morning scene, written at midnight

Steve was late again, and the only reasonable thing for me to have done was call him. But by then even the thought of scrolling to his name in my phone seemed to put up a sort of magnetic opposition to itself, one that sent ripples of vertigo through my guts; I wasn’t going to call him. He would either show up – and I was certain he would – or call me or we’d go the rest of our lives without communicating. It was an overcast morning but, in a way, limpid as if it were cloudless. I thought vaguely about having heard that the UV index was strongest in those conditions. The footpaths were a little damp and put out a strong, elemental smell; our garden smelt of petrichor. For the first time ever I saw the streetlights shut off before my eyes. There was a lot of fresh bird shit on a section of footpath across the road where some lily pilly branches overhung.

I hadn’t slept well. The richness of the peanut sauce Sarah liked, and the Oyster and Fish sauces too, and the intensity of the kaffir lime and lemongrass and coriander, and the heat of chilli, churned in me all night. After brushing my teeth three times a salty muck returned to my tongue and cheeks, cloying, astringent, and made me feel physically unclean. In bed I kept breathing out of my mouth into a cupped hand in the dark and smelling it, and being disgusted by the smell, not knowing what, if anything, I was trying to confirm. I held in so many farts that I was bloated to point where, after finally getting up to shit, I couldn’t. Then I hit my shin on the sideboard getting back into bed. Not especially badly, but bad enough for life to seem fucked beyond repair for a few moments. I smelled the fitted sheet where my body had been lying and it stunk of sweat and shit, or at least it didn’t discredit the expectation I had of it smelling that way. I lay half awake until my alarm sounded.

“My mum had great legs when she was young,” was the second last thing Sarah said to me before falling asleep. “Do you think I’ve inherited them?” was the last, and it came so long after the earlier statement that I’d lost the thread entirely. By the time I picked it up and answered in the affirmative, that her legs were the kind “men skinned each other over”, the shallow, rhythmic breathing pattern that was inimitably hers in deep sleep had set in. I listened to it most carefully in those first moments, but was aware of it at all moments of the night. I listened for other noises she might have made too. The occasional sighs, so sexy they seemed put-on, the stomach gurgles, the squelch of her silk pyjamas against the bedding. All of them made me feel something closer to exaltation than disgust, but not that much closer.

Sleeping, Sarah had always been a kind of Albertine for me, Marcel’s Albertine, except that it wasn’t plants her stillness symbolised, or which symbolised her stillness, but humanness, if that was a real word, and the fragility that attended to it all the time. Only since meeting Sarah and observing her as she slept had I ever really thought about the efforts to which a body went in order to stay alive, had I ever really thought about what the various sounds of the body signified, had I ever considered that the stillness of a sleeping human being was an illusion unless that human being was, in fact, not sleeping but dead. And by my emotional response to those observations it seemed as though they were what split the world into the initiated, the ones who got it, and ones who didn’t know shit. But if that was the case, what did it mean to get it? After noticing impassively that Steve was now half an hour late, I looked into the grey glare and thought, as I’d thought many times in the weeks and months prior, that getting it meant getting used to the idea that people needed to find somebody to be with but that in doing so they were consigning themselves to a lifetime of pain.