Shattered - Broken Heads and a Broken Heart

Shattered – Broken Heads and a Broken Heart

It’s my birthday today…I don’t know how old I am because I was never born but if I had to choose an age for myself it would be either four or one hundred and fifty four…or 0…

I know that my whole life has been a lie and that Dabios and Marine are not my parents. Dabios, Marine and my little brother died in a car crash a very long time ago…Marine told me that she had an affair with a man called Peter Younghusband…was he my Dad?... when she was living in Africa and that Dabios had an affair with his neighbours wife…in Africa.

  She had a little boy…Tonyo…the same age as me…four…we used to hold hands….he came to my fourth birthday party and saw me blow out the candles on my birthday cake…or not…as I was blowing out the candles I stumbled and fell backwards off my chair….when I got back on the chair…my arms hung loosely in front of me and I didn’t have the breath then to blow out the candles…someone else must have done it.

Marine told me once a long time ago…perhaps in fact yesterday that she was driving along a dusty rode in Africa with my brother and me in the car when she got a flat tyre on a little hill close to where a pride of lions lay snoozing in the sun. She said she got out of the car to change the tyre…and that it had been a lucky escape…it wasn’t a lucky escape.
That may or may not have been the year Elsa the lion cub raised by humans and released back into the wild… began attacking villagers. Dabios told me that her ‘owner’…a man with a gun…went looking for her…and he did find her and he did shoot her but that is one part of the story not included in the retelling of the story in the film ‘Born Free’.
In any case Marine was not my mother…perhaps Elwyn Morris was…apparently David had had an affair with her in England and she got pregnant and had an abortion.

There is a photo out there somewhere…I have seen it in Dabios’s photo album at his farm in Yass… of my brother and his identical twin aged about 2…one of the little boys is standing up, quite unfazed while the other little boy sits facing him…eyes level with his penis crying uncontrollably…tears streaking his face.

Marine once told me that a photographer friend of Dabios’s and David were visiting the Congo…apparently because there had been an uprising there and that this photographer friend of Dabios was captured by cannibals and eaten…I was shocked to hear that.

I don’t blame Dabios and Marine for what happened to us  and I don’t blame  the ex Primeminster of Singapore…or Usurunan or Lily or my brother and my sister….or the astral shells of long ago departed friends. What is the point of pointing your finger at anyone anymore and saying….he did it….or she did it…when the person you are pointing your finger at is a ghost…can you blame a persons astral shell for that matter?….if the shell is occupied by something else….and you don’t know what that thing is?….to make the situation even more confusing are the sudden and unpredictable turns in behaviour of the apparent astral shell…there are times when they seem to quite like you…even recognise you…perhaps…. and those other times when they can appear to be quite monstrous. At least I have some explanation for Marines cold indifference towards me and my Dabios’s tyranny.

At least now I can come to terms with Marines inability to hear me…to listen to me and Davids persistent refusal to allow me to speak while everyone else had free reign…indeed...i cannot think of a single instance where I have ever been allowed to finish a sentence…now I know why of course.

What is there to say to a God who does not believe in God… a spirit who doesn’t believe in spirits…a crystal that laughs at crystals and a fairy who doesn’t believe in fairy tales.

…ore…a slave who does not know he’s a slave…a slave who thinks his slave master is the only one who speaks the truth…
What is there left to say?…Nothing!

I also have had to harden my heart and in so doing have broken a few hearts myself.

The Young Black Elephant broke my heart…he was my first love….and…that was the first and last time my heart was broken by a boy.

To be fair I don‘t know what my astral shell was doing when I left it….what terrible things were done in my name?…what unspeakable atrocities were committed by something wearing my face?

And what face did I think I was wearing when I could no longer see it?
I have asked myself this question so many times….when did I die?
I have died a thousand times in more ways than one but since my consciousness is not attached to the part of me that lives I am oblivious… I feel the pain of these deaths and I have learn’t to recognise the symptoms….headache means head smashed in….heart pains means heart cut out…a hot flush is a burn…inability to breathe…can mean drowning, suffocating or smoke inhalation…flatline tone means life support cut off.
This is not to say I don’t know what it feels like to feel acute pain…the most acute pain for me has been emotional….i was devastated when I lost Daniel…even though I was already losing myself.

I figured something else out last night….re the rip in the fabric of space time the rip in the human brain and its flow on affects with regard to the consciousness of the group soul that is this planet…a heart broken beyond all repair also creates a rip in the fabric of space time.

The pain of seeing this world I love so much being destroyed again and again has caused me to feel acute pain. The abuse and mistreatment of animals and total wanton disregard for their right to live has been acutely painful…so much so that I have become numb to it.

 The death of my dog Zac in 1982 is an event that I can only describe as being one of a shattering magnitude.

Zac was a red kelpie who lived with me in Hall. At the time I was living with Dean a boy I met at Macquarie University through Anita…a hobbit girl who knew my brother before she knew me.

One day when Zac was about six months old a guy on a motorbike smashed into him.   I remember seeing him lying dead on the road….there was blood coming out of his mouth and ears…in a daze I carried him into the house…I was in such a state of shock that I could hardly walk…my legs turned to jelly….Dean carried him down to a room underneath the house and I stayed with him there a long time…as his body grew cold and stiff the grief set in…

How can I describe the pain I felt…it was agony…it seared through me and shattered my soul… my heart ached with the pain of thousands of little sharp daggers splintering it beyond all recognition.

We buried him the garden the next day… I remember the skies clouding over as it started to rain…it poured with rain that day and the next turning the garden into a swamp…I remember lying down on the couch curled up in a fetal position sobbing for hours…then I started to vomit and that went on for days…I had diarrhea… my body had gone in to such a state of shock that it stopped working…ever part of it ached…my throat hurt…I couldn’t  eat I found no refuge in sleep, I could barely walk…never have I known such pain…it was unendurable and it’s a pain I never want to feel again… I think that must have been when I died.

I floated around the house for weeks like a zombie after that…my grief was further compounded by the persistent attempts on the part of Chris – Maija’s boyfriend - to engage me in conversations about the relationship issues that he was having with her….i would just sit there mindlessly mouthing platitudes and nodding and just wishing he would go away….it got to a point where I could no longer stand it…I said to him…something along the lines of…. ‘Chris my dog has just died I can’t talk about this with you at the moment’…well…you should have seen his reaction…he was incredulous…he said…  ‘How can you compare the death of a dog to the relationship issues I’m having with Maija?’…truly I was lost for words…tears stung my eyes and I ran out of the room….i didn’t want to look at him let alone engage in a debate about it.

One day a few months later …Maija came over for a visit…she was also in a distraught state because her dog Tish had been killed in a collision with a car in Gunning…not only that she was sick with the mumps… her cheeks and neck had swelled up to such an extent that she was barely recognisable… we consoled each other as best we could and maybe drew some comfort from the fact that at least some else out there understands the pain of losing your best friend…your dog.