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THURSDAY
Phillip
I went jogging on the morning that I died.
I got up at five. I got dressed. I had a glass of warm water. There was nothing special or out of the
ordinary about it; it was typical run-of-the-mill behavior for a Thursday.
I would love to say that something told me not to go, and that I didn’t listen so it was therefore my
own cosmic stupidity that lead to my ultimate demise; life doesn’t work that way. Strange feelings
about avoiding death don’t happen, and even if they did there’s no way to tell if listening to those
prickly ghost whisperings ever changed the course of our destinies anyway. We would just forget
about them or brush those nagging feelings off as silliness. It’s kind of like when you’re out
somewhere and The Universe tries to tell you to go and talk to a pretty girl, or to help a little old lady
cross the street. You think it doesn’t matter, but maybe, just maybe, if you believe in destiny it does.
And if you don’t believe? Well then it doesn’t make a difference because you wouldn’t notice
anyway.
Sarah believes in those kinds of things. I bet she would tell you that her ring finger started itching
like mad at the very moment that I took my last breath. Sometimes I wish I could believe in things
like that. Things like God and the universe and signs and omens and fate and destiny. Romantic right?
But I don't.
Maybe I’d still be alive if I did.
You never think that you will be the first of your friends to die. In fact, if you’re a normal twentysomething person, I imagine you don’t think much about dying at all.
When we were younger we’d talk about who would be the first of us to get married or have kids or
get a grownup job and buy a grownup car. We’d talk about who was most likely to be rich, or become
a stripper or marry for money or have an affair. We would talk about who would perform which role
if we joined the circus. Or started a band. But never the death thing. Young people don’t die. It’s not
the part of the future that you wonder about or make plans for, so it never makes it into any significant
discussions. Not when you’re young. Or at least not when you’re me.
I guess the reality of mortality comes with age, as well as the embracement and acceptance of it, so
until the age thing happens you just don’t think about it. Maybe. I don’t know! Maybe, if anything,
you simply expect that one day when you’re fifty years old, one of your peers will die of a heart
attack, and you’ll be filled with this new-found respect for life and how quickly it can end. And then
you get a grip on your life and you do all sorts of midlife crisis type things to improve it. In fact, I
reckon that’s why people have midlife crises in the first place. It’s not because they suddenly realize
they’re married to an ogre, but because they suddenly realize that they might die tomorrow.
I never got that far. I never got to the stage where I desperately wanted to buy a red sports car or
sleep with a model. Or get piercings in strange places or a tattoo of a Harley Davidson.
Instead...I died before I was twenty seven.
I’m not going to tell you where I come from because it doesn’t matter. These small towns are all the
same anyway. They all have the same dilapidated beyond repair houses and the uneven gravel streets
that teach you how to aim between potholes with your car. They all have the faded traffic signs and
the vegetation that hardly ever seems to be alive. They have the same over-priced grocery stores and
the many randomly stocked shops run by runaway Asians. The same mangy stray animals roam the
streets in search of food that they never find. They all carry the same overtone of desperation and the
overwhelming sense of lost dreams and broken people and barely-lived lives. They all look the same.
They all feel the same and smell the same. And they all leave you with the feeling that this is where
God would come to die.
So all you really need to know is that I came from a really small place and that it really used to get
to me sometimes that, after so many years, I still hadn’t managed to leave.
I jog because I live in this forlorn and forgotten place. Jogging helps me to pretend that I am
someone else in order to maintain the sanity of the person that I am. It helps me to not hate the people
who don’t deserve to be hated simply for existing.
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In the summertime I get up at three in the morning to jog, because it has to be dark and it has to be
morning for the forgetting and the sanity maintenance thing to work. But it doesn’t always work
anyway. Life has this way of mocking your existence and constantly reminding you of your
undeniable insignificance. A teacher in class once showed us the difference between the sizes of the
planets (how the earth looks like a pin prick compared to this planet and that planet blah blah blah)
and then finished off with some apparently profound mumbo-jumbo about how insignificant we are in
context and how amazing it is then that God cares about us anyway. I felt like telling him that I
already felt just that insignificant and that his pompous little speech had done nothing to alter my
reality, so there. That is all we are really: one life in many. In reality our realities don’t matter. At
least not in the grand scheme of everything else, especially not when nobody knows what that grand
scheme is supposed to be. This is not news, it is simply fact. You don’t need the size of the world to
remind you how irrelevant you are, all you need is a shortened hand or a wounded heart. All you need
is the complete inability to fix something that should never have been broken in the first place.
Sometimes, when you’re lucky, the imagination superimposes itself over the reality and you do get
to be someone else; somewhere else; doing things differently, even if it’s only for a little while. It’s
like when you imagine winning the lottery. The reality is one in millions, but the fantasy of driving
the cars and living in the mansions and maybe being able to help a few people along the way always
has the absolute power to put the smallest smile on your face for a minute or two. Therefore I pretend.
You can’t tell me that you don’t do it too.
The thing is that these teeny tiny lost places are great to grow up in. We always had that wholesome
family dynamic thing going. We had that togetherness that dominates the populations of small towns.
Surely you get family oriented people in the big cities too, but there they’re more special than simply
part of a norm. It was the norm for us when we were growing up. We all knew exactly what homecooked dinners tasted like.
As far as the rest of the world is concerned, these small places don’t have any real significance.
Most people (from other places I mean) look at you blankly when you tell them where you come
from. “Where?” they ask, looking at you as if you’re making it up. Surely no such place exists you
hear them thinking.
I’ve come to the conclusion that city folk struggle to not look like they think you’re mad. Small
town people do insincerity way more convincingly. Invariably you respond by laughing awkwardly
(because what else are you supposed to do?) and looking slightly embarrassed while mumbling
something about where your town is situated (somewhere between here and there) and then hoping
they’ll drop it. Usually they do because city folk also don’t like to look stupid or ignorant and are way
more likely to second guess themselves in silence instead of just admitting that they have no idea what
you're talking about.
It’s not so bad growing up in such a small place. We all met our best friends before we were potty
trained. We all had more than one set of parents looking out for us. We could walk everywhere
because nowhere was ever further than a twenty minute stroll away. Or even better we could just ride
our bikes everywhere as if we were in some sort of suburban American movie (why couldn’t we just
all have stayed twelve years old forever?) We could enter each other’s houses without knocking. We
could pitch up just about anywhere for dinner. Or home baked cookies. Weekends always consisted of
a sleepover somewhere. I’m sure we had a lot of instances where we were bored, and I’m sure we
drove our folks nuts a lot like regular kids do, but we did have a lot of independence and we mostly
managed to keep ourselves well entertained. When you’re an adult you can’t remember the times
when you were bored anyway. All you remember is being indifferent to the weather unless it stopped
you from being able to play outside. You remember the excitement of exploring without adult
supervision. You remember that food tasted better and that sunshine felt warmer and there was always
a constant air of unquenchable adventure whenever you got together with your friends.
It’s only after you grow up that things are a bit different. Maybe once you have the wife and kid
thing down then it’s not so bad again. But this part? The part where you’re a grown up and you live in
this funny little town with its funny little people and you can’t do anything without everyone knowing
about it and you can’t go anywhere without it being a huge deal? That part is not so great…
So I go jogging in the early mornings, because there is nothing better to do, and sometimes I do it
simply because it helps to combat the loneliness of waking up in an empty house.
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Initially the jogging started as a group activity. I’m not sure which of us decided that it was
something we should do, but for almost two years Grant, Caleb, Josh and I went jogging together
every weekday morning before school. Perhaps it was an attempt to make ourselves more manly, or to
simply gain that air of superiority that seems to float around the bodies of the physically fit, or
perhaps we simply thought that telling girls that we went jogging every morning might seem
impressive. Whatever the reason, it became our bonding time away from the girls who otherwise
never seemed to be particularly far away. The track around the dam became our metaphorical locker
room, where our sex secrets and fantasies about celebrities or the girls that we liked were set free to
play in the fields between the blades of grass that seemed to never find enough water. I’m sure if they
could talk, ours wouldn’t be the only secrets they’d be able to tell.
The jogging habit stuck after they left, but missing the locker room talk made it harder to run around
the dam. I now jog along the road out of town in order to avoid the ghosts who mock and remind me
of my sorely missed youth.
I do particularly love the winters when it is so quiet that the only thing you hear is the soft rhythmic
tapping of rubber soled shoes as they hit the ground like a tribal drum beat. Tap-tap tap-tap. It always
reminds me of singing class in junior school where we’d have to clap the music notes written on the
board. When I don’t want to think, not even about the alternate reality, I clap in my mind to the
rhythm of my feet. Ta-te ta-te ta-te. It’s like having an annoying song stuck in your head, but it’s good
for removing everything else. It helps too that in the winter your breath comes out in puffs of steam
because, again, that is something else to focus on.
It was especially cold the morning I died, but not even that was particularly out of the ordinary since
our winters are frequently riddled with below zero temperatures and occasional snowfalls. When
Sasha, my Labrador/Golden Retriever cross, balked at the idea of going outside I had to wonder if
taking the dog out in below freezing temperatures could be considered animal cruelty. Her long
ruddy-blonde coat makes me think that she’s better equipped than I am, but still she looked up at me
from the foot of my bed, her eyes asking where my sanity lay. Perhaps that was the sign. Perhaps God
or karma or The Universe was using Sasha to communicate with me. Hopefully animal
communication from the other side has now been shrugged off as a bad idea. Obviously it doesn’t
work.
“Come on Sash.”
I laced my fingers through her collar and gently tugged her off the bed. I swear she rolled her eyes
at me, but she slipped off the bed and followed me to the kitchen where I started to boil the kettle. No
more death warnings. Not even a flickering light bulb. Sarah would have been disappointed.
Sasha’s water bowl, as often happens this time of year, had frozen over and after glaring at it for a
moment she started to whine. I reached for a new bowl from the cupboard above my head, and
without giving any consideration to the sanitary implications of feeding a dog from one of my own
cereal bowls, poured a bit of lukewarm kettle water into it and handed it to her before pouring some
warm water for myself. Winter means that the water pipes often stay frozen until about nine-ish. So I
tend to make sure that the kettle is full before going to bed.
“Come on then,” I tried to encourage my dog with an attempt at an enthusiastic shrug of the head
towards the door. She didn’t buy it.
The sound of my voice in an empty house is something I’ve always found rather strange. I always
talk to Sasha out loud, but I feel almost foolish. No, I definitely feel foolish. It seems like there should
be someone else in the house to hear me talking to her, otherwise it’s just odd. When there is only one
voice the echoes are funny, like they are trying to fill up all the empty spaces, but cannot quite
manage being stretched that far. I have to talk to Sasha though, because that is what we do. We talk to
our animals. I just don’t get why it feels weird talking to her when there is no one else around. It’s the
same with movies I guess. There’s something eerie about laughing at Will Ferrell or Vince Vaughn or
Jim Carey or the Marx brothers when yours is the only voice in the house. Like it doesn’t count when
no one else is listening, so why bother?
I wasn’t supposed to stay here - here in this matchbox town, here in this falling-down house - it just
kind of happened that way. I was supposed to become rich. That was my dream. My dream was the
house and the cars and the toys and the perfect girl. How I was supposed to manage to do that is an
entirely different question. The vagueness of it all no doubt contributed to my failure to realise it in
any way. I am not rich. I am no more than your proverbial average Joe, living the proverbial average
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life. The colour in my life exists because I live in this small town, where there is no choice but to be
colourful. The mass mental imbalance could possibly be normal, and is simply more obvious because
of the closeness between people who literally live on each other’s doorsteps. But whatever the case,
the madness certainly is there, and sometimes, when something particularly bizarre happens, it almost
makes up for the not being rich part. And as much as I hate it here, I do often find myself wondering
if we don’t laugh more than other people do.
I work at the only hotel in town. Nothing special about that. I have no idea how any of us ever get
paid,considering we hardly ever have guests. I think perhaps the sale of alcohol in the hotel bar is the
only thing that keeps the place solvent. Townsfolk drinking their sorrows away must be a lucrative
business.
The hotel is situated on the only double lane street in the whole of our unbalanced town. I kind of do
all the things that are left over once everyone else has done their jobs. A bit of inventory here and
there. A bit of handyman work when it’s needed. It’s my job to figure out what to do when no one
else knows (like the time the kitchen caught fire and no one else really seemed to come to the
conclusion that putting it out was probably a good idea).
Also, I am the only person who knows how to keep the swimming pool from going green. I guess
that makes me relatively useful.
When you live in a small town it’s only during the very early hours of the morning that it’s ever
quiet. It’s the only time you ever get to be invisible. There’s no one to greet or make small talk with or
be polite to. There is nothing that needs to be done yet. You get to be all alone with the quiet sound of
crickets and frogs in the summer, and the quieter sounds of nothing in the winter.
In my case, I get to be alone with Sasha.
The poor dog followed me out of the back door even more reluctantly than she got out of bed. I
imagine that frosted grass is not an entirely welcome feeling when you’re not wearing any shoes. Her
enthusiasm in summer can be noted as hysteria, but in winter she becomes the polar opposite. I can’t
say I blame her. She did follow me though, and seconds later there it was as always: I closed the gate
behind me and everything began to feel different. Nothing existed because it had all been locked
away. The loneliness of waking up alone was gone. The leak in room 206 that I still hadn’t been able
to fix was gone. The desperate desire to pack up and leave this place behind forever was gone.
The guilt.
The obligation.
The resentment…
Tap-tap tap-tap tap-tap.
I had to breathe slowly at first because the cold air burned my lungs. It felt bad in a good way, and I
knew it would get better. And it wouldn’t be long before I stopped noticing the pain in my knee.
Tap-tap tap-tap tap-tap.
I turned left onto the main road and headed out of town. It’s always the same. No room for changes
or adjustments.
Tap-tap tap-tap tap-tap.
And there the thoughts should have begun to go, melting away into nothing for a while,
disappearing further and further as I pounded out a steady pace.
Tap-tap tap-tap tap-tap.
I couldn’t get the thoughts to go away though. My mind simply refused to switch off and I could
think only of Sarah. Perhaps it wasn’t cold enough, or I had put the wrong shoe on first. Or perhaps
thinking of Sarah was my cue to turn back.
I imagined her in her bed, huddled with the down duvet up to her chin, sleeping soundlessly, almost
as if she were no longer breathing. I wished that I was with her, to see her face as she started to wake,
because that is when she is at her most beautiful. Her hair pulls away from the ponytail she always
goes to sleep in and it tousles in wavy kinks around her face, and her eyes get this bemused look as if
to say oh yes, it’s morning now. She yawns a lot and she rubs her face with her hands like a kid, and
she is definitely at her cuddliest and most loving. Or her least resistent. She functions in the cutest
fog-like way until halfway through her second cup of coffee before she starts transferring into her
usual, more useful, self.
Loving Sarah is like reading a particularly good book. That pressing and overwhelming need to just
devour it as fast as possible is matched only by the need to savour it slowly and completely, lest it all
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come to an end too soon. The all-consuming emotions are so many and varied that it is almost
impossible to pick out one for a few minutes attention. They mainly stay jumbled and unattended, and
for the most part not entirely understood or satisfied. But then, maybe it is in the understanding of our
love for someone that the love itself disappears altogether. If so, then I don’t want to understand, and I
remain content to simply experience her. Somehow, the more I learn about Sarah, the better I
understand myself. And the more I fall in love.
It says something when you have been with someone for so long and you still can’t get them out of
your mind.
Sarah knows all the words to all the songs that were ever written. That is why I love her. Because
that’s crazy! You can’t turn on the radio or put on a CD without her singing along softly, mouthing
the words and bobbing her head as if all the songs were meant just for her. Her eyes and her face
dance and her fingers and feet tap gently to beats that the rest of us aren’t hearing. She listens, and she
listens with her whole heart.
She has this amazing capacity for delight that outshines any that I have ever known.
Any of us should be so lucky to experience passion in such a childlike way. The joy she finds in the
simplest things creeps into the corners of her smile, like she has a secret that she loves not telling, but
she still wants you to ask her about it.
She watches movies with her whole body. She can barely sit still if something bad is about to
happen, and she scrunches her whole body up on the couch, or squeazes your hand if she’s holding it.
She squeals, she chokes, she laughs hysterically, she cries, and anything she deems magical puts her
body in a breathless trance where she just stares in amazement as if she is experiencing it with all her
might. And if she has already seen the movie that you’re watching, you always know when something
is about to happen because she turns her head and expectantly watches for your reaction with joy
dancing in her eyes.
Her favourite thing is to introduce people to new things that she thinks they will love. Whether it be
music or food or places to visit, she loves nothing more than being the reason someone falls in love
with something. It delights her endlessly to share with others the things that bring her joy.
She laughs with her shoulders. And if she’s leaning against you while she’s trying not to laugh, you
can feel her stomach muscles vibrating as she concentrates hard to keep a straight and sober face.
She’s a compulsive fidgiter! If she’s not playing with her rings or bracelets, she has taken out an
earring and is playing with that. I sometimes wonder if it’s the only reason she wears jewelry.
She’s a terrible dresser. And I say this in the sweetest way possible. Usually she manages to dress
just fine. She manages to fake it. But sometimes, she will wear the most ridiculous thing, every time
reassuring me that she still has no clue.
She has absolutely no idea how beautiful she is.
All these amazing qualities that I adore so much, in such a small firey package, and yet sadly her
capacity for delight is matched by another. Sarah holds within her a degree of sadness that she finds
impossible to let go of. And so while all I want to do is love her, all Sarah wants to do is not fall in
love.
She loves me, I know, but not quite in the way that she needs to. And not in the way I do her. Sarah’s
love for me is a lot closer to simply giving in instead of the necessary love act of letting go. And
though I know she will never feel for me the way she wants but refuses to, I still find it impossible to
walk away from the possibility that maybe one day she will learn to love me properly.
Because she sings while she bakes. And she showers with the lights off. And ladybirds excite her.
And she always smells like vanilla essence. And my love for her is so achingly real that I could never
imagine a life without her.
I could almost smell her as I continued up the road towards the outskirts of town. And I could see
her smile.And hear her laugh...
Sasha moved with ease and grace beside me, soundlessly at first, but she would be panting heavily
misted breaths later.
Tap-tap tap-tap tap-tap.
The smell of her hair.
Ta-te ta-te ta-te ta-te.
The feel of her skin between her neck and her shoulder.
Tap-tap tap-tap tap-tap.
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The way she wrinkles her nose when she smiles.
Ta-te ta-te ta-te ta-te.
Past the petrol station we ran. Past the police station with its lone cop car parked out front. Past ol’
Uncle Howard’s house with the boarded up windows and the fallen down post box. Past the park that
nobody played in anymore because of the broken down merry-go-round and the tire swings that you
can’t sit in without getting your legs scratched. And the rusted slide. Down the dip and up again. Out
of town. Away...with mental images of Sarah playing in my mind.
When the car hit me from behind I felt my body lurch forward and hit the tarmac with a dull thud,
the rough tar slicing my cheek and hands with its jagged edges as I skidded along the side of the road.
I heard Sasha bark loudly twice and then whimper softly before coming over to lick my face. And
then there was nothing…
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