What is there to say?

How did the government get this photo of me

I'm a bit sore today, but not too bad considering how much worse it was the last time I crashed. I've got a world record egg on my right hip and scratches and a bruise on the arm on the same side, and somehow without realising it I must've got knocked in the face, because I have a mild black eye. Nobody noticed it today, which is not surprising: how often do you really look at the faces of the people around you? I'm going to get up early tomorrow and go swim some laps at the pool before I see my doctor. Goggles can't be good for healing a black eye, but I need the exercise. I'm not sleeping.

I was in Fitzroy this afternoon and I'd been thinking about Mike Brown, so I took a slight detour on the way home to go past the house where he lived, a few doors down the street from where I lived when I was doing my fine art degree. He painted a mural on the street wall and it is not looking great, but it's still there.



He had one of those minds that's orders of magnitude more expansive and subtle and fast than nearly everyone else's, and he had nothing to prove, and he was really much more interested in other people than in himself. I think I was lucky to meet him and get to know him a little bit, which I did via a boy about my age who'd known Mike most of his life. And it's this quiet introspective boy who I've been working around to writing about.

The boy knew someone in my household, and he was in the house often, or else shyly hanging around with us in the park or on the street or at the pub. He took a shine to me and he wrote me a long and searching letter about his feelings. I invited him into my room and sat next to him on my bed, and as gently as I could, I told him I did not want to be his girlfriend. He seemed to me a waiflike child. He cried, I think; it's a long time ago and I'm not really sure what I remember and what I am only guessing at. I do know he continued to come to the house and loiter in the kitchen or the hallway. Some time after this, we heard that he had committed suicide by jumping under a train at Museum station. A ceremony was held in the front room of the funeral parlour on Queens Parade.

I knew I wasn't responsible for his despair and that really, it had nothing at all to do with me, I just happened to be there. But at the same time I felt I had let him down. Whenever I have been reminded of him, when I've been in that part of the city, I have brushed past those thoughts and hurried on to thinking of other things, and with all the irresistibility of irrational conviction, this averted-eyes brushing-off of the memory seems to merge with the guilt I still feel, and can do nothing about, at not having found a way to honour the affection he expressed to me. Love seems so abundant when you are young, and so it's so easy to push it away as if it doesn't matter. I wish now that I had understood myself well enough then to know what it is that I think love requires of me. It doesn't have to be accepted or returned but it needs to be acknowledged. I've not talked about him before, though I've thought of him often. There's no more to say about him now except that I'm very sorry he had such a short life and that it ended so abruptly.

The hurrying away and on to thinking of other things was a hallmark of my life, for years, and years, and years. I used to literally up and leave when things got too challenging - both internal and external things. If therapy can be said to make cures, and by god it had better be the case that yes it can be said to make cures, then it has cured me of this ineffectual running away. The urge to split, once so irresistible, is utterly gone now. Now, I am sitting with it. I have made such an art of sitting with it that I have become rooted to the spot.  That's also an acting out, and the day is approaching when I won't do that either. I will move, but it won't be running and it won't be blind.

The very last time I really ran for it, I did it very thoroughly.