The pilgrimage to the airport

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I write this with great trepidation because the past is exactly where it should be. but a precursor, a foreword from the author is necessary I suppose, before we all go on this journey that I cannot premeditate. I always skip the foreword in any book I read. I don’t watch previews. the less you know the better. I have turned capitals off previously, because I don’t like my poems having them when I punch a new line, but now I don’t know how to turn them back on and I'm 13000 metres from the ground and don’t have reception to work out how to change it.

I've tried to push this back and back, explaining how I got here, but as I sit in an empty aisle on a Boeing to Singapore with three little bottles of red wine in my guts, I'm left with no choice but to spit it out so I can finally relax.

I can see me now, in my mind’s eye, I can’t imagine what it was like to be me back then, but I can see me, wearing a yellow shirt and my favourite pair of shorts that were comfortable and fashionable enough. standing next to my dream girl. standing Infront of a sold sign. four and a half years ago. a little thinner, a lot surer and maybe a lot more successful to the eye of you. I had a second mother and father, a real mother and father and the world telling me who I was and me saying I'm the best version of that. most importantly I had a French bulldog named ralph who was with me for enough years to prove he would love me no matter what and enough vet bills prying from an empty wallet to prove I loved him just as much. everything was perfect, like the end of a fairy tale, but life keeps going. now I'm sitting by myself on that on my way to India for six months with nothing but a soul and a bag of emotions to hand out.

how did I get here?

I waddled here like a wounded penguin, having escaped the jaws of a polar bear who goes by the name of suicide and wears the scolding eyes of all those so perfect. I want to cut a long story short, because I can’t be fucked telling the cunt.

we bought the house; we were madly in love. I was 26 and had my own electrical business and strangely enough, with no work ethic outside of local football it was doing well enough to convince a bank to lend us money. The greatest gamble since I sided with Jesus against the Romans.

we bought the house in 2018, I was captain of the local football side, had a six pack and all that cool stuff that rewards everything but the soul. enough money in the bank not to worry, enough work to not have to work for someone else and that’s all that mattered. I was an electrician and from the first day of work I hated it. but what else do you do but go get a trade when you're a boy from the northern suburbs of Melbourne. at school I thought I could be a physio, in year 12 I picked all the hardest subjects. then they gave me homework over the summer holidays, and I wasn’t going to be doing that. so I started year 12 behind and never caught up. a few weeks into the first term I gave up. I walked across the road to the public toilets and watched porn on my phone until it was time to go home again. then I got my license and never went unless we were playing school cricket. Where our team made it to the state finals.

I didn’t have the brain for school. I didn’t have the brain for anything other than footy and making people laugh. I was and am an insecure little boy. but I never wanted to be a physio, or an electrician, I wanted to be an AFL player and I was going to throw everything at it.

back to 2019. the year started well. I spent the summer training for a half iron man. which consists of a lot of swimming and riding and then running. I didn’t drink over the summer break. I did that and did it well. two nights later, with my beautiful girlfriend asleep in my childhood bedroom I began to sweat, hot and cold, my body was fighting crystals in my kidney, I got up to the shower in my room and pissed in the sink. I pissed blood and clots of it; looking like a squashed red grape, the same red grapes that fill my cup today. my body was telling me something.

It was telling me to stop but I didn’t listen. I refused to bend to the signs of life. I went to the doctors, got my drugs and was all better a few days later. just in time for the footy season to start. Whittlesea had been relegated to division 2 the year before and I was captain then and now captain again. the last 2 times we had been relegated we had won the flag and it was my chance to captain a premiership, which was the goal that seemed more realistic, even though in my head I was still just one VFL season away from breaking into the big leagues. Round one was good, and we won by 80 points. I was that captain, a militant, took the fun right out of the game, everything had to be perfect, I was playing a character, reading the books of what leadership is, being everything but myself. I was not playing the game I was ticking the boxes. then round 2 came and I moved the wrong way. slipped and landed on my ankle. snapped it in three places, ruptured everything that held the tibia and fibula together and dislocated the joint. I walked off the ground with false pride. sat on the bench. told them to call an ambulance cause its broken. MY beautiful girlfriend came up to me and my vulnerability I could only access through her found the edge of my skin and I held back tears.

“it’s broken” I uttered.

we went to the hospital for x rays. the pain subsided.

“Bones only take six weeks to heal, I will be back by round 10 at the latest and be good for the second half of the season” I told my girlfriend who sat with a perfect smile beside the bed.

I asked the x ray man what the result is,

“Yep, you have broken it”

“How bad?” I asked,

“You have done a good job of it”

of course I had, I don’t do anything half hearted. except work.

the surgeon came around and told me the news, I had really fucked it.

“How long until I can play footy again?” was the first question I asked, although I had a mortgage and an entire real life outside of local football,

“You won’t play footy again, this is the same injury that made Dane Swan retire”

Dane Swan was a Brownlow medallist for Collingwood, getting 700k a year to play, he wasn’t known for his professionalism nor commitment, so this wasn’t a major issue for me. I sat in a hospital room for three days until surgery, I stayed in good spirits, nothing could break me, nothing could when you are so driven and motivated. I’d read all the books, all the quotes. I knew about mindfulness; the body was mere but a respondent of what I told it. I had the surgery; the peaceful anaesthesia froze the veins in the back of my hand and I slept the best I have for a long time. I woke up in a good mood. a plate, a bolt and 8 screws holding it all together. whilst waiting for surgery I had done all the research.

A high alkalised diet, no alcohol, meditation, the placebo is REAL Joe Dispenza and I'm going to prove it. I got home and my beloved beautiful mother went shopping and got everything on my list. I even gave up my majestic coffee because the scientists did a study on rats to show that it may weaken bones. I was straight. I was motivated. it was agony, all of it. the agony I needed to distract me from myself.

once I could, once the scar healed itself, I would wake up at 6am every morning and go to the leisure centre. take off my boot, hop into the hydro pool then sit in the sauna. I would do every exercise I could do that wouldn’t prevent the recovery. Meditate in the sauna and stay there until black covered my vision. Walk out, sit on a chair for the disabled and feel at home.

first check up the surgeon said he had never seen anything like it. I wasn’t surprised, I’d been to the wells of the unmanifest to heal this fucking thing. the scar and the skin were prestige. I made him look like a modern day jack the ripper.

“Dr. Bewsher, I am captain of my football team, we are going to play finals, is there anything we can do to speed up the process so I can play again?”

he was a saint’s fan and I think his ego was tied up into it as much as mine,

“Well, there is this surgery I have done on a few of the St Kilda players who also had the syndesmosis. We can put you under again and replace the bolt holding your bones together with a string. Then you can start your rehab on the dorsiflexion a little earlier”

“Will I be able to play in 4 weeks?”

“You will be able to run onto the ground, whether you can play, I don’t know”

and that was good enough for me. so I went under the knife again, got that sweet cold drug that sent me to nowhere and awoke to a girl called Siobhan and we had a connection I'm sure of it. pronounced Shavon by the way.

the Asian hostess with braces that’s fruiter than a Fijian hat gets me another small bottle of red wine as I type.

“Receipt?”

“No thanks mate”

So the income protection was up because I was going to play again. the physio said that I was ‘structurally okay’ and ‘as much chance of breaking that foot again as the other’.

it was a nice day but the ground we played on was covered in a foot of mud. I played in the reserves and eased into it with fear in each movement. played in the ones the week after. two games to go in the season. I was limping like my hostess after a 3 day stop-over with the other hostess who gave him a little smirk as they were telling us how to put the oxygen mask on. I was back at work. I was still motivated. we moved into the house, and I was going to footy training. the steam started to dissipate in the train. to run and then work the next day was too hard so I was hardly working. the mortgage was like a slow turning tide of water that needed constant attention to prevent the house from going under. I didn’t know what to do, I was the man of the house, I had bills and my own business to look after them when I couldn’t look after anything but this dicky foot. the relationship was just ok. I was perfect in my eyes. I was looking into the spare rooms and picturing a little Riley in there. This is where our kids will go to school, I would say to myself as I walked passed the local primary school, or maybe by the time our eldest is ready for school we would have upgraded somewhere with a bigger backyard. out towards Wandong where I grew up. My beautiful wife, I can picture her in her wedding dress. white with diamonds and long sleeved. low cut at the front but still classy, classy but sexy.

Everyone at the footy club started to look at me differently. I was on a fistful of painkillers just to jog, and I was expected to be who I was before. You sacrifice your health for the game and the game spits you out because of it. Before training I would drink a concoction of bullshit. cacao powder and chilli. I read they were natural painkillers. Spending hours a week in a float tank to help the mind overcome the shortcomings of the body. I couldn’t turn, I had no trust in my body, one wrong movement was going to break something. but it couldn’t break my spirit. not yet anyway. We won the first final and I played that, we won the second and like the beautiful words that rhyme in the fables we won the grand final. I kicked the sealer, and everything was perfect. I held that big cup up and I tried to find joy, but it did not want to find me.

Is that it?

is that what all that was for?

so I drank to find pleasure and I still felt so small, I felt like the world did not give a fuck what I had done. and why would they. my girlfriend hadn’t had any attention for 4 months and although id rewritten the entire encyclopedia of medicine and dr. Sam Bewsher won the Nobel prize , everyone was worried about their own lives. Ah, but I sit in my home with pissed pants on the Sunday morning having slept on the couch after drinking joy and pretending the pleasure was worth a lifetime of arthritis and retardation, but I still had Ralph and he loved me. no matter what he loved me. I loved him so much. he would sit at the back door and his eyes would widen even though he had no eyebrows and watch me move. his widened eyes would whisper,

“Can you let me in?” and I would walk over to the sliding door and open it.

“Yes Ralphy, now give me a cuddle, I would be nothing without you. I love you”

now it was September in 2019 and I had no motivation to do anything. I’d lost my northern star and I wasn’t three wise men; I wasn’t even one.

the mortgage didn’t care id won a premiership. simply energy didn’t care. Yarra valley water didn’t care. the clients didn’t care. commonwealth bank didn’t care. and mostly, my girlfriend didn’t care. I wanted to be anyone but me and I tried to work but the pain of the foot was too much, and I tried to take Ralph for a walk but the pain of the foot was too much.

I was lost. An image I created was so real that when he died I died with it. Left with the frustration of what's left behind.

footy trip came around and I was a shell of a man. I went anyway. The first day there, once the bags were put away, we all sat at a pub and the lady who managed the bar said

“Righto, who is your captain? who is in charge of you lot?”

and I filled with burning rage. don’t you know I come here to escape who I am? to escape all responsibilities? the nights went by, and I drank and drank and always found myself alone. the world hated me, and I took their side. End up at KFC every night and message whoever was online. whoever would like me. I wouldn’t say it but whatever I did say had the undertone of ‘please like me’.

I cheated on my girlfriend. with some fat sack of shit. she was a barmaid, and I got her number. I was never going to do it and as soon as I began, I stopped.

she knew I had a girlfriend and she said

“what's wrong?”

“I'm sorry, I can’t do it”

and I left, I think cause she was hefty and had a hairy ass that she took it personally, but it wasn’t personal. but I still remember those blonder hairs that screamed at me to get out of that house.

I was broken. I had manifested all the anxiety and angst within me and now I finally had a reason to feel so bad.

I got home and wasn’t the same, I would slap myself in the darkness and watch the light from the force enter my mind.

a few weeks had passed, I wasn’t doing well, I didn’t know who I was and I felt stuck. and then I saw this girls name who I had online. I deleted it to try and diminish the anxiety. To delete the past. she didn’t like this and messaged my girlfriend and gave her an in-depth description of the proceedings.

for a while we tried to work it out, but we all wanted this ego dead. on Christmas eve she text me and said it was done. it was done. I was done. I was finally killed.

Well I guess that’s part one to this fucking pilgrimage, and now everyone praises my bravery to pursue this lifestyle, to chase my dreams. but please know, I tried everything but. from a young age I knew this is what life is, to be lived and that’s why I got sacked from every job I ever had, because it didn’t make sense. I always felt like there was something wrong with me and everyone made me feel this way because I wasn’t enthusiastic about mundane tasks, because I wasn’t working harder than I had to be. because I wasn’t adopting the stress of my boss even though I would receive the same reward no matter how much I cared. the soul was always there. eventually paying the devil to kill the ego for him. and now, as I fly to a life that feels like mine, was it really the devil after all? or just a stubborn man refusing to listen to the trees?

I sat on the couch alone; in the house I bought with my supposed soul mate and watched the panic of presence reach me until I had to move. walk anywhere, take your clothes off and sit beneath the cold water and scream. smash the photo frame against the bedhead. every item in the house told a sad story.

This red shirt, the shirt I wore at her birthday last year, the birthday where I got drunk and lost at the festival.

her family, who would say they loved me on birthday cards deserted me quicker than they could spell the word and it made me question love. Love made me think a lot, it made me think that maybe two people in love, shouldn’t be and what is love? is it our two egos in love or is it them in the way?

we did what all couples do, cling on for a long time. when I would get to a point of moving on, she would pull me back and when I was hers again, she would push me away. for too long. I sat in the house with Ralph and started smoking weed. Started doing psychedelics to heal. That’s when I found you. That’s when I found all the voices id been denying. all the colours id orchestrated to be only primary. This one Ego speaking for all of us, how dare he?

so how does a man who is too scared to sit still on a couch end up on a plane heading to India on his own?

fucked if I know, but I guess the pursuit of a writing career denies the liberty of saying things are too hard to explain.

I had a flight voucher from a trip I was meant to go on with her family. so I used it to go to Byron Bay. Instagram manifested but it is a beautiful place. I laid down to get a massage and had a panic attack at the curtains that kept me locked in. I drank and I wrote in my notebook. I watched a man ride a bike with a flowerpot on his head. and I thought to myself, well, instead of killing myself, I can always come here and ride around with a flowerpot on my head.

Art saved me;.for the first time I replaced a girl with something other than a girl. I didn’t rebuild my ego I watched it and kept trying to see it. it always builds. I see it as money. you need it to get by but can’t let it define you. you have to be enough without it. but I borrow its fingers to type words from the soul.

I wanted to keep the house and with a broken heart I kept going. the 3-day trip to Byron was filled with fear but left a good taste in my mouth. the summer after I drove up there by myself for two weeks. filled with the same fear and finished off being better for it. I sat in the pain, in the fear and started to believe in God. started to believe I am not in charge but whoever is does care about me. as a beautiful brown eyed girl always says to me, ‘we make plans and God laughs’

so I was tired of trying to formulate it myself and gave it up to destiny. And I wrote my way out of it. The more I wrote and painted and all that artistic shit the more I realised that this is all I want to do. it replaced footy and now footy seemed trivial. I hated it to be honest. I gave up everything for it and it rejected me because I had nothing. I blamed it for everything. but now I can take ownership myself and it’s not footy’s fault. It was the character I allowed it to create.

I wanted to rent the house out and go to India. for a few months. get closer to God or closer to writing or closer to being someone the hot girls online would want to fuck. maybe all of them.

I couldn’t do it, the closer I got the further it went away and the more I pursued writing the more I could see only one path clearly. it’s all I cared about. but having learnt from football it’s something that still requires balance. but fuck balance, I'm an extremist, I will try and suck this dry, something tells me it’s got never ending juices and will hit me back a lot harder than I can hit it. I sought advice, I wanted someone to solidify my faith in my decision. I wanted god to come down and say YES DO THIS RILEY, but I guess that’s why it’s called faith, because I'm just as scared now as I was on my first day of school, first day at work, first time I shared a poem, when I went to Byron, when I drove to Byron, I'm always scared that eventually you just realise your emotions are nothing but whatever song is playing and you can’t let them stop you from living. no inspirational quote is going to get you there, you always feel the same, you just have to do it, and it’s annoying because you want to think you know what you're doing but you don’t, and I don’t, but gee I hope someone does.

I contacted the agent, the repayments were piling up, I was falling behind and didn’t have it in me to catch up. I put the house on the market, I tied up all loose ends. all I had left was my best friend, Ralph.

one Saturday night as I was high and listening to music and just thinking how good life is, I held him by the jaws and told him I loved him, and I felt lumps in his neck.

I messaged my auntie who has owned 37 dogs and can get them to backflip, and she didn’t ease my concerns.

I took him to the vet, and they took a blood test. a few days later they told me it was cancer. a few days later they told me the options. he could have chemo for one year with a 50/50 chance of surviving beyond that or he would be dead in 4 weeks.

I wept with his in my arms and I told him I loved him, and I had nowhere for him to live and no money to pay for the treatment and my life and death philosophies believed in reincarnation and in 3 weeks he had green liquid injected into his body and he died on my lap. driving home with him in a bag on my passenger seat I made noises I never made before. I got home and dug the hole. I took him out of the bag and placed his perfect cute little body on the dirt. I sobbed for him. my best friend. I lost everything. I lost my baby. this is why I did not want to write the story as the page blurs through the salt water that wells on my eyelids. I buried him and said goodbye. the house was handed over two weeks later. I had a lump of cash and booked my flights to India. I am full of love and full of confusion. I'm scared and excited. I was a shell of a man, now I'm a soul with a shell. the faces that fill this half empty Boeing are masks on the light that fills us all. I miss you ralph. you taught me everything, in your life and in your death and I know you're walking the aisles of the plane. eating the crumbs of the expensive food.

now whatever happens from here, I'm sick to death of talking about myself. it’s done now. I'm the luckiest man alive. to have found something that ignites me, that kills me, I am plenty of things, but mostly I am nothing. nothing but what I'm doing at the time. and here I am, about to order another little bottle of wine. glad that this is over and excited for what's going to come.

things will never be the same.

they never are.

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