at two in the morning, getting home on foot. eyes are very red, bushfire moons.
strangers converge on me at intersection, reveal familiar faces.
shrugging away as he reaches out to pat me on the shoulder, walking again.
'are you sure you'll get home alright?'
'are you?'
driving at night on main roads with no police everybody starts to speed. they have these tense little races with each other, overtaking at ninety kilometers an hour in an eighty zone.
walking at night there is a compulsion to appear slightly dangerous, even though dangerous looking people are the ones you're hoping not to meet.
ever since a child in a cardboard box was crushed by a truck, people are careful to swerve around rubbish they see on the road. but nobody ever gets out to check if there is an infant wrapped in trash in the middle of the street.
do only so much as to appear aware.
the promise is that you're the only one pretending. that secretly in a world of dropped pretenses you'd come out on top. shed your snakeskin and reveal something older and stronger than your appearance might suggest.
i could fuck your girlfriend if i decided to. beat you in a fight. drive faster than you in an eighty zone. the promise is made to yourself that you're only playing along. that if astrology came under serious attack you could reassert yourself as the centre of the universe.
the promise is that action is not necessary as long as the thought is maintained. no need to exercise a power you're sure of. convince yourself that a life of quiet arrogance is justified because even though you never proved it, you're an individual of potential.
society is a laboratory to examine the functionality of compassion, promise. solipsism is ready and waiting in the wings, promise. you are complete in and of yourself. promise.
thought belies honesty, your rationale meticulously engineers systems of superiority to all contenders without ever necessitating conflict.
maintain one's individuality in all cases. self-preservation hinders humility. i am convinced i will destroy this world before it destroys me, but i never clench my fists.
why put weakness to the test?
i think therefore i'm not.
when i was a little kid somebody showed me the skin that a tarantula had shed. offered to let me hold it. i didn't because i was too scared that the husk would come alive in my hand and bite my wrist.
half awake one morning i drank a cup of coffee in bed, and imagined the body of a huntsman floating to the top and sinking its fangs into my upper lip. i lay back in bed and dreamt intensely for another twenty minutes before i got up and got ready for school.
the earliest nightmare i can remember is of me in the park near my grandparent's house, except the grass is dotted with rock pools with deep blue water in them. a spider the size of me climbs out of one of the pools and chases me across the park. i am running from it, whenever i turn around it is just a mass of legs moving. periodically it drops into one of the pools and i wait. then it erupts from a pool next to me and i have to run again, barely keeping ahead of it.
when i'm stressed i sometimes dream about massive numbers of spiders, infestations. in one of them i am waiting in a checkout queue at a supermarket and i look back to see all the aisles are covered in web, and gradually, spiders start to crawl out from between the items on the shelves. some of them are huge. in the most recent one i was told to wash the dishes and i found the sink was filthy and filled with web. i tried to clean some of the dishes but every time i moved something i disturbed spiders. big bloated ones the color of rotted fruit and glossy black ones with prominent fangs. the centre piece of the dream was my turning over a plate to reveal a tarantula the length of my forearm, moving slowly. these dreams aren't nightmares, i'm never afraid in these dreams. the pervasive emotion is always dread and rising panic.
when i was a kid i borrowed one of those choose your path horror stories from the library at school. my nonno picked me up that day and took my brother and i to glenferrie road, because my brother had his grading for taekwondo. while he was doing it i sat in a cafe with nonno and i read this little book, except i made a point of folding down every page where you made a choice and i kept coming back to them so by the end of the hour i had exhausted every possibility the book had to offer. nonno finished his coffee and waited. i think he thought it was funny how i kept flipping backwards and forwards in the book.
a few years earlier than that i took a day off school and i went to nonna and nonno's house for the day, driving there i told my mum about how i didn't really understand my math homework. she said i should ask nonno because he used to be really good at math. i showed it to him that day and he drew this pyramid of numbers and sort of explained it to me, but it didn't make sense and he couldn't seem to get what he was saying straight and he got frustrated and i think i smiled politely and put the homework away. later that day i was sitting reading and he saw me and spoke to me in italian for a long time, trying to explain something to me. nonna translated, he was asking me to read aloud to him, he used to read aloud to himself when he was a kid in italy. he really wanted to hear me read and he asked a few times but i was embarrassed and i didn't. at the start of this year in methods my teacher drew that same pyramid of numbers on the board, pascal's triangle.
a few years after the cafe i was going to italy with nonno and we were in heathrow airport, our plane was delayed. we sat waiting, and in four hours i read a whole book. nonno sat next to me, and every fifteen minutes or so he would ask me what was going on, and i told him not to worry and kept reading. four hours. i read a book front to back, and he kept coming back to the same question, what was going on. he even got up a few times because he wanted to ask people or get food but i made him sit and wait because i didn't know when the plane would be ready and i was paranoid that we'd miss it.
in italy we stayed with nonno's family, all people who knew me from when i was a baby and loved me for it, i didn't know them. i wasn't sure how i was related to them. who i think was nonno's brother took us to a cemetery. it was a beautiful place. you couldn't see the sky for all the trees but the sun still kept you warm. you couldn't hear the road outside. nonno was led on a tour of the graves of all the relatives he'd forgotten were dead. he cried at every one. there were maybe more than ten, fifteen. some were tombs with couples, whole families. nonno's brother osvaldo spoke some english and he kept encouraging me to take photos of nonno at each site, so he'd remember. even nonno told me to a few times. so every time he found out somebody he loved was dead, he'd cry for a while and curse god, then look at the camera and try to smile a bit with tears on his cheeks. in some of the shots you can catch a bit of me, reflected in the marble with the camera over my eye. between graves nonno had this look in his eye, miserable anticipation, like maybe he was trying to remember all of the people he grew up with and wondering whose death was going to find him next, though they'd found him all before in the lives he'd forgotten. it's only now that i realise how much respect i have for him, for taking so much bad news in one go. these were landmarks for grief that come every few years for most, and here was nonno experiencing a near lifetime of loss in one day. i think he felt ashamed too, ashamed that he'd forgotten so much death.
a few days later nonno took me to see a friend of his who'd only recently had a stroke. he was lying in a huge white hospital bed with a shiny metal skeleton that sat in the middle of a traditional old house. his wife was feeding him baby food, she had these big tired eyes. nonno saw him and sat with him, his friend couldn't speak, but he recognised nonno a little bit i think. nonno held his hand and was friendly to the wife and smiled and asked how he was in broken italian and by the end he was even making jokes, play fighting with the guy in the hospital bed. the guy who couldn't talk ended up smiling a little. i remember the whole house made my skin crawl and i kept quiet. nonno only cried when we left the house.
it's been a few years since the trip to italy but every now and then i still start and remember how i sat reading. i want to apologise to nonno for ignoring him but he wouldn't know what i was talking about. nonno had his stroke before i was born, i've never met the man that my mum tells me about, who he 'used' to be. but to say that i've only known the shadow of nonno doesn't feel right.
i still come back to the same moments in my life, reading while nonno waited, the cemetery, pascal's triangle. i want to say sorry. i want my sins forgiven rather than forgotten, immortalised by transience. the wrongs i've done to him in his past lives, like the deaths of his loved ones that he has to be reminded of. i can't end this. his name is berardino.
