insufficient

Mostly I’m happy enough, but when I stop moving, working, an emptiness rushes in to fill the void. Thoughts of my good woman, where to from here? On the tram, when I look up from my book, walking along the street by myself.

Thoughts swirl: the things I might have said, didn’t get much chance. My good woman has her spiel together, the evidence, mostly symbolic, of our failures to connect. She’s too smart by half, sees some things where there’s nothing to see, but mostly gets it right.

The haste seems unseemly: what chance is there to chew things over, try to make sense where there is none? Now, after, pieces fall into place, slowly, like the coloured shapes of a computer game as the battery goes down.

There’ll be little chance of going back for either of us. We are not like that. I can’t go back to Bendigo; it worked when I was in another town. We won’t return to the ragged garden, untended, neglected for lack of time, lack of opportunity to just be us.

Anything seems possible, as it unfolds. In hindsight everything seems inevitable, from the moment it began. Time held us green and dying: Dylan Thomas.

The day it all ‘gets wrong’, my birthday, on the couch in her lounge room, I spy a purple-spined book in her bookcase, author Bruno Bettelheim. The name rings a bell. I ask if he’s a psychologist, a philosopher? She crosses the floor, brings the book to the couch. The title on the cover is in Serbian. She translates for me: Love is never enough.

Rock on.