I
What makes life worth living?
I ask him this one night as we lay side by side, backs dirtied by the damp grass, the cautious moon casting faint rays across his face. My cheek pressed against the cool floor, drinking him in. Him, facing the stars. Fingers loosely interlocked, hands laying gently on the moss, bridging the gap between us.
He breathes in, out. Turns his head to face me. The world is silent but for the soft breeze whispering secrets through the treetops. From here I could count his eyelashes, every freckle, every curl.
I move his hand to rest on my chest, and he slides it under the neck of my shirt, palm against my skin, feeling the steady rhythm of my heart. I rest my hand atop his, imagine him digging his fingers in, grasping my heart and dragging it out of my chest, thrusting it in the air as I watch on, gasping, choking, the veins and valves twisting and morphing grotesquely around each other, this thing that lives within me so desperately clinging onto its own life, pulsing within his grip. Feeling the tightening in my chest, the dull throbbing in my head, the numbing in my fingertips as I dig my fingers into the grass. The coldness that overcomes me as hot blood dribbles down his arm.
And as it drips onto me, I fall back down to Earth. Breathe in with a depth I never knew my lungs had, fill my chest with fresh, evening air. Feel every sensation. Grass on my back. Hand on my chest. I lift it, lace my fingers through, feel every knuckle, tendon and vein. The softness of the skin, the rough edge of the nails. Joints made for crushing, used instead for caressing, long, nimble fingers , delicately feeling for a pulse. He tilts his head, pondering the question for a moment.
Trust.
II
What makes life worth living?
He exhales through his nose, eyes on the road. In the front seat you’re finally an adult. Can see him eye to eye without a booster seat. Calloused hands grip the steering wheel with a practised ease. Ahead, nothing but dust for miles.
What kinda question…
Humour me.
Another sigh. A moment of silence. Gravel rattling and grinding beneath the wheels. Vague gesture, almost a slip of the hand.
This. His lips barely move.
This?
All this.
The summer sun thumping against the sand. An orange so true it must be painted. Flashes of green. Parched, but alive.
The vastness. The expanse. Dread that builds to nothing. The feeling of being a kid and hoping the drive home would never end. With a lazy finger, you trace the outline of rocks in the dust on the window.
And you think to yourself, what if we just kept driving? You picture making it to the edge of the world and driving off the end. The swoop in your stomach as you make the drop on a rollercoaster. How you once thought the world was flat and that when you were at the beach you could keep swimming to the tipping point until you dove right off into space, into the inky blue night, suddenly treading thin air in the moonbeams. Swimming past planets, landing on the endless, grey nothingness of the moon. You glance up at it now, its shy white silhouette peeking through the midday clouds. How quiet it must be up there. You picture him as an astronaut, alone in his pod, light years away, swimming in stars. Nothing but his own rattling breaths and the muffled crackle of a radio.
All this. All to ourselves.
III
What makes life worth living?
Eyes gaunt, face thin, my own superimposed onto his through the glass. Hard plastic against my ear. We exchange pleasantries, jokes.
The green suits you.
The food sucks.
Mum and Dad are fine.
Worried about me?
Always.
I’m behaving myself.
Promise?
Promise.
There was a time I thought him tall as a giant, bright as a star. Wanting to beat him, wanting to be him. My heart pounding in my head as we fought to hold our breath for the longest. His firm hand on my shoulders as he taught me to skateboard. Our unabashed cheers as I rolled from one side of the patio to the other. I try to remember how I did it now, how my feet found purchase on the slippery surface, but all I can recall is the way my heart plummeted as I overbalanced and the board shot out from underneath me. That moment of freefall, how when you’re afraid centimetres above the ground can feel like a thousand feet in air.
I observe him now, think about the bruises that bloomed across my back, and how they were the exact same shade of purple that haunts his under eyes. I wonder what haunts him now, whether he sleeps through the night in his cell or if every passing shadow on the wall grows teeth and claws. I wonder if he flinches with every creak of a pipe and squeak of a bedframe. I wonder what he writes in his letters home, if he even bothers sending them. I wonder if he still talks in his sleep. I wonder what he says.
This former giant, now hunched like a starving dog in a cage, begging for a morsel, the curling plastic phone line like a leash around his neck.
I’m not a bad person. I just made bad choices.
What is life but a string of bad choices? Who is anyone but their decisions? I ask him the question again. He laughs humourlessly down the phone. The smile doesn’t reach his eyes.
When you find out, let me know.
IV
What makes life worth living?
He turns the crackling radio up so she can hear the song. A bit more. That’s it. I’m not as young as I once was, you know. It’s some old romantic tune, something from when she was a girl. She hums it absently now, head swaying softly.
Let me face the window.
He grabs the handles, turns her slowly around. Draws back the moth eaten curtain, lets the weak afternoon sun spill over the scene. Notices the dust pooling at the foot of the drapes. The sumptuously piled up cushions yellowed with age, a display cake left to rot in the window. Pictures her tucking herself in under the musty, floral sheets, wrinkled hands smoothing down the quilt. Delicate head nestling in the creases of the pillow.
She often talks of her dreams, how she slips into the reprieve of girlhood in her sleep. Flashes of memory appear with kaleidoscopic intensity, running through her mind like negatives through a projector, riotously colourful, unceasingly loud, like every song she’s ever heard playing at once, every film projected onto the same screen at the same time, running through the years, the incessant drumming of the clock going tick tock until-
-the projector winds to a sudden stop. The image dissolves on the screen. The patrons gather their things and bustle politely out the door, and with a soft click the theatre is plunged into darkness. And she sits there in the dark, eyes wide, hands clutched over her heart, wondering what happened to the next scene.
Now those hands are folded in her lap, milky eyes glazed over as she stares out the window. He kneels beside her, takes one of her hands in his own. His, fleshy and smooth, hers carved with lines like a topographic map, an infinitely intricate record of every moment, of every memory, of a life.
See the galaxies that exist in her eyes? The memories that wash up like junk on a riverbed?
He thinks about the sickly blue veins making hills on her wrists, the mountains and valleys of her skeletal knuckles. The unchartable terrain of another, a twist in a road that never seems to end.
He thinks about how every breath rattling her chest brings her closer to her last, the weary, soot-covered workers shovelling loads of coal in the engine room of her heart’s chambers, coming to the end of their shift.
She blinks once, slowly, as if she just remembered he was there.
What was that you said?
He repeats the question.
A breath, as deep as her shallow lungs will let her. A twist of her rings. One by one, the workers clock out for the night.
That it ends.
V
What makes life worth living?
What a stupid question. The answer, I think, is this:
To hold onto it now; to reach my unlined hand into the sky and pull down a star, to hold it between pale fingers and let its warmth spread through my chest, up through my neck, down past my hips and right through to my toes. To be overcome. To give into the strength of
it, the overwhelmingness of it all. To become slave to the joy, to recognise its finiteness, to burn it up recklessly, so that when it all ends nothing remains.
To stand barefoot in a forest, to hold life in my hands, and with all my strength, squeeze, so the beating heart squelches and bursts between my fingers, splattering crimson blood across the trees. To wipe my hands in it, to smear it across the floor, to make angels in it, to bury it into the soil. To let it fertilise, to watch new life burst forth from it. To know that I am no more than organic matter in fancy dress, hurtling towards a deliciously inevitable end.
To work the engine rooms until they collapse. To see galaxies in her sunken eyes. What makes life worth living?
Knowing that it ends.
