Route 59
1/1
To the dearest boy I ever held in my heart-
I may not know a lot about this world, but here are some things you taught me that I have kept in the hidden drawer of my mind:
Blood is more viscous than milk,
Eye colour can be recessive,
Air is thinner at a greater altitude,
And without your skin on my skin
my electrons are unstable.
Somewhere near the bottom end of King Street, Christopher and Katherine are arguing outside a nightclub. The goose bumps on Katherine’s arms are only fuelling her pent-up emotion, and the early morning fog is beginning to roll in around her ankles. Christopher swears that nothing is wrong. Well then where the hell is she?
On Elizabeth Street, at the tram terminus, the temperature has dropped such that the cold snap is beginning to crystallize. The metal railing of the shelter is coated in a thin layer of ice, and when Luna carefully runs a gloved finger across it, it sticks. She’s not quite sure where she is going, but she knows that she has a familiar, desperate aching in her bones that is urging her to disappear. The fact is, that Luna runs away from a lot of things. It’s been her method of coping since she was a small child, and it’s become less and less convenient the more responsible she is for her own actions. She can’t care about that now, can’t worry if it’s good or right. All she can see are Christopher’s eyes, set on her face, and the words they told her that she wasn’t ready to hear.
A tram rolls in through the thickening fog, all yellow light and faded green seats. 59 – AIRPORT WEST. Luna helps a boy lift his drunk girlfriend up the stairs before burrowing in to a window seat of her own. The lights in here feel clinical and tired. There is a soft drink can on the floor that rolls in to her feet, as the doors shut and they jerkily begin to move forward. Luna looks out the window at the closed doors and vacant spaces of her city – the witching hour, inhabited by people who are not quite still on the inside. The cold has kept most indoors tonight, and the fog blurs the horizon-lines between present and future.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?”
Luna is not quite sure who it’s directed at, but she turns her head to the quiet voice anyway. A man, maybe a little older than her, is leaning across the aisle and smiling wistfully at the deserted footpaths of the city.
“I suppose so. It feels dead.”
She half turns back to the window, but sees him shake his head softly anyway.
“Not dead. Enchanted.”
She nods slowly, and falls back in to herself, watching her breath form condensation on the glass that beads, and runs down the window in quickening streaks. She doesn’t really know where this tram goes, but she’s taking the journey now, and all she wants to do is get lost in the romanticism of it all. The empty space beside her feels fluorescent. Her heart begins to feel heavy, but she refuses to acknowledge it, and cuts the cord that tethers her reality to her thoughts.
“You’ll never find it like that.”
“Excuse me?”
Luna breaks her eyes away from the grey outside, and focuses on the way the sick yellow light of the tram hits this stranger’s cheekbones and uneven skin.
“What you’re looking for. You’re never going to find it if you deny yourself the journey.”
Luna stares directly ahead, unblinking, trying to understand his words through the thick fog that has crept in through the window and in to her head. The tram lights above her flicker, and she is sure that she has been here before in some distant dream.
“I’m not looking for anything. And I’m on a journey here, now.”
They come to a sudden halt and she is pushed forward, bracing her arms out in front of her like a small child in a playground. The stranger stays steadfast as a rock, and answers her with a strange mixture of pity and joy.
“We’re travelling, sure. But you’re not moving.”
Luna doesn’t want to be here, having this conversation with some raving junkie. This journey was designed to break her away, her own personal form of meditation, not to drag her further in to a rabbit warren that she’s not qualified to navigate. She turns away again, her full body, and presses her arm against the glass. The cold contact makes her shiver.
For a time, the two of them stay still, just occupying the same space. If she allows herself any concession to reality, it’s only the fleeting thought that the air she is breathing has already touched the inside of this stranger’s lungs, and that because of it they are more wholly connected than she would really like to believe. As she watches Flemington, Parkville, Ascot Vale pass by her window though, she is more primarily concerned with the air outside. The sleeping children and elderly, the couples sleeping separate and the couples fucking slow in the dark, all the endless possibilities of her life and their lives, of future and past and present all dictating each other. She never lets herself in close enough to work out what that means for herself, but she hovers over it all and she watches, and she allows herself to fall in to their perfect realities, and white-out the parts she doesn’t want to see.
Somewhere just past the Essendon Depot, the voice drifts across to her again, but this time it seems to flow in to her like a blossoming flower and expand in to her skull.
“You know, sometimes you have to feel pain and doubt and fear in order to truly understand happiness. Or else everything will only ever come to you in halves, and the greatest joy you will ever experience will be the day-to-day of someone else.”
Luna frowns and pulls her knees further from the floor. He feels closer somehow, but she knows he hasn’t moved. And then she wonders if it’s not his physical presence, but his words that are too close to something inside her. Something she never named, the cage she created for her emotions. There is a serenity that she pushed through her skin a long time ago that doesn’t allow room for passion. She is starting to wonder if this self-inflicted anaesthetic is all it’s really cracked up to be.
“This is me, anyway,” he says, as he stands at Moonee Ponds Junction. “don’t forget that when you are lost, the stars and the trees and a cool breeze will take you home.”
Luna start to laugh. The stars and the trees and a cool breeze. Two stops down, at a park, she stumbles down one, two, three steps and out on to the bitumen, and then across to the low bluestone walls. When she takes her shoes off and steps on to the dark grass, the cold snap of ice-frosted grass on the soles of her feet makes her shiver and giggle. Across the lake, the sky turns the faintest magical pink and the ducks and other water birds begin their morning calls.
And here, barefoot and wild in this foreign suburb, Luna uncertainly whispers I love you, Christopher and I’m sorry, Katherine in to the swirling August winds, and with arms outstretched she says goodbye to the stars and lets her heart grow full of bursting joy.
I may not know a lot about this world, but here are some things you taught me that I have kept in the hidden drawer of my mind:
Blood is more viscous than milk,
Eye colour can be recessive,
Air is thinner at a greater altitude,
And without your skin on my skin
my electrons are unstable.
Somewhere near the bottom end of King Street, Christopher and Katherine are arguing outside a nightclub. The goose bumps on Katherine’s arms are only fuelling her pent-up emotion, and the early morning fog is beginning to roll in around her ankles. Christopher swears that nothing is wrong. Well then where the hell is she?
On Elizabeth Street, at the tram terminus, the temperature has dropped such that the cold snap is beginning to crystallize. The metal railing of the shelter is coated in a thin layer of ice, and when Luna carefully runs a gloved finger across it, it sticks. She’s not quite sure where she is going, but she knows that she has a familiar, desperate aching in her bones that is urging her to disappear. The fact is, that Luna runs away from a lot of things. It’s been her method of coping since she was a small child, and it’s become less and less convenient the more responsible she is for her own actions. She can’t care about that now, can’t worry if it’s good or right. All she can see are Christopher’s eyes, set on her face, and the words they told her that she wasn’t ready to hear.
A tram rolls in through the thickening fog, all yellow light and faded green seats. 59 – AIRPORT WEST. Luna helps a boy lift his drunk girlfriend up the stairs before burrowing in to a window seat of her own. The lights in here feel clinical and tired. There is a soft drink can on the floor that rolls in to her feet, as the doors shut and they jerkily begin to move forward. Luna looks out the window at the closed doors and vacant spaces of her city – the witching hour, inhabited by people who are not quite still on the inside. The cold has kept most indoors tonight, and the fog blurs the horizon-lines between present and future.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?”
Luna is not quite sure who it’s directed at, but she turns her head to the quiet voice anyway. A man, maybe a little older than her, is leaning across the aisle and smiling wistfully at the deserted footpaths of the city.
“I suppose so. It feels dead.”
She half turns back to the window, but sees him shake his head softly anyway.
“Not dead. Enchanted.”
She nods slowly, and falls back in to herself, watching her breath form condensation on the glass that beads, and runs down the window in quickening streaks. She doesn’t really know where this tram goes, but she’s taking the journey now, and all she wants to do is get lost in the romanticism of it all. The empty space beside her feels fluorescent. Her heart begins to feel heavy, but she refuses to acknowledge it, and cuts the cord that tethers her reality to her thoughts.
“You’ll never find it like that.”
“Excuse me?”
Luna breaks her eyes away from the grey outside, and focuses on the way the sick yellow light of the tram hits this stranger’s cheekbones and uneven skin.
“What you’re looking for. You’re never going to find it if you deny yourself the journey.”
Luna stares directly ahead, unblinking, trying to understand his words through the thick fog that has crept in through the window and in to her head. The tram lights above her flicker, and she is sure that she has been here before in some distant dream.
“I’m not looking for anything. And I’m on a journey here, now.”
They come to a sudden halt and she is pushed forward, bracing her arms out in front of her like a small child in a playground. The stranger stays steadfast as a rock, and answers her with a strange mixture of pity and joy.
“We’re travelling, sure. But you’re not moving.”
Luna doesn’t want to be here, having this conversation with some raving junkie. This journey was designed to break her away, her own personal form of meditation, not to drag her further in to a rabbit warren that she’s not qualified to navigate. She turns away again, her full body, and presses her arm against the glass. The cold contact makes her shiver.
For a time, the two of them stay still, just occupying the same space. If she allows herself any concession to reality, it’s only the fleeting thought that the air she is breathing has already touched the inside of this stranger’s lungs, and that because of it they are more wholly connected than she would really like to believe. As she watches Flemington, Parkville, Ascot Vale pass by her window though, she is more primarily concerned with the air outside. The sleeping children and elderly, the couples sleeping separate and the couples fucking slow in the dark, all the endless possibilities of her life and their lives, of future and past and present all dictating each other. She never lets herself in close enough to work out what that means for herself, but she hovers over it all and she watches, and she allows herself to fall in to their perfect realities, and white-out the parts she doesn’t want to see.
Somewhere just past the Essendon Depot, the voice drifts across to her again, but this time it seems to flow in to her like a blossoming flower and expand in to her skull.
“You know, sometimes you have to feel pain and doubt and fear in order to truly understand happiness. Or else everything will only ever come to you in halves, and the greatest joy you will ever experience will be the day-to-day of someone else.”
Luna frowns and pulls her knees further from the floor. He feels closer somehow, but she knows he hasn’t moved. And then she wonders if it’s not his physical presence, but his words that are too close to something inside her. Something she never named, the cage she created for her emotions. There is a serenity that she pushed through her skin a long time ago that doesn’t allow room for passion. She is starting to wonder if this self-inflicted anaesthetic is all it’s really cracked up to be.
“This is me, anyway,” he says, as he stands at Moonee Ponds Junction. “don’t forget that when you are lost, the stars and the trees and a cool breeze will take you home.”
Luna start to laugh. The stars and the trees and a cool breeze. Two stops down, at a park, she stumbles down one, two, three steps and out on to the bitumen, and then across to the low bluestone walls. When she takes her shoes off and steps on to the dark grass, the cold snap of ice-frosted grass on the soles of her feet makes her shiver and giggle. Across the lake, the sky turns the faintest magical pink and the ducks and other water birds begin their morning calls.
And here, barefoot and wild in this foreign suburb, Luna uncertainly whispers I love you, Christopher and I’m sorry, Katherine in to the swirling August winds, and with arms outstretched she says goodbye to the stars and lets her heart grow full of bursting joy.