This Empty Room

Like it always does, the sun bursts through my dusty window. All that's left is a Veronia on the windowsill, beautiful and still. I'm tired of this empty room. Tomorrow, I'm leaving.

The Seed

We who are still gripped by the power of big ideas.

Take the cash you pour down your throats or filter through your lungs, and all the cash you exchange for ordinary sushi handrolls and unloved salads. Think of how much it all is. Turn it into a seed, and keep feeding it.

Keep feeding it. Stay strong.

I'll have a library out of this, wood paneled from wood i sanded and oiled myself, each novel inscribed on the date it was purchased in the Paperback Bookshop on Collins Street. I'll have a house in the fold of a mountain, with heavy scented grass pushing up against the back fence and gravel at the doorstep.

The three of us will drive in convoy, three sleek Ferraris hugging mountain roads like lizards. It'll be cold when we return, and we'll open wine and invite women and listen to music, while outside nothing's happening for miles.

It will be morning, again and again. But we know its more than just that.

Light in a Bar in Krakow

I am sitting on the cobblestones, my head between my knees, drunk. The cold beats down on me from the vast sky which twinkles with a smattering of cold, hard diamonds. The sky is shimmering from the cold.

I stop for a moment to focus. I want to keep this moment. I want to remember the heavy pounding of my heart in my ears, the creaking eaves of old terrace houses lining the street, and the stubborn hum of cars that reminds us other people are alive. No, no, what I really want to remember is this blur to my vision.

I lean back and watch the stars swirl giddily. I reach out and take the hand of a girl wrapped in a tight black fur coat, swinging her around behind me and back. My shoes reflect the light of a thousand lamps, scattered by a thousand pieces of broken glass. The walls are black, or else there aren't any walls, but there are no mirrors. Our feet click on the shiny wood floor, and the noise is loud, in a giant vacuum.

I say to her: I met you, in a bar in Krakow, you were drawing, I was writing, there were candles that made us all feel like children in a dream, and you were drawing me, and I was writing about you, and we looked at each other like we knew how lonely it could be.

And she says: I've never been to Krakow. It wasn't me.

I pull her closer and lean forward, and her perfume fills my head and triggers strong memories of morning. I suddenly feel lonely and we leave, stamping on cigarette butts and pushing drunk and sweaty people aside, dashing for the door, flying down steps that smell of spray-paint and steel, by train to my house.

It is hidden behind tall, yawning elm trees, populated by squirrels and invisible birds, and there is a light glowing in my windows, and she's delighted by the carved pipe on my mantelpiece, and I fall asleep, forgetting to undress.

The Camera

I have just realised that no-one is documenting my life. Just me.

The Difference Between Childhood and Afterwards

I woke up and looked at the flickering red numbers on my bedside clock that read 4:00. Good.

The radio was on, and a glass dog with a tiny black pebble for a nose balanced on it. An old woman was talking with all the serenity in the world. Her voice made me swallow hard as images of a long life in stained yellow flicked through my mind.

I was already noticing things. The plant on my desk. Its leaves against the window, bending up and down in an invisible breeze even though the window was closed (I imagine it was the breeze of my breath colliding with the cold air). I noticed the spaces behind things, and the shadows. I saw an arm in the shape of my blanket, and moved my feet around until it was gone. My feet were warm. The tip of my nose was ice cold, and felt like a droplet of freezing water was hanging from it.

I rolled over and put my face in the pillow. I pulled the blanket over my head, and savoured the gush of cold air. Looking out from under the doona, I grabbed a lighter. There was a candle next to my bed. I lit it and stared straight at the flame for a long time.

I had a notepad next to my bed. It was black, beautiful, leather. I thought about my grandfather. I thought about my grandmother. I thought about strawberries for breakfast, and watching cartoons on saturday morning, and soggy weet bix, and small t-shirts, and scraping ice off the windshield of the car in the fog. I remembered waking up in the middle of the night, afraid.

A Room on th 25th Floor

I had just taken off my shirt, and was undoing my shoelaces and was surprised to realise, suddenly, that I was upside-down, stuck to the ceiling in a sealed box wedged between hundreds of other boxes, floating through a directionless universe.

Snow in Novvy Urengoy

It's snowing in Novvy Urengoy. Under the cover of darkness a man is coming home, carrying a pot his colleague's wife threw away. There's vodka on his breath, but no-one will mind. He is thinking that he should have washed the sheets.

Imagine yourself there.

Now imagine you're in Algiers. It's hot, but raining. It never rains. I'm there too. I'm shaving, carefully. The door to the bathroom is open wide, and there's still steam escaping out into the bedroom. There's a girl in my bed, asleep. I can see her shoulderblade in the mirror, and I can hear the rain on the tiles outside. I won't leave.

In a while, you'll imagine you're somewhere else. They always do.

I think: somewhere, right now, someone is warming their hands on a fire, and someone else just threw off their doona and leapt from their mattress hopping around like the carpet was full of needles.

I think: I could fall in love with someone who is making love right now to someone else.

And she is thinking: Everything I wanted will come true if I just try hard enough.

I guess there would be about 15 million office blocks in the world. How many of them are absolutely empty right now? In Calafate, there are only seven office blocks. All of them are empty of people, except one, which is full of a woman crying in the stairwell. She is not dressed in a suit. She has a t-shirt on, and it says "la vida es llena con sorpresas". Outside the building, a car chokes cloudy fumes into the cold air. The door is open, and the driver is staring straight at the dashboard, which says 237,664km. He's thinking: I could have driven from here all the way around the world six times.

None of the billions of crabs in the ocean, or any hiding under rocks on the beach, are thinking these things. Nor are any of the babies in baby-containers or wadded in blankets or lying like upside down millipedes.

One baby is naked. He is cold. He can see out the window, and he can see stars. Millions of them. He doesn't know they're stars. I'd like to tell him that stars are holes in a blanket that covers the world, that we can see through to the other side. While he'd still believe me.