I used to think time was an elastic band attached at one end to the past. Unless you were strong enough to overcome the tension and snap the damn thing to break free, the struggle to escape would inevitably exhaust you.
The road stretches to the horizon, carrying my car alternatively through the rough rattle of old bitumen, and the muted hum of new. The accelerator holds beneath my foot without effort, to maintain one hundred clicks. A pair of Whistling Kites swoop at carrion on the road in front of me. At my approach, black and brown blurs thrust up into the sky propelled by one meter wing spans. Kites don’t have pasts. They don’t have futures either; at least not ones which they contemplate. They are free from reflection.
The light fades as picturesque altocumulus clouds thicken into brooding cumulus as a wet season storm brews in the heavens. Framed by such, I see a giant light globe. Its filament sparking from top to bottom, flooding the edges of the moisture dense clouds with ghostly flashes. I can hear the cracking and rumbling despite the volume of the music filling the car. The CD player no longer works, so I surrender my ability to choose. There are only so many radio tunes I can take. They play an impressive variety of music and occasionally provide a real gem to surprise me, but mostly, I’m enduring a mediocrity which fails to connect. I have to feel it.
A feeling is worth chasing, isn’t it? If you identify it, then locate it, and the memory is attached to a promise of euphoria. Surely, that is worth pursuing. I’ve decided that the buzz I long for is at the end of this road. I experienced it previously, but I’m running away now. Have been running since accepting the job offer in Darwin. I’d never considered Darwin, until I did, and now I’ve been here for years. I don’t want to leave either. Like many Territorians, I’m from somewhere else. I left my family, tattered and fragile as it was, and fled to the land of the runaway. The land famous for crocodiles and oversized bottles of beer. A city filled with fly in, fly out workers who either suffered through the separation, and the demanding work schedules, or embraced the otherness. The separateness. The distance. The safety of isolation.
There was a guy who found himself in the watch house again, after a short stint in jail and a long night on the tiles. His wheels were spinning until he met Jesus and started going to some happy, clappy church in the suburbs. I knew him because I ended up at the same institution. The people were irresistible and overflowing with acceptance and tolerance. After several months, he became a part of the furniture, serving the church with the skills God had given him, and dispensing advice in the midst of oversharing about his tragic family history. I learned very late, too late, that he was on parole and being sponsored by the church. We got reasonably close after many conversations over tea, either before or after the morning service. He started to change. I smile. He started to transform, exactly like the sky above and before me right now. Darker. He made me uncomfortable, so I avoided him. Then he was gone. Running again. His parole period had ended, so he climbed on his Harley Davidson Street 750 and took off.
I’m on Giraween Rd, which connects Coolalinga to my destination: the horizon. Ten minutes behind me is the clubhouse of the Hell’s Angels. The gates are red, bright like we imagine the devil’s horns, not dull and dirty like the Top End soil decorating the space between the edge of the road and the spear grass still erect, yearning for rain, waving at the procession of vehicles which pass. Girraween Road is flanked by large acreages, homes and sheds set way back from the road behind barbed wire topped fences. These gates are all gray or silver, occasionally white, but soiled white like the ancient line markings on the road. Everything feels old. The collections of car and farm machinery wrecks, the tumble-down buildings, the unkempt grounds in which the bush and the civilization fight for supremacy. I know where my gate is now. I could find it in the dark, or in the belting monsoonal rain, but I’m not looking for it today. My focus is on the horizon.
I’m tired of that gate, the house, the trees, and the dogs behind it. Restless, I’ve made up my mind to drive on to the end. The end is an undiscovered country. I’ve never passed my gate. I don’t know what’s down there. It looks like more of the same. The dividing line between earth and sky is obscured by the rising and falling bitumen, shrouded in mystery. A sign tells me to hit the anchors. Twenty kilometers off my speed in twenty meters, not that anyone cares. If I was in the city or the suburbs there would be police around. I got surreptitiously photographed the other day doing seventy-two in a sixty zone. When I didn’t slow down fast enough, officer friendly snapped me. I only found out about it three weeks later when the fine arrived in the mail. Big fines for minor offences while the kid doing two hundred on the highway has no authoritative audience.
The air, thick with rain, assists my deceleration, and I need to adjust the air conditioning. It’s chilly. Cold, like me. Alone and on the run. A pretender, bluffing my way through life: a job, a church, some friends. Faking enjoyment of my routines, even singing their praises to anyone interested. I’ve got so much free time, I started writing a blog called I Don’t Cook. A hundred people in Poland read my reviews of microwave dinners every night.
At times, I really felt like I had broken free from my past. Fleeting moments of delirious joy served with spoonfuls of hope gave me enough strength to persist through the crippling grief and desolation. The tension in my stomach, in my neck, the permanent frown which I attempted to massage away with moisturizing cream. I had a girl to share the pain with for a while. The problem was she was the cause of most of it in the first place. Sadly, it took too long to wake up to the devastation being caused by that diseased relationship. By the time I finally removed her physical presence from my life, her bitterness had stained my heart and infected my mind. I don’t know what kept me going. Pig headedness. Stupidity. Addiction. She was bad from the start, and I should have known better, but I was messed up. So certain of myself that it qualified as delusion.
The gate whizzes past on my right as the first heavy drop explodes on my windscreen. In a few seconds, it’s an invading army which I fight off with my windscreen wipers on high. I pop the headlights on too. The low-profile tires of my Falcon no longer feel so sure on the road. The rain is hammering down, and water pools in irregularly placed splotchy puddles. I hit one and feel the tires skate across rather than roll. Slightly unnerved by the loss of control, I ease off the accelerator. Needing to concentrate on the road causes my melancholy to evaporate. I feel better, lighter. I bless the storm, and thank the God who blew it in my direction.
My life has changed dramatically, beyond belief. I was deep in a financial quagmire courtesy of careless spending and allowing myself to be manipulated. One of my addictions bled my bank balance to the point where I began defaulting on loans and I was caning my credit cards to the limit and beyond. I was chasing thrills, stuck in the cycle of diminishing returns. Fooling myself I was making progress and this time I would find what I was looking for. I didn’t even come close. More destructive, exploitative relationships followed. I was on the phone every day to creditors making new arrangements to repay debt which I knew I would not be able to meet. Chasing further highs to self-medicate on the internet, and then a miracle happened.
Whilst battling my demons, and mostly having my arse kicked, God intervened and sent me an angel. I knew it from the first time I saw her picture. The first time I heard her voice. The first time I kissed her cheek and held her hand. Purity. Goodness. Grace. The undeserved favor of God personified in an elegant woman. Meeting her was the beginning of my salvation. Everything began to change for the better.
The car slows as I lose concentration and forget I’m driving. I can’t see the road now because of the teeming rain. I have to stop. It’s too dangerous. I tentatively pull off the road and engage the handbrake, preparing to wait out the storm. I used to think time was an elastic band anchoring me to the past, but I infused it with power. Gave it authority to restrain me. I did it to myself: my own worst enemy. Time is not an elastic band. It’s gelatinous and quite capable of maintaining a vice grip, but it can be easily stretched beyond its capacity to hold shape. I did it. I broke free, but only because I never gave up and I recognized my limitations. I couldn’t save myself. Neither could this angel from Saigon, who I met on an internet dating site one day before I was planning to cancel my membership. She was, however, a vital cog in the machinery of the rescue plan. She still is.
The rain is easing. I’ve lost track of time. The clock in the car doesn’t work. Like the CD player, the digital display on the dashboard has passed its use by date. It’s unreadable. Time doesn’t matter now. The dogs will be overjoyed to see me when I get back. I get the same reaction whether I’ve been gone for an hour or a day. The big dopey one will do pirouettes, flicking spit out of the side of his mouth when I appear with a bowl of food. The other one, which stands as tall as me, will try to eat the biscuits, dog sausage, and even the bowl right out of my hands. They’ll act like they haven’t eaten for weeks. They can’t remember the past, and they don’t think about the future.
A future is exactly what I have now, and I should focus at least some of my intense mental activity there. I can enjoy each moment too. I can dance and salivate when food is presented to me. My angel from Saigon may be far away from me physically, but I never felt closer to a woman. I married her last year, and I’ve never been happier. The problem is I’m not a whistling kite or a dog, so the past still impacts me. I destroyed all my credit cards and I’m paying off debt, but every scheduled direct debit from my account is a reminder of the past. Thankfully, it’s also a beacon for the future. It is my choice how to view it. My choice to return to my gate, or press on, urgently to the horizon, to the future. I’m sitting in a car which I shouldn’t have bought, but one I love and don’t want to sell. I’ll finish paying it off this year. Then, I’ll own it, as I already own the memories I’ve made in it and with it. A thousand turns, hundreds of crossroads. Choices.
Resurgent evening sunshine breaks through the disintegrating clouds and begins to bake the saturated earth once more. It won’t take long until all these irregular shaped pools and ponds disappear. The evidence of the historic storm will soon be gone. I won’t remember it because it has passed, and no longer bears down on my present. I’m free now. I just need to live free. U-turning with care, I accelerate slowly away from the horizon. The distance shrivels behind me, as does the distance before. I turn the car to face the gate, and the dogs lope down the driveway to greet me. It is now. I am in it. Having learned my lessons from the past, and being at peace as I await an undisclosed, but secure future, I choose to live now.
