Some things last, don't they?
Like a marble from childhood rolled under your bed. Then thirty years later when you're cleaning up your dead parents' house, you yank back that little bit of glass from that dark corner, and with it comes strings of memories and disbelief, that something so small could persevere, survive, etch away at the aeons, in that forgotten corner.
You like to think you know the things that last. This particular missive had its conception as I got out of the bath (I take a bath when I manage to go a day without gear, sort of a reward and a treatment rolled into one). I have taught myself just this week, after decades of being told, to put out my clothes for the morning, set up my lunch. It would seem obvious you'd think, I am so ill in the mornings, not ill but just desperate and despairing, no locomotion, no oomph. Blame the methadone, I do.
So I struggled out the bath, warmth to cold, all pink and grublike, and I put on my thermal, and I think "This is the thermal I bought with Lora all those years ago". She was the one I discovered thermals with. Freezing nights in North Melbourne, drumkit in the living room, decorated bedrooms as only the young can decorate. And i smile that something has survived these years, that it was not all for naught, all for nothing, all a waste. I think that despite the fact that every day since we parted I have spent chasing an opiate, scrounging or just outright stealing cash to get on, all that time all that waste, this thermal sat folded in a drawer, waiting to remind me of a good time long ago.
It's bright blue, thin striped with red green and black bands, and I guess it hugs my now not-so-svelte frame as firmly as it hugged that emaciated motor that was junkie flex back then.
Such little things are such miracles. The water splashing in the bath from the tap overwhelmed my visual sensors. I tried to see what was happening as the stream hit the bath's surface but I may as well have tried to see a bullet crack an egg. My brain isn't designed to process that much information intelligently, so it reported the splash as a blur. Job done, visual cortex says, now look at something else.
This blur was lovely, it was chaos and drips ricocheting towards me away from me, utterly indifferent to me.
This Mortal Coil played in the lounge room and I thought myself the very model of a modern sad boy.
So it goes, hey Kurt?
But then reality. I think I bought the thermal years later, with girl S, before a camping trip, using excess junk funds to provision myself against the cold to come. You can never stockpile enough gear to get you through any real amount of life, but the things that are cheaper sometimes provide better for you. This thermal warms me today with the heat from a dodgy transaction a decade ago.
So it's not Lora's touch. But it was born of her. It was inspired by her. And the bad things I did to her exist but sit outside this thermal as it warms me against this cold Brisbane night and this cold junk withdrawal.
In a very small way I think I may have won something. Another day clean. Day One, for the hundredth time.