Disappearer

There we are then. In the walls, under the floorboards, everywhere in this house and there, upstairs, a little of your breathing, a shadow of you left over from some other time before. You are the disappearer. You have some kind of finality about you. Like coming to an end of a book you can’t put down, your reading slows a little, not wanting to reach the full stop of the last sentence. But then again, were you really that compelling? You certainly put me down more than once and it certainly wasn’t a gentle placement on the side board next to the bed we never really shared. I never knew how to read you anyhow. We had one of those thick kind of plots, all messy and going nowhere. And I lost your character along the way somewhere. I guessed you were a pivotal figure in a landscape who, at some unexpected point, was never to return. There you go, off into the deep dark distance, fading out. But this was less classic fiction and more soap opera. Will they bring you back from the dead? Will you return re-born or as the villain in the piece with a unresolved case of brain damage or amnesia. How will this story progress with you and I? How would you like it to end – or even better, to begin again? Will there be flashbacks to our shady past such as the time when you were here and then you were not. It was an intrigue. You were nowhere to be found. I caught a plane to the other side of the world hoping to find you but you were not at the arrivals gate. You were always more inclined towards waiting at the departure lounge. Bags ready and packed. But I don’t give up. I drive out over the flatlands hunting you down, calling various telephone numbers, hoping to find an exit off the freeway that would lead me to your new town, but there was no exit and there was certainly no answer. I took wrong turns off unmarked tracks. These were the kinds of roads you would lead me down. These were the kinds of roads you’d end up dead on. There was an agreement between us that you were not keeping. There was a year of discussion to lead us toward some kind of future. There was a house involved, a dog, perhaps a child, there were walks in the park, trips away, the meeting of families, dinners cooked and eaten, long nights and mornings spent doing nothing. There was remote sex and web cameras when we were apart. Telephone conversations on international call cards between Australia and somwhere far away. Conversations about being the strange one in the family, about living in small towns with redneck values, about violence and running away, about illness and self-harm, about feeling lost, about desire for another world and each other in it and desparately wanting to touch. Conversations about not being able to trust other people anymore. They only make you sad, they only disappoint, you would say. And I would agree. I recollect a time you once told me about, a time when you were convulsing and foaming at the mouth from an epileptic fit, pretty much helpless – and your boyfriend at the time did nothing to help you, he got embarrassed, with you left shaking and choking and wheezing on the sidewalk while strangers stepped over you and some of them stopping to look and only one who would help and call an ambulance, who had to fumble around in your bag looking for some kind of medication – and this guy, your so-called boyfriend was probably throwing back a beer in the club you always hated. Or maybe he was laughing with your other so-called friends and continuing to not care about your dying frothing body on the street. You told me about how your depression is triggered by forgetting to take your pills and your various subsequent suicide attempts. How easy it would be to disappear, you would say. How simple it would be to vanish, to never be seen again, to slowly melt away. And so you did. For two whole years you appeared quite real to me, quite fleshy and tangible. Something I could hold. For two years we had become ‘almost there’. For two years, these small steps to solidity. How easy it is to watch things break apart. And I suppose these steps we took, marks left in the sand, disappear too, out to sea, washed away, off they go. With your shadowy self… a ghost. Your body was unreal.
JASON