Friday fiction - an excerpt from my free-writing

Most mornings, over breakfast, I write. Usually it's a mix of free-writing, journaling, and reflective writing.

I recently passed a million words and this prompted me to reflect on why I still write. It helps me process emotions and reminds me of what is important.

I encourage anyone to try it, even if it's just a couple of sentences a day; it's less about the words and more about the process.

I don't often share, but below is a story I really enjoyed writing this morning, and I hope you get something out of it too!

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If there was just one place on Earth where I could lie down and die. Down beneath waves or sand or coconut shells. This would not be that place. “There are too many things to see,” you told me. “Too many things for what?” I asked. There was no reply, just a gentle breaking of the waves like you sucking through your lips in disapproval. When you went away, I went away. Down to the beach where so many retreat to feel the Earth beneath our feet and the smell of ferns and forest scents.

There is a bakery off the highway where we used to stop. Do you remember? A truck drives past and pops an aluminium can crushed by the eight wheels of your sixteen-wheel trailer, the sound like a gunshot, the sound like you telling me in the most condescending of tones that of course you remember. Well, it wouldn’t have been the first thing you’d forgotten. We both know that.

Sitting in the driver’s seat sipping an ice coffee from the servo and checking the petrol gauge. The red light is blinking. Maybe you should have stopped off at that bakery next to the petrol station. Too late now. Drains the last of the ice coffee and tosses the bottle into the back of the cab. The sun has started to set and he switches on the truck’s headlights, which roar and scream silently in the language of light.

We watch the sixteen-wheeler snake off into the distance, climbing – with effort – the coastal mountain pass past this bakery. My brown paper bag crinkles and I max out the space in my mouth with sausage roll and tangy tomato sauce. Cars leave the graveled carpark to re-join their cousins on the streaming highway. I twist my shoes on the gravel making circles of dust and I look up at the sign “Pitstop Bakery” which at night, reads as “Pi stop Bakery” because the neon lights of ‘t’ rusted away a long, long time ago. So I’ve only known this place as ‘Pi stop’ all my life. No doubt that’s why the trucker missed it.

I scrunch up the brown paper bag and toss for three points at the open-lidded bin, built from metal, built to last. It bounces off the rim and falls in. I pumped a fist discretely as an attractive woman comes out of Pi Stop and catches me and smiles. I brush pastry flakes off my t-shirt and pretend to get back to tidying myself up before getting back in the sedan. As the sun lowers and light becomes thinner the air becomes thinner too. The glow of the bakery becomes more of a beacon for travellers on this highway.

I stretch my neck and arms before re-clasping the wheel of my best friend from high school and putter out of the pitstop and smash the pedal when I feel all four tyres grip the blackened asphalt. That was my weekend, how was yours? That’s something you’d say to me every Monday. It was a microwave conversation that became a ritual. An appendage to our morning coffees which usually went cold because we’d get caught by our inboxes. I’d heat my cold coffee first, then you. While the machine whirrrrrred and our mugs spun beaten by microwaves warming we’d warm to each other.

This went on for years — a man walking by clears his throat and spits violently into the gutter — I know that’s you telling me you knew it went on for years. I laugh a bit and apologise to a pedestrian traffic light pole, rub the back of my neck, of course you know. I cross with the green man and a family with a pram and a dog on a blue lead. I’m walking the block where you used to live. The block where I used to walk, and where you decided to leave.

I find weather reports on TV some of the most paradoxical and fantastic things these days. Forget the PushFlix and NetWatches, no, just turn to Barry Bertram on ABC news telling us again like he did yesterday and the day prior (I haven’t told anyone this but I think the weather forecasts are pre-recorded, like a week in advance) that there’s a firestorm cutting its way from the Big W in Gunghalin to Parliament House in Canberra or that there is what’s now commonly referred to as ‘needle snow’, hail like needles which can pop balloons and pin flesh. I still find it amusing that the politicians call this death rain ‘snow’.

It’s a turvy topsy world my friend. An elderly man with a pusher falls down in the middle of a main intersection. A crowd of people rush to help him, and he gets up okay. With that, you beckon me to the park based at the bottom of the neighbourhood. Before it was an oval it must have been a bog, you said. There are pools of water in the reeds of grass. The park fronts a Dan Murphy’s across the street and I’m not sure which is wetter. I’m wearing thick blue jeans but decide to sit cross-legged in the muddiest, wettest, least-dry patch of swampy oval I can find.

There are a bunch of young kids monkeying in the playground. School’s just finished for the day and gaggle of parents next to a hovel with crossed arms and bagged eyes hoping that the sun will come out again tomorrow. Why is it that we feel so tired as grownups? Why can’t we keep that bountiful energy we’re woven from as younger selves? You lament that not all children are like that and I cast eyes down at the squelching mud in shame, having been caught out in a generalisation.

A Frisbee hits me in the back, right on my vertebra. That’s you patting me on the behind telling me it’s alright, happens to all of us. Not to the best of us. A kid runs up to retrieve it and looks at me for a second—have I got you kid?—no, the answer is no. He runs off back to playing with his mate and a dog, who can catch a Frisbee better than I can. I turn my head and watch the group play and see the dog can also throw the disc better than me. My underpants sag as I stand up and that’s when I get an alarmed and disapproving look from the gaggle.

We drip dry on our way back to the walking path. There are distant lamps illuminating this walking path at night. It’s suitable for runners or cyclists but I know not many people walk here after dark. Tall wire fences either side look down at me like a thin giraffe. The occasional commuter in a long jacket and backpack will wander through here but tonight it’s just me. There’s a trail of sloshing footprints, which I think is quite amusing, and shoulder check behind me to see if I’m being followed. I jump when I see a possum suddenly scuttle up the trunk of a eucalypt.

There was no place higher than that place. I am wretched now. Or maybe that’s how I was born, you joked. I fold my glasses and tuck them in my drawer and stare up at the ceiling, blank and blotchy. I check my watch, a quarter past nine. There are different tickets to sleep for me these days. I indicate to you with my hand, this pile of books, some dustier than others, a smartphone with spider-cracked screen, and a window with a view to an infinite brick wall.

There are no other ways to go. All paths lead to you, and so I fall asleep in sweats and fits and dreams bring me back to the blank and blotchy before I finally fall asleep from exhaustion. Ghosts sputter out the tailpipe of my car parked on the street. I let the engine run. Keeps the thing warm. I see you in a dream in the backseat of my car with the engine still running and the exhaust pipe exhausting.??