Friday the 13th

1. It’s five am, and I’m standing on top of a mountain. A mountain. It’s fucking cold, and I am wearing as many clothes as I could pull on before my friend picked me up: a night dress, a t-shirt, a hoodie, a coat. I look ridiculous, but nobody is looking at me. Because on this particular morning, and for the first time in who knows, four planets are visible from earth in the same sky. Jupiter and Mercury make a dip via Venus, leaving Mars in tow, so outshone by the other planets that it doesn’t even retain its usual yellow glow.

Almost everybody else I know is still asleep. But I didn’t want to miss this. How could I have justified sleeping through something that won’t happen again til 2056?

How do I know I’ll still even by alive then?

2. I’m in the CBD. If normal people kill time, then I am a mass murderer. Either I cancelled my plans, or my plans cancelled on me. So I walk, I watch people. I sit inside food courts and read Italo Calvino until for some stupid reason or another I tear up, and have to close it. I hate being that girl who cries in public, but these days more than ever it is becoming commonplace.

3. I can’t shake the feeling that being in the central nervous system of the city would feel a lot less lonely if my father weren’t interstate. I never see him anyway, but there’s a certain comfort in knowing that he is tucked away in an office somewhere, nearby and accessible if I need.

I imagine a phone conversation.

She’s dying now. She’s not going to make it through the night.

Shit, I’m sorry.

Yeah. I got the call this morning, she’s getting worse. She’s not going to make it through the night, I can just feel it.

I’m so calm, so collected. I don’t know if it means I have come to terms, or if I am just emotionless. But I realise I’ll miss her periodical greeting cards – birthdays, Christmas , all portrayed in a flurry of scratchy script and calligraphy pens.

I even feel like shit for writing about her.

4. I’m about to go home, I’ve had it with this empty place and these empty people. So I’m sitting at the bus stop, waiting. Then I get the call.

5. Now I’m sitting in a seedy bar, at a table composed mostly of strangers. But we chat, we laugh, and suddenly life feels something larger than it is. I have less than two standard drinks in me, but I can already feel the twinge of inebriation. It feels good. I feel happy. I feel ready for anything, and I perhaps share this sentiment too readily with the others: the one who compared my hair to baby duck feathers; the one who compared a girl in line to an anteater; the one who sadly has no animal-related anecdote to identify with.

This is my life. I am drunk. I am young, I am fast, I am indestructible. I could do anything right now.

6. There’s this girl, and she’s surrounded by something like ten strangers. She’s confused, she’s lost, she doesn’t know what she’s doing there. She pours herself glasses of purple cocktail, and when that runs out, beer. She despises this. She was always a bad news-good news person. She wants to be anywhere but here.

And then almost seamlessly a prince arrives, and he takes her away from the place. He takes her home and takes care of her. He kisses her on the forehead and puts her to bed. She sleeps, long after he disappears. He has a kingdom to run, and she is nothing more than useless.