Armless

There’s something about waking up at midday and watching Dr. Phil at someone else’s house that makes it feel much less like you’re a slovenly, procrastinating dog and more like a you’re wealthy man of leisure - pottering around your airy holiday estate. Then along comes Oprah to ruin everything - some smarmy American shit born without arms and legs has risen above it all and become a champion college wrestler. Great! Now I’m the bad guy. Congenital amputation once again ruins what was otherwise a perfectly good day.
Café di Moda offers alfresco dining with slow, inept service and enormous, steaming steins of brown-and-milk masquerading as café lattes. I know, I know, you’re thinking when can I go?! Well, I’m keeping it my own little secret. Emily and I were settling down do a birthday breakfast of bacon, eggs and loudly repeated orders. It didn’t seem like we’d spent any time apart.

We jumped straight in to some conversation about how, if faced with cancer, we’d ‘ideologically’ die from it, rather than seek treatment. Me and Em have a way of agreeing that somehow always feels like arguing. A battle for clearer explanation, subtler semantic nuance, more poetic maxim. One day I hope me and Emily will converse entirely in haiku.

Rehashing some old ground, it was odd to hear a few of my own aphorisms coming back at me. Endearing – I wonder if she realised she was doing it… or if I’d been quoting her all these years… it’s been harder and harder to tell over the decade…

My cappuccino arrived. I let it gently warm my hands through my asbestos gloves and spoke, ‘I say all this knowing that I’ll probably change my mind the second I actually get cancer…’ Emily paused and squinted in that tilty-headed way.
“You never know how you’ll feel” she started. “…it’s like, I spent all this time studying to be a physio. That was the goal. That was going to be… it. And now I am one… and I’m left feeling… like, now what?!” The mantra of my generation.

Grateful people – like dolphins - are smug. Always kind of grinning, responding to rudimentary hand-signals, and communicating in squeaks and clicks. Luckily, I don’ really know any of them – grateful people or dolphins. Sure, when pushed, everyone will say that they are thankful for all they have. You have to. It’s the rule. Otherwise you’re an arrogant fuck in the eyes of others, and you’re only ever likely to pick up shallow, self-interested, extremely attractive women. Regrets? I’ve had a few…

Yes, we do love our family and friends. And of course, we like that we’ve got money, food, health and aren’t bothered by poor people or retaliatory bombings. Hey, we’ve got it easy. And yes, we are grateful, I guess. So, why is everyone I know wanting for something?

A quip and a joke and a slight distracted tangent and we’re talking about something completely different – the preferred condiment of dinosaurs – such is the nature of our conversations. My coffee had even cooled. We must have been talking for hours. Finally, she drops the bombshell. Emily has this talent of entering a conversation with one thing on her mind, then avoid talking about it until the last possible moment.
She’s found a boy. She’s faced a fear and told him that she liked him. She’s entered into a long-distance relationship, the type she’d said ‘she’d never do’. She‘s enamoured. When she talks about him her mind is still and giddy at the same time. She glows. And for a little while, our conversation isn’t about wanting anything. And I wonder what I’m wanting. And I wonder why I’m here…

Post Script: The day after breakfast I was picked up from my sister’s house to go for a night out. I’d be gone four days. In that time I’d find myself on a beach on the Sunshine Coast. Time had slowed to clichéd crawl, the sun browning my back as I wrote, absent-minded, in the sand. The constant crashing of waves was so soothing it had become silence itself. My gaze happened upon what I’d been writing. You are not what you are looking for. I hadn’t changed my shorts in days. Why would I want to? Why would I want anything? …from across the sand, a girl with curlybrown hair smiled and waved…