In the morning the daylight warms you in a way that feels nice but there’s the hint that it doesn’t want to warm you, it’s warning you that it will not warm you but hurt you later and it’s trying to hurt you now and it’s annoyed that you are enjoying being warmed which makes you enjoy it more because there is a suffering in it. The soft blue of the blank sky like a poorly drawn comic book is music to your eyes, angels sing, herald the new day with it’s romantic barely-recognisable-as-reality vista, there is a sweetness in the air, it tastes like flowers and pollen and those many times you’ve snapped the end off a honeysuckle, pulled out the stamen, plucked the base from it and sucked out the nectar. Having once tasted this sweet drop you went ahead and sucked twenty or fifty of them, but not enough to wipe the entire shrub of flowers because you are not an animal or evil or whatever that is and as a child sucking sweet drops from flowers realised then that you are not anti-environment or a destructor and taking that to school with you is enlightening. You are too young to imagine that others are not as capable, too young to know that not everyone is so delicate and inspired. You see them do brutal things, say brutish things that are against your nature, but in sucking that sweetness freely from nature you gained an appreciation for nature, which includes your fellow humans. As such you were able to understand and appreciate them, in all their brutality and animal honesty, how they did things and how they moved, sweating and touching each other. So when they are doing this you are telling them about things or ways to think about things and they smile, wide smiles and pat you on the back and tell you they like you but they don’t know why and you smile at them and they smile back. But it’s not children anymore its adults and they are hideous and now powerful and they have cars and money and are doing things sexually and playing with other people’s love in ways that make you sick and suicidal and even more resilient because you can still taste that sweetness in your mouth only now you know about bees and honey and pollination and how important bees are for the ecosystem and that bees then also know about sweetness. The main thing bees do is produce a sweetness that cannot be replicated by science, a sweetness that sustains the world, taken from beautiful flowers, a system which is the basis for all life. When you overheard this teenager in school talking about how he raped this girl, well not really raped but fucked her when she was virtually passed-out drunk at a party and he said he couldn’t be sure she was into it but she sort of was, sort of was asleep kind of thing but they fucked (and he lost his virginity in this way aged fifteen) and he was smiling and telling us (you were there) about it in ways that make it sound so terrible but you looked around and lots of ‘boys’ were smiling and laughing and touching each other, like patting each other and grabbing arms at what not. Later when you had left that town but came back to visit a friend you saw them all together in the local pub they were still talking the same and patting each other all over their bodies and smiling with their back teeth with two telling a story about how they had both fucked a girl at the same time and high fived each other during it.

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At your desk you stare at a screen and look to the right and see a cityscape but it’s not enough so you respond to an email and press send then get up and take your coffee mug to the kitchen and make a tea. The time it takes and the smell you get from the tea bag you try to savour and get transported by them and it works for mere seconds because either you hear something directly referenced to your job or else someone talk to you about their life. You talk to them, mainly, respond to them because these things are basically questions to be answered, dull faced inquiries that have no purpose but in being a fellow human require a response. Back at your desk you overhear a boss or manager talking to a fellow employee and he is asking her to do things that are noticeably (in her face) against her morals but she wants to keep her job and impress so she is agreeing and talking about the ways in which she will go about subjugating herself and you can see her swallowing hard and having to stammer her words in order to get them out and standing up with a weak smile and leave with this heavy task on her shoulders, trying to take a deep breathe and justify what she is about to do to herself. What she is about to do is kill her soul a little bit, what she has done is sold her soul for an amount not really worth the true soul so what she does is do what she is asked and then call her boyfriend crying and saying ‘I can’t do this anymore’ and he is saying back to her ‘it’s ok, it’s ok you can do this one thing and we’ll be home together in a few hours’. What she was asked to do is threaten to fire a young employee in customer service who is having an exorbitant amount of leave because her grandmother is dying, even though she knows that both this employee’s parents died when she was 5 and 6 respectively and that her grandmother brought her and her sister up since then and it is basically her mother dying for the second time and that the insane amount of grief, obligation and confusion inside this twenty year old is unfathomable.

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You don’t even realise you are a person walking around the schoolyard, you are just moving from one thing to the next with time irrelevant, controlled by the sounds of bells and even really unaware of waiting for a bell or knowing the time, relying purely on cues from teachers or just that bell-type sound. You mind is involved in menial thoughts, mainly this one where you want to be liked so you tell people what they want to hear and find joy in seeing their happy and warm reaction to you so you keep at it and when you are first caught out telling these fifty percent fabrications you are able to twist it so that the person questioning you starts doubting the validity of their question and in the end just settles on being confused.  It doesn’t make sense to fall in love but you do for reasons that sound incredibly simple and ordinary like ‘they make me feel confident’ or ‘I like the way they do things’ or ‘they make me feel like I am a better person”. They seem to be other worldly and different to everyone else and it makes you behave in a new way you have to think about and basically it is that you have let yourself down in some way because you were not being yourself, as in, not the charming, lie telling, crowd pleasing self but, you were trying to be honest or at least closer to honesty in the face of what you considered to be some type of ethereal being and the question of authenticity and what authenticity actually gets you when five minutes after interacting with your secret admiree you can go back to having the adoration and attention of the meagre crowd you have amassed. When you repeat this pattern into your twenties, thirties, forties and beyond it becomes less about being an adolescent and more about being the kind of person that desires unconditional love, or a desire to receive unconditional love based on certain conditions, namely, that you can continue to output the kind of things that make you confident enough to continue outputting in a desire-inducing level that is enough to get someone to love you unconditionally and that the awareness of such cyclical conditional precludes you from actually feeling “true love”.

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The streets are filled with people and it’s strange how when you close your eyes you can imagine the faces of so many people who do not exist, an old man, a woman, a young boy, a group of Asian teens etc until your mind is filled with thousands of them all coming at you as if down a busy street and you are moving through them without walking, all these imaginary people, their faces do not live or may have lived n this earth. Is it so unfathomable that they have existed, these worn in faces, these faces that exist as solid, wrinkled, expressionless faces like you bump against on the way to and from work at some point in the history of the world? That they have had bodies an souls and lives just in the same way you imagine the people you really have seen, the children you have played with, the parents and teachers you have known looking up at as a child wondering why they are so slow and solemn and have a thing about them where you know they are not like you. Now the way that you interact with people as if they are mere apparitions, forms in a body that is filed up with the media of the time, saying things they have learnt from TV or whomever they consider to be inspirational or sources of truth as if you are interacting not with people but with the time and with the media itself, trying to get the media to change and collude to transcend the rote insertions that are formed as a response to any input. Then you see them bare children and talk to the children in a graphically disconnected yet expected way and it is the way in which they have been taught to behave and the more they act like this the less you feel they are solid, the apparitions from your mind are in your awake eyes and they are building houses and having cars and wearing clothes for the very same reasons they yell at their children to “shut the fuck up mummy is busy”.

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We came across about four or five kids who were around the same age but they were strangers, that is, from a different school to us but of course growing up in the exact same area as we did and our first response was fear, like one pack of animals meeting anther pack and both being too afraid to make any sudden movements, happy for the moment to stare and circumnavigate one another in a stand off situation. You are staring at one kid who is noticeably taller than the rest and it males you feel uneasy because you have to experienced hanging out with an older person and it makes you feel even more estranged from these other local kids who are now even more different from you which gives you a horror insight into these strangers, namely that they allow some older person to hang out with them but for what purpose? They instantly seem so much stranger and more threatening than your troop in their bizarreness, yet this doesn’t stop you from staring at this older kid who is basically ignoring everything and throwing large rocks into the lake. The dinner party where you go too drunk and told the people there who you barely knew expect of course for your connection to them via your partner and told them that they are all grossly misinformed about reality because they were living basically closeted lives hat revolved around trivialities that are dependent upon the age they are living in and not the real essence of existence made you, when in the toilet washing your face, flash onto those kids and the strange way in which they were different sized and colours and your group of white like minded fellows at the time made you feel safe and now you realise is a misrepresentation of the world at large and you fear at the time has over the years been replaced by a repugnancy that allows you now to be hyperaware of acceptance and of course the possibility that you are overcompensating and have lost the crux of what it is to have any kind of identity vis a vis a group or a connection to your culture at all. Back at the table you go on to talk about how “we” have no culture and shortly thereafter your partner begins making to necessary social niceties to leave.

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That morning you felt sick and on the train it was as if you could pass out from dizziness and walking down the stairs on the carriage you thought you would fall and hurt yourself badly because if you were to fall you would completely allow yourself to fall and the thought of you breaking bones or opening your skull on the metal railing that are everywhere overtook you all the way down the five stars to the bottom and the swaying and slow stopping of the train made you feel worse, as if there as something tugging at your guts. Every morning there are the same type of people with you, surrounding you but you only ever notice those three same people and you want to say something to them, to share this with them but of course they have their own three people they feel this connection with so you would end up being a stranger appearing from the mess as one talking to them and it could go no further than an obvious momentary observational pleasantry, something we have all experienced as so unexpected. On the street we are more diluted and it becomes a game where you walk in a direction with them all, each one with their lives and dreams and goals, in this most concentrated and close way we exist each deeply caring about our individual things, alone, preparing to pretend we do not really care about these things for the next eight hours or begin justifying to ourselves that the next eight hours contribute to achieving those hopes and dreams. You hear a voice inside of you screaming to stop walking in that direction, turn around and walk away to where you want to go because you are a human and you can do it and the fear you have takes over and you think about the ways in which you are trapped and each step closer kills something inside of you that used to think you could do whatever you wanted. You can’t see it at your desk but you can imagine that small child that you were in that photo that is stuck in your memory where you have a smile on your face that is wide and even in a way acting for the camera.

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A sweetness in the bush where there are tendrils and vines and exposed veins of trees that seem to be struggling to get back inside the earth and you touch them and they feel vulnerable even though you can scratch a little bit of bark off under your fingernails and pick that bark out from under your fingernails so easily. The earth is black and sweet and wet and it takes a lot to not put a clump of it into your mouth, sometimes because there are about four or five boys running around near you with sticks taped together to look like guns and the boy’s bush backyard you are in now has the best gun because he lives here and has had the time to make a really good looking stick-gun and you and the others party guests have had to make one in a few minutes and so they are misshapen and have minimal tape to accentuate their gun-like features. You are alone on the bottom of a very small valley with a stagnate creek looking back up to the house wishing you could be in the house where there is carpet and a sweet smell that is not like your house. One boy yells out “bang bang bang I got you” so you have to sit down on the ground because he got you and you instead touch the soft leaf of a water-plant that is plump with water. Now you see banner ads and ads on TV about recruitment into the army or navy and they are modelled on video game aesthetics like first person shooters and the ability to control a group of blood thirsty courageous men through war torn now yellow coloured environments when it used to be grey for the Nazis and then green for Vietnamese and now its yellow for the Arabic people which sells video games these days like Nazis sold games and movies and other propaganda yesterday.