Hi friend,
here you will find a few of the many scraps of errata I have left behind. These words will probably not survive me. If they do they will be most likely be ignored until they eventually become disassociated electrons, less than dust.
Let me assure you that what you are looking for is not here, I am as lost as you. Each tap on the keyboard heralds an atom of thought. Here you will find the echo of my confused imagination.
Since I can remember I have looked past the trees, across the water to the next hill and up to the clouds. I always want to travel on and then beyond those places. Breath the salty air by the sea and feel the hot sun on my shoulders in the fields. Each step I travel stitched into my cartogaphic memory.
Over time the events of my past become places of increasing fantastica and beauty. I see now the map that I constantly embroider is innaccurate. My life is two thirds done and I am no closer to working out the reason for my compulsion to travel.
Illustrations from my imagined travel-lands
A map of where I grew up
It was and I sat in a busy shopping centre coffee shop. Roy Orbison playing on the muffled loudspeakers offered me anything I want. I tried ordering a coffee using the barcode scanner at the table but the shop was apparently closed for business. The hefty queue at the counter told me otherwise. I ordered nothing.
I came in to accompany my little family shopping but like many miserable men before me I cannot deliver on this promise. Why do I do it? It goes to the root of why I do anything, for the sharing of love and company. Betraying this motive I went into a bookshop to escape Roy Orbison and the incessant shopping.
In the bookshop I was accosted by a man in cycling lycra who swore he knew me. His name was Wayne and he'd had a heart attack at the side of the road some years earlier. He had been riding his bicycle.
"That must have been a terrifying for you but I am glad to see you are still riding" I said.
He told me he rode 500km a week and once broke his pelvis in a mountain bike race. That was all after his wife had left him and taken the money and the children. The words flooded out of him, it was a familiar story to me. I got to hear all of it whilst backed into the corner of that bookshop. I explained that whilst I too was fond of cycling I was from Broken Hill and could not possibly know him. He went on to tell me with pride of his two daughters success. They are both very wealthy and fulfilled with husbands and children. The oldest did not call him this Christmas. His ex-wife had apparently turned them against him. Clutching his bicycle bag to his chest in the corner of that bookshop he paused looking from my face to the ground
It was a familiar story to me which was perhaps perhaps why he found himself telling it. Never adept at finishing conversations I introduced myself and asked his name.
"Wayne" he said. We shook hands."Your daughters do sound like impressive women, you must be proud of them..." what was I saying? this was not going to end the conversation "...I am proud of my boys too. I really should get going as I one of them is wandering around here with his Mum and they'll be wondering where I am"
I backed out of the bookshop still fumbling to round off the conversation. Outside on the concourse Wayne seemed to finally understand I was done. I could almost see his thought in his wide glistening eyes, what did he just tell me all this for? Were we not now friends? I was now his confidante whether I wanted to be or not. He took a breath and launched into a new story about a swimming race he once unwillingy took part in. The other man was full of confidence and had a coterie of admirers. Despite this Wayne still managed to beat him, he had learned to swim at the age of 9 under the tutelage of Dawn Fraser and said he'd never forgotten the tricks. I told him how admirable he was but I really had to go. A flicker of distrust in an uncaring world and one lonely man said, "I'll look out for you on your bicycle, till then. Goodbye."
Christ, this place is horrible.