Drink a lot. It might help.

During twilight you note that your mind works in layers; not even parallel. This one stubborn layer will betray you. It will, that stubborn rebel within you. While the others recede to let you sleep, this one suddenly becomes clear as day, and it wakes you up – melatonin defeated. Then there it is, dancing on the street. It takes over you. You become it. You dance on the street. You think it is you. Consider yourself lucky; this one might be positive.

Drink a lot, and hope that water dissolves. In the meanwhile, just blame it on the hormones, and smile a lot.

It’s blue-skied and sunny outside, and we were out doing small entertaining gestures taken from aikido, capoeira, judo, pair stretching and lovemaking, like frolicsome puppies, all after having a bit of very late brunch and tea. To my delight, an Ikea catalog was suddenly hand-delivered over the low fence. Thrown onto our welcome mat, sender unknown. For some reason we then imitated the Japanese. I feel uninspired to write. Looking at the very light yellowish white wall corner in front of me I feel grateful for Dan’s idea of stationing me right here. Any Which Way, a new play by David Watson, the poster boldly says in red and black over white. A thin green string stretched like a triangle peeping on top of it, hanging it onto a tiny metal nail. ”Amazing,” Daily Mail commented.

The train was leaving in eleven minutes. I couldn’t help you lift your big bag anymore, it has grown too heavy. We found your seat, number 11, and looked at each other again when we saw the girl sitting at number 12. I couldn’t wait to tell you and so I rushed out. You couldn’t wait either. As soon as we reached a good distance from seat number 12, you told me, I think I saw that girl earlier today or yesterday. I said, excitedly, yes, yes, I think we saw her in the National Gallery, ask her, ask her, and, and I think she’s Japanese, so maybe, maybe you can ask whether she’s from Tokyo and, and maybe, if she’s from Tokyo, maybe she’d know about Shinjuku. But it was only nine minutes before the train had to leave and we stood there wanting to say goodbye but couldn’t and just stood there on that platform in the closest hug possible. Can we sit? I asked. Let’s sit for five minutes, you said. Let’s sit there.

We walked there. Away from the train. We sat.

Sitting, and wanting to face each other, there was a distance between our knees. An awkward one. I didn’t want to move, it would be too uncomfortable if I did, and if I tried to be comfortable, the distance would have been greater. As long as I could still smell your face, and feel your lips, and try to remember the scent of your shabby jacket, and how I wish someone had invented a smell-recorder, yes, how I wish I could record all these and play them later again at home, and again whenever I want to smell them again. I wanted to talk more, so that I can hear your voice more, but the couple then sat down just opposite us and I didn’t want them to hear too much and besides, I didn’t know what to say. Rather, I didn’t know which, of all my thoughts, to say. So I stayed quiet so close to your body, and looked at the train schedule on the monitor. Negative and positive and neutral and of many sharp angles and opposing poles in my mind incomplete, I kept quiet.

The schedule monitor flicked. Five minutes, I said. And as though it was written on the lines of our palms, just after I said it, five minutes, I suddenly burst to tears. I didn’t hide my face in your chest. I didn’t even care what that other couple might think. I just held you as close as I could. I thought it was ridiculous, but no matter what I thought, I cried. Five minutes to what? I cried for whatever there were necessary to cry for, even though I thought they were probably not really that necessary.

Three minutes before the train left, with your heavy bags in it, and with that girl that we might have seen in the National Gallery earlier that day sitting next to your seat, we parted. You don’t have to wave, you said. Don’t wave. I won’t wave, I said. You went in and sat in your seat. You said something in a sign language that I struggled to understand. I answered in a sign language that even I struggled to understand. The train started to move. The window between us. I started to wave, but caught myself. I put my waving hand in my pocket. The window between us. I walked with the train, knowing it impossible to keep that same distance with it as before. The carriage between us. I walked with the train, knowing how powerful it was to create such a big distance, how powerless I was compared to it. I told my brain to remember that scene forever, and Click it went. I couldn’t keep my waving hand in my pocket, it went up and covered my mouth and sobbing nose. Click my brain went. The image of you, calmly retiring from struggling with that unknown sign language behind that window, went away. The train between us. Click my brain went. I kissed my waving hand. The long tail of the train between us, first class carriages. Click my brain went. Soon it became just a dot in the horizon. Click my brain went. The space between us.

The empty railway between us. Click my brain went.

I wiped my tears, but they were not all gone. I turned around. The couple, now only the male half of it, stayed in the platform. He didn’t walk with the train. He just stood there, at the spot he saw his girlfriend off into the train when it was still there. I walked. He looked at me and gave a friendly nod. I smiled back, trying to look tough and trying to walk pass him without interacting. An awkward silence. It’s always hard to say goodbye, he said to me as I passed next to him. I nodded and wiped the rest of my tears. Boyfriend? He asked. Yes, I nodded. So is he from Sydney?

No, I said, London. Oh, he said, maybe wondering a bit. I wondered what his case was. Was that your girlfriend, I asked. Yes, he said. I wondered whether it was a parting any sadder than ours. I wondered whether they knew when they would be reunited. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask. He kindly solved my hesitation and told me, she’s visiting her parents in Sydney. She’s studying here in Melbourne, and on school breaks she’d go back home to her parents’. Ah, I nodded. The air somewhat, somehow, cleared.

Yes, that girl on seat 12 was the girl in the National Gallery. And I was right, she was Japanese. Amazing, you texted. I wondered what all these movements would look like from the sky. The crying girlfriend will come back from Sydney to the same spot in about a week. His boyfriend will pick her up, and they might repeat the same movement in the next school break. The Japanese girl – who earlier that day had crossed paths with us, gone elsewhere and then met with us again in the train – was to spend the whole train trip sitting next to you, after which she might visit the National Gallery in Sydney, fly elsewhere in a few days, visit another gallery, and perhaps fly again elsewhere in a few weeks, eventually back to Japan. From Sydney, you’ll fly to Tokyo to hang out at Shinjuku, and then perhaps more eagerly to London.

Some of us might see each other again, some soon, some might never. Some might never care. If moving around, parting and being in a distance is such a drama, which of ours is more dramatic than the others? For which should one cry louder?

That night I took the tram to East Brunswick through the city. Immersed in my thoughts, I mistakenly alighted on Swanston street, and so had to walk back to Elizabeth street to catch my Airport West tram. At one point during this choreography of all our movements in time, from quite a distance, you managed to make me laugh.

In a distance, you waved to me a flying kiss. I waved back my flying kiss, and sat down at the front row. A girl with a big backpack came in. An older man in black with white hair came in, waiting for the girl with the big backpack to sit down, but she did not.

“Sorry – I just have to ask something to the driver,” she said, giving way to the older man. The older man smiled and answered intelligibly, but stopped midway, right besides me. Clinging to a pole, he took a second look at the girl with the big backpack.

“Excuse me sir, would you like to sit down?” I asked him.

“Oh,” he said to me, looking at me in surprise, “I have no idea! No, no. I have no idea!” and, as he walked pass me, touched my shoulder and told me, “Relax, just relax.”

So I did. He sat down just two rows behind me and started a loud one-way conversation with someone sitting right next to him. “That Yugoslavian girl,” while the girl with the big backpack asked the driver in an apparently Yugoslavian accent, “she seems to have lost her bag in one of the trams,” said he, while the apparently-Yugoslavian girl continued to ask the driver how to get her bag back. “And the driver has just told her how to get it back,” continued the man in black loudly.

I resisted the temptation of turning my head to take a look at that narrating older man. I looked at the Yugoslavian girl instead – it was much easier. She had a bag of chips in her hand. She sat down, opened the bag of chips and started eating it. She must have been quite hungry. Who knows what she had lost – her passport? Her wallet too. And she would have only had a few gold coins with her, and had to buy whatever she could for dinner. Poor Yugoslavian girl. She looked quite calm for someone who has lost her passport and wallet, though.

Next stop Victoria Market, and she went out. The woman next to me was also looking at the Yugoslavian girl. Or maybe she was looking at me? I resisted the temptation to turn my head and look at her to check whether she was actually looking at me. She sat too close to me for me to do it with subtlety.

“I love the Christians!”

“I love the Christians! The Buddhists! I love the Buddhists too!”

“Long live the Christians! Good Christians!”

This time I couldn’t resist any temptation anymore, and turned my head to look at the source of those yells. The woman sitting next to me didn’t seem to have to resist at all – she immediately turned her head to look. Everyone’s heads in the tram 59 going to Airport West at 10-something that evening were turned around to look at this middle-aged big man, back at the back row, who continued to shout, “Long live the Christians! I love the Christians! I love the Buddhists too!” or at least something resembling that, as his accent made it too unclear to me.

The older man in black with the white hair started answering him. “Yes! The Christians! What about them?”

“I love the Christians! I love the Christians!”

“Yes, but you are still quite young! Calm down! Be quiet!”

Out loud. The middle-aged big man continued to shout something like either “Long live the rich!” or “I hate rich people,” and the man in black shouted back, “Why are you going to Richmond? Why Richmond?”

“I’m going to Richmond!”

“You’re on the wrong tram then, my friend!”

“I’m going to Richmond!”

“Why? Why do you want to go to Richmond?”

“I love the Christians! I love the Buddhists! You killed all the Aborigines!”

“You still want to go to Richmond?”

“You killed all the Aborigines! You, white people, you! White people! Killed all the Aborigines!”

The woman sitting next to me gave up trying to compose a message on her mobile phone, shook her head, turned her head to the direction of those two men in intense long-distance colloquy and whispered loudly. It sounded like “Mori! Be quiet!”

She then went back to her TXTing, shook her head again, and said loudly while looking at her mobile, “Ssssoooossssh!”

I looked at her for the first time. If she was not those men’s some sort of guardian, why did she tell them to be quiet? I wondered. If she was those men’s some sort of guardian, why are all of them sitting separately? She continued TXTing.

Quiet. For a while. The tram was full of people but no one made a single sound.

“You see, it might sound scary, but when you think about it, it actually doesn’t affect you at all. You don’t have to be afraid. Nobody cares! Nobody is paying attention.”

The man in black continued in a lower volume, “I’m talking to you, boy! No fear. You don’t have to fear.” It sounded like he started talking to someone just behind me.

A woman’s voice suddenly emerged from behind me. “He’s fine. And you should stop. Both of you. Stop it, now.” She sounded like she was scolding two grade-twos.

But the big man started shouting again.

“You killed all the aborigines! You white people! You white people! I’m Turkish! I’m Turkish!”

I couldn’t decide whether I should feel relieved to finally hear something about his cultural rootedness.

“I’m Turkish! You all white people! You are all racists! You are racists! This is a racist country!”

A few people walked towards the front door. The scolding woman behind me walked up to the front as well, with her son. She was smiling awkwardly and her son didn’t look fearful. I wondered whether it was really their stop. Perhaps they just couldn’t take the shoutings anymore. I turned my head and saw the Turkish man standing next to the rear exit. The tram stopped and he walked down saying “This is a racist country!” It was hard to tell whether he was satisfied with his declaration – with my limited neck-rotating ability I could barely see his face.

As the tram started to pick up speed again, the man in black made a sound between giggling and laughing.

“Life can be easier,” he said, sighing. Not shouting this time.

The guardian woman sitting next to me turned to me, looked at me in the eyes, and said, cynically,

“Life can be easier if people stopped drinking.”

I looked at her. Her smile to me was bitter. I gave her a child-like smile, an understanding one, perhaps not as bitter as hers.

The next stop was not my stop – but I decided I’d rather go out and walk.

“Have a good night,” I said to her, right at the end of the tram’s pulling of its brake. She smiled, less bitterly, “Good night,” she said to me.

I almost ran out, quickly saying thanks to the driver. Looked like an Indian woman. Middle-aged.

Australia Day, I thought. Forty-something degrees. A few years ago, someone told me there is a National Barbecue Day in Australia. This must be it, I thought. My sandal snapped.

With poetry in mind I tried to forget that things that have past really have formed the present me. But really, every single second of my past, like you – they linger. And, like metal, at certain peaks of the cycle they – again – got pulled out by magnets like you – and again. Out, to the surface, but not beyond.

Then I question.

And you said, “they were not stars – they were planets. Jupiter and Saturn.”

Such beauty, your preciseness of perception. Your descriptions of science in palpable reveries. And you thought you imagined that I wrote especially for you. I never answered, but now I will. In fact, I did, often times.

All that has past has formed the present us. And each of those elements has a certain shape; we name them. I now name those metals: nails. When they got pulled up by magnets; spikes, sharp ends, flesh. The attraction, the urge to come, out, to the surface, but perhaps not beyond; spikes, sharp ends, flesh. Never beyond, just to linger; spikes, sharp ends, flesh. How dramatic.

My love of anarchy – can we be different than we are? In another life, maybe; is it there that we will meet … or have we?

Each morning, she would wake up with an understanding that today is another day. That there was yesterday, and there will be tomorrow. That today is a present sandwiched by the past and the future, and that today she will apply her knowledge of her world from yesterday to theoretically be able to face her world tomorrow.

Knowledge and understanding. Feelings. Hope. Faith.

Today, however, something seems quite different. She forgets. She tries to remember why she keeps forgetting. She realises that she has been losing sleep. She wonders why she would, each morning, wake up with an understanding that today is another day. She starts to think that the order of time – the rise and the set of the sun and the cycle of death and of birth – does not make sense.

Déjà  vu.

What makes today different than yesterday? What will make tomorrow?

She takes naps in between her long states of wistful consciousness. Her naps are a millisecond in length and everytime she wakes up from those little naps, she gasps and tries to remember.

Have I lived?

How long have I lived?

Did I exist before I started living?

What happened before then?

She asked no question about the future as the future, she thought, was nothing more than a result of the past. But then she thought that she might be wrong.

Déjà vu.

Sleep, she thought. I need sleep.

In order to forget and stop accumulating knowledge, one simply has to stop to sleep. No sleeping pills, no soap, just simply has to stop to sleep.

Somnolence.

If events that happen in reality got organised within the realm of our memory during sleep, are insomniacs doomed for stupidity? If we got rid of blinks between sights and if we got rid of sleep between wakefulness, would our minds still be capable of forming a coherency of reality? Is it possible to experience this world and gather knowledge from it without any break at all?

She tried to answer her questions but surprisingly found no ground to even start doing it. She got more anxious as she started to lose faith in reality. Anxiety, in turn, prevents her from sleeping.

What is dream after all? If it is simply the reverse of reality, how do we know which is which?

Déjà vu.

What are the rest of the world doing when I blink? There is a good reason that our earth is round: so that there are different timezones, and so people will never ever sleep together all at the same time. Along the twenty-four hours cycle of a day, at least one person will stay awake to watch it: keeping watch of reality, so it does not run away. What happens if the whole world would blink in sync? Would reality then fail to exist?

But has that ever happened?

In which side of reality?

Blink. Limbo. Blink.

Sleep, she thought. I need sleep.

Today, she turns thirty-six. All those years of doubting.

The window placed us right in between of the walls that turn into a slanted pair of attic ceilings. He has often told me that that peak, where two sides of the attic’s ceilings meet, is where energy is created – sitting right under it is just like being in the rain: it will pour all over you. I believed him. I doubt, however, that the wind whistled beautifully through the pinetrees, as I know that my mind was clouded as impartially as the sky was. The past hours have left me with my prolactin levels raised.

As I surfaced I knew it was there that I wanted to stay forever. More than a place, it was a constellation of him, myself, the sky, the breeze, my feelings, reddishness, imaginary rain, the snow, his skin, mine, all that I have described to you earlier, and time. A few months earlier, I told him that falling in love is a decision. I never continued my sentence; I simply never thought of why. I guess he wondered, but never asked – he saw me as his poetic muse; a mystery that should never be solved.

If only I could tell him: falling in love is always easy, has always been easy, and will always be easy. It happens all the time. It is unexpected, and once it hits, your world will turn upside down or any other direction you can imagine but never will realise. It is uncontrollable, yet it is a decision – of who to fall to it with. And it never had to be a conscious decision. I simply have not grasped that whole picture to let him know then.

I just wanted to stay there forever. I was with him, but it was not him. What happened was that inside my addicted self, dopamine gracefully gave way to my precious prolactin and soothed my cravings. Although love is a decision, it did not really matter who it was. Telling that truth would only break his heart. So I listened to the subtle whistle through the pine leaves, let it sing me a lullaby, and gave in.

I then promised myself to remember that moment. Beauty might not be true – and what is truth anyway – ; at least it cuddles you with a dream. Speechless of unthoughts, I reached again for his skin, looked through his eyes with sheer subservience, declared myself his once more and let him say it all through his lips feeling all the spaces where a part of me meets yet another, long, long before we two float away. He was my one and only, and I was his. Such crap.

B, Stu, Daniel and I shot it. Actors are Sal and Ting. Location is Preston Markets, Melbourne, Australia, where we work night and day now.

I’m missing Davy and Jane. And crazy Abel too.