we can remember yesterdays.

Conception.

Half of me recalls taking out an unusually shaped sperm with a flick of my flagellum. It had advanced quickly in my slipstream and was preparing to overtake me. The fertile egg was in sight. I contracted and expanded like a super-sonic accordion and lunged head-first into the spongy wall of the ovum. 

***

The other half of me remembers being attacked by a white tick-like creature which buried its head deep into my body, batting away others of its kind with a powerful tail. After that it's something of a blur. I became single minded in my purpose to divide; I thoroughly embraced mitosis. Ironically, single-mindedness is a leading cause of schizophrenia. 

Venn diagram.

Black.

It was rain-dark. Silverbeet coloured trees which were neither silver nor red shrouded the slick roads. He walked too fast, bouncing off strangers. Mist permeated their angry, sibilant voices with coldness and the white noise of tires on wet asphalt became ugly. He would have welcomed the punch in the face – it was the threat of the punch that caused more damage. Peering back every few steps, through the inkiness, he felt sick. We want to see the colour of your fear, they'd told him. Well, this was it; a boy tearing through blackness, all his light absorbed.

Eureka.

Which reminds me, I must come up with a memorable opening line.